With 425 characters from 375 games, spanning decades of gaming history, you'll be hard-pressed to identify every character in this collage. According to the creator:

This design is the result of 8 months of work, and more hours carefully cutting out characters than I care to remember. All artwork used here is from the developers or official promotional material. That way it stays closest to the original as possible.

Beckett Massive Online Gamer Readers Choose the Best MMOs of 2009

Beckett Media LLC has announced the results of its 2009 Reader’s Choice Awards, which were voted on by readers of Massive Online Gamer and visitors to the magazine’s web site, www.massiveonlinegamer.com. Tens of thousands of votes were logged, and the winners in some categories came down to fewer than 100 votes, including the competition for the coveted title of “Best MMO of 2009,” which was decided by just 68 votes. Blizzard’s World of Warcraft eked out a narrow win over Turbine’s Dungeons & Dragons Online and was narrowly followed by KingsIsle Entertainment’s Wizard101 and NCSoft’s Aion.

Most people would consider the MMORPG genre to have begun with EverQuest, in 1999. Networked and Internet games existed beforehand, but the MMO is, by most accounts, a 21^st-century (and very late 20^th-century) innovation. So what kind of MMO profile would certain historical figures have cut? If you think that one guy in your guild always ninjas all the good loot, imagine how tough it would be with a real ninja in your party?

We're giving away a brand new Star Trek Online game to three lucky Massive Online Gamer readers! For your chance to win, please send your name, age, address, phone number, and e-mail to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. with the subject "STAR TREK ONLINE Contest #24." One entry per person. Entries due by June 1, 2010. Three winners will be randomly selected from all completed entry forms.

Last week: Ragefire Chasm. This week: The world!

OK, so maybe not quite the world, but I did delve into the Wailing Caverns with my Tauren druid in WoW over the weekend. I set aside a good chunk of time, as the entry for Wailing Caverns in the WoW Wiki says the instance takes “a minimum of 180 minutes (three hours).” Turns out, you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet (shocking, I know).