Perfect World Entertainment, creator of the Perfect World MMORPG, has announced the roll out of a new social networking platform called CORE Connect.

The new platform’s goal is to connect players from across the vast Perfect World gaming world together with a set of new set social networking tools.

Days of Wonder’s board game, Small World, is so powerfully addictive, it can lead a young widow to starve her dogs to death and ignore her small children, at least if a recent online news article is to be believed.

Once the story hit the internet, it spread quickly, despite the fact that, no, Small World wasn’t responsible, and isn’t even playable online (although there is an iPad version available). Instead, the widow played an online game called SmallWorlds, more of a social game than an MMO, unrelated to anything at Days of Wonder.

Captain James T. Kirk himself (William Shatner for you non trekkies) was at Wizard World Comic Con in Chicago, last Saturday August 21st, (the con ran from Aug. 19th- 22nd)

Shatner is a man who loves to talk, and talk he did at his Creation Experience panel. I took a video of him talking about a couple of his shows and asking the audience for help on a couple titles (lets face it, Shat an’t a young man anymore).

William “The Shat” Shatner, known to many as Captain Kirk from the original Star Trek TV series, host of Priceline.com and Denny Crane from Boston Legal, graced us with his presence at Wizard World Comic Con help in Chicago, IL (US), August 19 through 22, 2010.

Shatner immediately started causing trouble when he tried to move the tables out of the way so he could be closer to us. “There is this green table between you and me and I don’t want it that way,” he said after shoving the tables, almost knocking over all the water pitchers. But, as we know, if The Shat wants it done, it gets done.

After that he spoke quite a lot about his new show…

Brent Spiner, Data from Star Trek: Next Generation, was recently at the 2010 Wizard World Comic Con in Chicago, IL (US), August 19 through 22, 2010.

Spiner has a lot to say at his Creation Experience panel but he is a man who should be seen as well as heard, so I took a couple videos and captured his wonderful personality.

PC game publisher Matrix Games has announced the late 2010 release of Panzer Command: Ostfront, the latest in the Panzer Command series of war games. This incredibly flexible series of 3D turn-based games based on World War II tank battles handles operations from the smallest of scales up to full warfare campaigns.

Ostfront will be available free to owners of Panzer Command: Kharkov, as it replaces that and Panzer Command: Winterstorm, including the content of both as well as new battles and many bug fixes and rules tweaks.

I just received a message from Gaia online today that asked a strange question: “Hi Lucy, What do Neopets, MapleStory and Habbo all have in common?”

Out of curiosity I logged into my Gaia Online account to see what Kate Pietrelli, an account manager for TriplePoint (Gaia’s PR agency), is typing about and, sure enough, along the top of the page is the option to send an instant message my fellow Gaians…

With the increasing popularity of MMOGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Games) and the growing user community, the technologies behind them have to evolve in order to accommodate hordes of players living and interacting in a virtual world. As hundreds of thousands of users conduct raids and battles, powerful computer clusters have to keep track of every move and action users make. As the users keep on coming, companies have to figure out ways of keeping these worlds running smoothly.

While different companies employ different architectures to simulate these virtual environments, all of them are working to develop a solution in which all the players could really share a single virtual world. In case of the popular World of Warcraft, Blizzard uses what they call “shards,” which are copies of the same world running in different machines. Users of WOW, which now total over 9 million, are distributed amongst these shards to…