At first glance, you’d think Paltalk Holdings Inc. has a few loose screws rattling around in its head. After all, it recently declared legal war on a who’s-who list of big-name MMO developers: Blizzard (WoW), Turbine (Lord of the Rings Online), SOE (Everquest), NCSoft (Guild Wars, City of Heroes), Jagex (Runescape) – you name it. If you’re on top of the MMO world, Paltalk is trying to knock you down a peg or two. So, why would Paltalk risk getting torn to shreds by some of the fiercest lawyers in the videogame business? Easy – because the company already forced Microsoft to pony up an undisclosed sum with the very same lawsuit.

Paltalk holds a potent pair of patents that basically spell court-ordered doom for any massively multiplayer game publisher. These patents grant Paltalk providence over “sharing data among many connected computers so that all users see the same digital environment.” Sound like any MMO you’ve ever played before? Because it sounds like every MMO we’ve ever played before.

So, will this super team of MMO publishers – forced together by circumstance – be able to overcome Paltalk and its sidekick, Johnny Law? Really, we have no idea. Are there any lawyers in the audience who might be able to give us a more solid answer?

I had the pleasure of taking a stab (and a hack and a slash) at an obscure little game called Diablo III during last week’s BlizzCon and, well, it was pretty nifty. How nifty, you ask? Well, let’s see, I think I abandoned my infinitely stealable laptop to play the demo, oh, four or five times. (Happily, my laptop remains safe-and-sound. How anyone could refuse the allures of its sexy 900 MHz Celeron processor and cutting-edge integrated graphics card, though, is beyond me.)

So, Diablo III’s shaping up quite nicely. If you were afraid (or… hoping?) Blizzard might finally stain its spotless reputation with a sub-par game, you can put those fears to rest. Now then, without further ado, let’s dive into the specifics of Diablo III’s diabolical brand of fun.

The demo I played opened with my character in a small desert outpost. Other characters told me that leaving the outpost would mean certain doom and all that jazz, so – of course – I completely ignored them and dove headlong into the sandy deathtrap. As I strolled about, clicking on things until other things came out (usually blood, loot, or some combination of the two), I quickly noticed something: the desert was enormous. A departure from Diablo’s usual linear dwellings, it presented a plethora of potential paths, and without that medieval global positioning system sometimes known as a “map,” I would’ve gotten all kinds of lost.

Fortunately, my semi-aimless wanderings were anything but uneventful. When I wasn’t poking and prodding enemies until they erupted into gore geysers (more on that later), I was partaking from a veritable buffet of sidequests.

Continue reading after the break!

In this day and age -- where print’s allegedly on the verge of casting off its mortal coil -- the announcement of a new magazine is a bit of an oddity. But then, we’re talking about World of Warcraft here, the brand that once had us a friend eying a bottle of Mtn Dew with something akin to legitimate interest. It’s with that rationale, then, that Future Publishing’s launching a World of Warcraft magazine.

 The quarterly publication will “cover all aspects” of WoW, and will be stitched together by an all-star editorial team comprised of people like former Official Xbox Magazine Senior Editor Dan Amrich and industry vet Julian Rignall.

Interested yet? If so, a subscription will run you $39.95 per year, or you can strap in for the long haul and drop $69.95 on two years. But hey, the magazine’s nice and glossy, and ad-free to boot! Gotta pay a little extra for class.

And remember, don’t be too rough on the new publication. It was born and bred under Future’s roof, so that makes it MPC’s big, green, chainmail-clad sister or something. Go easy on the gal, or we might have to rough you up a bit.   

The petition may already be having fond, nostalgic memories of the time it was at 100,000 signatures, but Blizzard’s decision to keep StarCraft II LAN-free remains set in stone. So, one might wonder, is Blizzard an unfeeling, out-of-touch monster? Does it even care what its fans think? Blizzard’s Rob Pardo was taken to task with such a question, and he fired back with this little number:

“Of course we care, but it’s not like we’re surprised that there’s a petition about LAN in Star II. It’s not like we went, ‘D’oh. People care about that?’ Clearly, we knew, it was a very tough decision, and I’d say we’d been talking about it back and forth for well over a year before we finally decided that this is more the direction for the future for us, and actually for the industry.”

“If you look at LAN, that goes back to the War II days, with Cali and stuff like that. I think LAN will be a great footnote in our history, just like DOS was. It’s just something that, with broadband and with the connections and the things that we can do on Battle.net, and having to support LAN in addition to that… It’s the sort of decision we have to make that has to be the lowest common denominator for both. I don’t necessarily think [LAN’s] going to be the way of the future. And that’s going to be the best thing for Star II and our future games.”

So there you have it. Blizzard thinks history is all well and good, but the future’s where it’s at. And we imagine Blizzard knows a thing or two about the future. After all, the company did birth one of the greatest futuristic sci-fi gaming series of all time. And that concludes this week’s installment of Flawless Logic Theater.