Things are not quite looking good for Blizzard Entertainment's giant MMO, World of Warcraft. First, expansion The Burning Crusade was delayed for a couple of weeks with the developer saying it needed some more time. The players gave in, thinking it's for the best. Then weeks after weeks, the updates being done to the game became public and sad to say, the fans are not liking it.

To be quite frank, thinks like these leave a bitter taste in the mouth. Sometimes it makes a player so disappointed, that he just want to call it quits. If you ask us, it makes us go back to the time when WoW was just released and the gates of Azeroth just opened. It makes us remember what it is exactly about the game that we love in the first place.

When you think about it, WoW holds three qualities that help endear an MMO to a player. The virtually unlimited dungeons and raid runs were designed for achievers, while the PvP enthusiasts have a world and battlegrounds set aside for them. Then you have the casual players that were pulled in and eventually became hard-cores themselves. Interlocking quests, smooth level transitions, goal-driven gameplay. Everything a player desires is there.

If you really think about it, WoW in its own way deviates  from the norms of MMORPGs. Certain games require you to join groups and clans. Not require in a sense that you won't be able to play but require meaning "let's see how far you can go alone." WoW allows a player a moment of solitude, the freedom to be left alone whenever he wishes it.

Yes, those are all the things we love about World of Warcraft. Blizzard boasts of its 7.5 million active fan base. While it is true, we hope they begin listening to its people before their number dwindles down.

Ever had an old friend you haven't seen for a while, like say five years? This same friend then all of a sudden pops out of nowhere at your front door, gives you a rib-cracking bear hug, asks you how you've been, then goes off to raid your fridge?

It's been more than six months since we heard of anything regarding the Asterix and Obelix XXL 2, and all of a sudden, as the game gets ready for its November launch, we run into these screenshots.

And for the guys that are still a bit suspicious over the last batch of screenshots we posted, these sets appear to be the real McCoy, and features what we love best about this dynamic duo - trouncing Romans as they run through Las Vegum, the game's setting. These screenshots appear to be the European release of the game. Enjoy.

The rest of the screens await after the jump!

You have all seen the video of the Safeguard Missions for MMO City of Heroes. While you already have an idea on how these would actually go, a quick rundown of their specifics would never hurt, would it? Besides, we are quite sure you are not so keen with the idea of letting those villains win. On the official site of the game, designer EJ Nelson (aka Ravenstorm) dropped by to enumerate all and provide a number of helpful tips.

On top of his list is the Bank Robbery. Tasked to prevent the robbery of one of the city's banks, you should of course review first the minimap given to you and master the location of the bank. Just after a few minutes, the crime would immediately ensue and keep in mind that the big boss will make his or her way to the vault to destroy the vault door and rob the bank. The key here is to finish everything inside the establishment as letting them out would certainly complicate things.

Given that you succeed in the Bank Robbery mission, a 15 minute timer will then be displayed on your compass. Use this extra time to earn additional experience, badges, and temporary powers by cleaning up the streets. By cleaning, we mean the dirty work itself and the more fun part, defeating vandals.

Aside from these, there are also side missions than ca be activated along the way by finding mission-specific keys. There would be a good number of unnamed villains in your locality but paying attention to their conversations and movements would give you a clue as to what they are up to. Example of these are the following:

• The Arsonists - Villains are attempting to set a building on fire! You must put a stop to them before it’s too late. Look for villains tossing around fire bombs. Defeat the villains and click on the bombs to defuse them, but be wary of an attack by villain reinforcements
• Minding the Store - If you find villains carrying boxed merchandise around, you can bet they are involved. Defeat them and head to the shop as quickly as possible. Once inside, clear out as many of the villains as you can, and make your way to the secured area.
• Sewer Bombing - Once inside the sewers, make your way to the building and defuse any bombs you may find on your way. The villains will send reinforcements. If you do not defuse the bombs in time, the building will be set on fire.
  
• Weapons Raid - If you spot any villains cleaning or examining weaponry on the streets, make sure to take them out to find the location of the warehouse the deal is going down in. Make your way to the warehouse, find the stash of weaponry, and confiscate it.
• Breakout - While securing the area, you may stumble across a PPD officer being held up by villains. If you rescue the officer, you’ll be tipped off on a jailbreak attempt in progress at the PPD station. Villains from the Rogue Isles are being broken out by local villains.

There is an old saying among martial artists that goes "Your body is only as strong as your weakest link." The mantra isn't just limited to disciples of the ancient arts, though - modern military doctrine teach the same principle, and every fire team in conflict is only as good as their slowest man.

That seems to be exactly what Gharuvy over at the WoW boards had in mind when he discusses his lamentations. According to his experiences, while it takes at least 25% of any current group in a raid/encounter to perform exceptionally well to get the job done, he's realized that it only takes one poorly performing member in every group to screw the whole thing up.

The raid leader's lament then is that they can never expect majority of the team members to perform extremely well, but at the same time, they can expect most of their members to at least perform reasonably well - there's just that gamble of a "weak link."

Interestingly enough, Mike Schramm over at WoW insider makes some remarks about this statement, adding his own personal experience of getting his rag-tag team across Deadmines, and how they barely survived their encounters there based on his own initiative - though he admits to making fumbles himself, ending up being the "weak link" on other occasions.

So, what's this all say? With the number of raiders per party now growing into the 40-man mark, we're hoping this little bit of wisdom gets itself passed on to the other raid leaders out there. We're not telling you guys to be suspicious of every noob that comes along - just be careful of the people you're drafting the next time you set your eyes on areas like Naxx, and make sure everybody receives clear orders before you march off.

Today's batch of WoW mods include these nifty apps: Kisk's PVPCooldown Reborn v2.9, totalpackage's ImproveDressingRoom, and Razzen's Grim Riders - Target Tools.

Kisk's PVPCooldown Reborn v2.9 shows the time remaining on your PVP status or shows PVP zone-info. Razzen's target tools provides a visual target and raid icon assignment for both the main tank and raid members through network communication and GUI. The installation instructions for both combat related mods can be found in the readme files in their respective folders.

The odd mod out for this batch is totalpackage's ImproveDressingRoom as it's something for the aesthetically anal among you. The ImproveDressingRoom mod allows you to zoom, reposition, and rotate the dressing room models so that you may get a better view of how things look on your avatar. It works with the Auction House dressing room.

Enjoy the mods folks!

Download [WoW Mod Pack]

Nibris, the Polish game developer, could be compared to an indie rock band in the sense that it's just one of a handful of game developers who chose to not take the mainstream road and independently create games for Nintendo. Independent and enigmatic are the two things that best describe the company, as it takes a while for them to update us with their projects- the black and white, gothic horror game Sadness and the shooter game Raid Over the River.

Now, Nibris game designer and art director Marek Okron granted an interview with Cubed3 and talked about Raid Over the River. It's just too bad that he didn't kill two birds with one stone as he didn't give an update about the going-ons with Sadness.

He mentions that Nibris aims to create the best shooter ever with Raid and their ticket to that could be the fact that they have new ideas to introduce to the community which would be told via a story mode strictly related to onscreen actions. Aside from that, he hopes to win them over with the game's intuitive controls, new boss fight approaches, and your ships special abilities which isn't just fire power.

The team is also shying away from the shooter-game stigma - wherein most games falling in this category tends to fall short in the plot department. He mentions that "story mode at "easy" level will be a challenging, yet not frustrating, experience. There will be a lot of action, a few plot twists and spectacular air battles - for everyone who wants to play it." He also realizes the fact that there are some gamers who don't really give a rat's behind about the story, so the game also has an arcade mode which is all about the kills, points and scraping enemy bullets.

When asked about influences to create the game, Okron mentioned the Don Pachi series which according to him is "difficult but fun to play." Their unit designs were influenced by historic designs like German airplanes designs from the era of World War II. He also expressed Nibris' desire to work with Pikmin because of "loads of creativity." Something to look forward to? Well, dreaming is still free, so that's all we could do for now.

Shandrai has update his World of Warcraft AV (Absolute Vikings) mod pack for PvE, PvP, good for all classes + more for all you AV guild members out there. This addon pack can give you some advantage in battle plus a lot of info about fights, flights, timers for different things or adding some features.

Addons, says Shandrai, can make playing WoW more "laggy" especially if you have an old or slow computer so he says don't add too many add too many addons. He recommends that you use only the addons that you think are the best ones. But if you a powerful PC Shandrai strongly recommends you to use all addons in this pack.

The easiest way to update to this addon pack is to delete all addons in your addons folder and drag all addons from the 'other addons' folder and the ones you want from the 'class addons' folder into you addons folder. It should be located here: C:ProgramWorld of WarcraftInterfaceAddons. If you haven't got a addons folder then create a folder and name it addons. place it in your interface folder. Got that?

Shandrai included a very long and very useful explanation about this addon pack which is a must-read if you're thinking of using it.

Full details of the AV Mod addon pack after the jump.

Download: [AV Mod Pack Update]

Humanity may have been having a hard time looking for life beyond out planet, but already we're witnessing the transformation of a new world. It might be virtual, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's less realistic than aliens. Being almost as real as planet Earth, Azeroth has it own share of hardworkers, such as Rivotti who has just released a World of Warcraft addon that helps Priests, Druids and Shamans with the following spells:

• Healing Touch and Regrowth(Druid)
• Greater Heal
• Heal
• Flash Heal
• Lesser Heal(Priest)
• Lesser Healing Wave and Healing Wave(Shaman)

If you decide to install RSavedHealer, Rivotti says players occasionally can't use the auto-target function of the mod. The function SpellCanTargetUnit has a bug that sometimes doesn't return the correct value. He says he can't fix this bug because it's a base game function and there's no way get over it. For now, that is.

Download: [RSavedHealer]

You can read the full details of RSavedHealer after the jump.

Grinding can quite often be a pain, and a pretty boring kind of pain at that. We all have our own little ways to help lessen the dampening effect that grinding has n our will to live. Some people read a book, some listen to music, and some people play poker. If the aforementioned ways just don't float your boat, then maybe you'd like to take a stab at trying to answer a few trivia questions.

That's what today's World of Warcraft mod is for. Aptly named TriviaBot, this mod is a fun and engaging way of distracting yourself from the tedium of grinding, raiding or random idling. With almost 3000 WoW-related and non-WoW questions, it's sure to add a whole lot of brain activity to your WoW experience. Plus, it gives you a chance to show off that collection of useless knowledge that's backing up the pipes in your grey matter.

Authored by Guri, TriviaBot is based on the RaidTrivia mod by Psy. Right now, there are 2,632 normal questions and 312 WoW questions included. The normal questions are from Psy's RaidTrivia as well as some parts of the code. Some of the WoW questions are Guri's while some are user-submitted questions. The mod maintains a list of top scorers which is printed out after every fifth question. It also keeps speed-records for the quickest answers and allows you to play in any channel. How do you use it? Here's a list of available command line options:

/trivia channel [SAY|YELL|PARTY|RAID|GUILD|] - Sets the trivia channel.
/trivia start - Starts the trivia game.
/trivia stop - Stops the current game.
/trivia skip - Skips the current question.
/trivia shuffle - Reshuffles the questions (restarts from beginning)
/trivia clear - Clears the scores.
/trivia qlist [wow|normal] - Select the question list.
/trivia help - In-game help display

Click on the download link below to get TriviaBot and let the games begin!

Download: [TriviaBot v1.4]
Buy: [World of Warcraft | WoW Expansion: Burning Crusade ]

All you Dark Age of Camelot fanatics take heed, all servers for your beloved game will be down tomorrow for some tweakings and fixes. The development team will be working on some behind-the-scenes stuff, but to make it up to you, they will make sure that their anniversary bonus goodies will be working properly. You might complain that it's working just fine now, but the team says that it only works well when you're playing solo. So for the sake of those who play Camelot on "big raid-style dungeon crawls", they will be working on this too.

Also, they'll make the Classic Zone bonuses available soon after, to further ease whatever withdrawal symptoms you may experience from the downtime. Servers will be down tomorrow at precisely 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. EDT. Remember to check back with us for more updates on your favorite RPGs.