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SushiChop – Free To Play is one of those silly kinds of game that is sort of cheesy, but once you get started, you really don’t want stop. In this game you play as sushi chef, and you are cutting up different kinds of fish and shellfish to make nigiri. Along with this, you will also sometimes cut wasabi and ginger root along with the fish for bonus coins. Coins can earn you upgrades to get better knives. Between waves of fish being thrown up in front of you, you also get bonus rounds where you have to cut up a certain number of one kind of fish or shellfish.  Read more... (229 words, 31 images, estimated 55 secs reading time)

Champions Online has had a make over and is now free to play and hosted by Perfect World. Originally coded and made by Cryptic we now have the MMO that is free to play and actually quite fun to play as well. From the time that you log in to the time you log out you do have fun with the characters that you make. Even making a character is fun to do and you could spend an hour or more just doing that. The hardest part of the game was waiting for the game to download and then patch itself. For those with very VERY fast download speeds it wont take you long but those with slow DSL will be waiting a while as when I downloaded the game it was 3 and a half gigs and the patch was 256 megs. Even after patching the game still is loading areas and textures in the background which might give you a few hick-ups now and then but nothing that will get your character killed as you play.  Read more... (1162 words, 68 images, estimated 4:39 mins reading time)

I received an invitation to try out Star Trek Online Free To Play on the 19th of January and was excited to try it out. It will not matter how much you want to play you will need to be patient as you will have at least a 24 hour download no matter how good your speed is. My download was consistently at 24 to 32 KB/s and it is a 3668MB download. Another bad thing about the downloader is that it mucks up your internet connection for the entire time that it is downloading so that you are not able to do much of anything on the net as it downloads. That is something they really need to get fixed and fixed fast. I hope PerfectWorld and Cryptic will make that a priority in patches to come. Till then you are just going to have to be patient and just wait it out while not doing anything meaningful on the net or anything that is connected to that router as it affects everything connected to the main connect to the net.  Read more... (992 words, 8 images, estimated 3:58 mins reading time)

May 8, 2011 C.E., 4th Age
After a hiatus from this game, it turned out that Turbine is still using the point system, but it has become more group friendly. The storytellers that made this game nearly impossible for couples and families to play in groups without stiff penalties are gone. Perhaps their system was causing LOTRO to lose much of its earlier customer base. I do not know the full story, but the game is better than ever now, with the exception that what I once had to earn through gameplay can simply be bought with Turbine points. The new area of Enedwaith is now open, and it seems the enemies are not as blind as they once were. Lothlorien and Southern Mirkwood are filled with repeatable quests, and who knew there were so many orcs and trolls in Mirkwood? The old system is slowly coming back into play which made me like it before, but enough of the newer stuff is still there to make it easier to do, like map locators. The nightmare that I had experienced in the Free to Play Beta is gone. Even though parts of the game are still Free to Play, actually earning those Turbine points through deeds and actions makes the game much better now. Sure, entering the digits of your credit or debit card can earn you points, too, but to unlock certain places in Middle Earth, it’s not such a bad thing. Somehow, seeing all this stuff again, it was like it was all new again, but I still remembered it clearly, and went back to some old quests and deeds that we left untouched from before, and found that I could rack up the Turbine points rather quickly. Thanks, Turbine, for setting things to rights again.

When I first logged into LOTRO a few years ago, it was stunningly beautiful in many ways, and true to the Tolkien books. The maps were accurate, even though some places were hard to find when questing. There was no real guide to tell you where quests where, so you had to hunt them down, sometimes going out of the game and using player made coordinate maps of the areas. They were broken down accordingly, from West to East, at the time. The first chapters of the game was Shadows of Angmar, which was the home of the Witch King. You started off playing as one of the Free Peoples of Middle Earth. Human, dwarven, elvin, or hobbit. Elves and dwarves started the game in Ered Luin, the westernmost region, with the Elvin area in the very west, and the Dwarven area in the north in Thorin’s Hall. There were many quests to take on just in Ered Luin alone, dealing with factions of Dourhand dwarves, goblins, some undead, and some fiercely territorial wildlife. The hobbits started in the Shire, where their enemies were few, but some Dourhands and Greybeard influence had come in from the West. There were some goblins and many wolves, bears, and giant spiders to fight, plus some human outlaw bands that were scattered in remote parts of the Shire. The Shire’s influence can be seen also in the northern region of Evendim. Human’s started in a small town north of Bree called Archet. To the south of Archet was a section of ruins that had been taken over by a band of outlaws called the Balckwolds. The Blackwolds and the Southerns where the main human bandits in the Bree-lands. Also, the Bree-lands is where we first find giants, and orcs, plus the many undead of the Barrow-Downs and the angry trees of the Old Forest where we also found the world’s oldest, and merriest creature, Tom Bombadil.  Read more... (992 words, 1 image, estimated 3:58 mins reading time)