Have you ever wanted to save the world? City Of Heroes plunges you into the wonderful world of the super heroic. This time, though, it’s you who is in control. Forget having to play as set characters from the universes of Marvel and DC, City Of Heroes lets you do the thing you always wanted to as a kid – become a superhero yourself.

The barrage of beta news continues with NCsoft guaranteeing players who pre-order Aion: The Tower of Eternity, their new MMO launching in the autumn, access to all the games closed beta events. Players who pre-order will also get a 48- hour head start on the servers, able choose which they'd like to be on and name their characters before launch.  The offer applies to both pre-orders of the standard and limited edition versions of the game. The developer also revealed the ...

I've just witnessed the shut down of Tabula Rasa. It was interesting from a sociological point of view: the mood was, if anything, euphoric. People seemed to be celebrating the fact that they were part of a rare occurance in MMOs and enjoying the final onslaught of the oppressive Bane forces. Strange, considering some of those were undoubtedly hardcore players with a lot of time and money invested in the game. For me, it was a bit of an anticlimax, but being a freeloading hack who popped onto the servers today for only the second time since TR launched, I neither deserved nor expected the same experience that dedicated TR players were obviously enjoying. I had hoped that my puny level six recruit would get boosted to level 50 by a friendly dev, but no joy. I'm not sure what I would have done with all that power anyway, because my main problem was trying to figure out where the action was. Here's my account of the final four hours of TR, from a noob's perspective, for posterity:

Tabula Rasa is to end its live service on 28 February 2009. "Unfortunately, the fact is that the game hasn't performed as expected," came the statement from the TR team in an open letter to the community, "[Tabula Rasa] never achieved the player population we hoped for." The move by publisher NCsoft comes as no real surprise as the MMO has been flagging since its release last November. This announcement comes shortly after luminary Richard Garriott made public his farewells to ...

City Of Heroes creator Cryptic has unveiled a teaser trailer of its next project, a superhero MMO called Champions Online, based on the pen and paper board game. Until recently Cryptic was beavering away on an official Marvel Comics MMO, but following the cancellation of that project they acquired the Champions licence. This early footage shows a game that doesn't look a million miles away from City Of Heroes, though its cell-shaded visuals are looking very slick. NCsoft now owns City Of Heroes and its evil spin-off City Of Villains, and continues to regularly update the game with new content. See the trailer after the jump, or visit the official homepage.