Welcome to the 1,007th Edition of Loading...

If you aren't reading this in your e-mail, you could be. Sign up! Are you looking for gaming news? Look no further for all of the headlines. General industry news and Ten Ton Hammer excusives are all yours as part of Ten Ton Hammer's RSS Feed . Enjoy!

The Pulse

You vote with what you view at Ten Ton Hammer, and the result is the Ten Ton Pulse (What is Pulse?).

Here's today's top 5 Pulse results:

1. World of Warcraft
2. Warhammer Online
3. Lord of the Rings Online
4. Age of Conan
5. Atlantica Online (UP 5)

Biggest Movers in the Top 20 today :

1. Dungeons & Dragons Online (down 5 to #10)
2. Dungeon Runners (UP 5 to #16)
3. Vanguard: Saga of Heroes (UP 4 to #7)

Loading... Daily

Loading... a study in cultural values on par with the Super Bowl ads.

Those of you that missed the Super Bowl last night not only missed some dramatic football but some hilarious commercial spots too. And if you think American football is overly commercialized, at least our football players aren't running advertisments for AIG, Vodafone, and Fly Emirates! (I know, I know, soccer doesn't allow for the TV timeout, don't hate me forever, my considerably large international audience.)

But in a tireless effort to entertain you and make you waste time at work, here's the highlights and lowlights. Hurry before IT blocks hulu.com.

My favorite spots:

• Bud Light featuring Conan in Sweden (best belly laugh)
• NBC: LMAO (best network plug ever)
• Priceline: Asian Shatner (best impression)
• Coke Zero: Mean Troy Greene (best spoof)
• Pepsi Max - I'm Good (absolute best slapstick)

Worth a watch:

• Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen trailer (looks to be as mindblowing as the original)
• GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra Trailer (where's Flint, Rescue, Destro, other childhood icons?)
• Star Trek: Trailer (small time Chris Pine as Capt. Kirk? Say it ain't so.)

Multi-Million Mistakes:

• Anything 3D (I'm watching your commercial, don't expect me get your specs to watch men in underwear and bowler hats dance)
• Teleflora: Insulting Flowers (those flowers were just way over-the-top mean)
• Budweiser Clydesdale commercials (no horses playing football - time to put this concept out to pasture)
• Pepsi: Pepsuber (that Richard Dean Anderson would participate in the sundering of MacGyver's good name - too awful to click upon.)

For pure hilarity, are soft drink commercials the new beer commercials? After a fine run of coach press conference spoof commercials during the season and playoffs, Coors Light really let me down with its non-presence in the big game. You'd think in a down economy, beer commercials would go over well.

Optional NFL / character rant follows. I'm an avowed lifelong Steelers fan, born and raised just a few hours from the Steel City. This was a tough Super Bowl for me since 1) I'm an underdog fanboy but the Steelers were a favorite for this game, and 2) Kurt Warner and Larry Fitzgerald Jr. are genuinely stand-up guys, and you'd be hard-pressed to match their character with any five guys on the Steelers team.

Don't believe me? With the obvious disclaimer that taking a kid out of college and giving him nearly endless money, fame, and five months off a year might not be the best thing in terms of character development, here goes. The Super Bowl MVP, Santonio Holmes, has faced domestic violence and marijuana charges in the past and the James Harrison's 100 yard pick-six to close the second half- the longest in Super Bowl history - was fouled by a nasty Unsportsmanlike Conduct in the fourth quarter for which he probably should have been thrown out. Harrison too has an ugly history of domestic violence.

That's not to say that none of the Steelers have used their celebrity to work good, but while Holmes and Harrison were having illegitimate children to multiple partners (that they can "afford it" misses the point), breaking the law, and beating their girlfriends, Warner was building houses for underprivileged families and Fitzgerald was raising money to find a cure for breast cancer. I hope my team would have been as classy in defeat as these guys and their coach were in their postgame interviews.

Character matters, whether you're talking MMO developers or NFL players. And as in football, the more the pageantry and fluff surrounding the main event changes, the less the core gameplay really changes in popular MMOs. Football is still football, and MMOs deviate from the "d20" only at their peril.

And though you could hardly classify some or all of today's MMORPGs as being in the same league, Blizzard devs - the reigning champs by almost any measure - have always been a class act, humbly passing on the credit to others in their ranks, past and present, and never reveling in their obvious success and superstar status (at least, that I've seen). If a few of the other folks we consider "superstar" devs had had success on the level of WoW with their games, would they be as sporting? I hope so.

Comments? Post in the Loading... forum, or email me.

Shayalyn's Epic Thread of the Day

From our Tavern of the Ten Ton Hammer Forum

[The Secret World] Snippet from an AoC interview

When
Funcom named its MMOG in development The Secret World, they really
weren't kidding about the "secret" part. The developers of Anarchy
Online and Age of Conan, have been notoriously tight-lipped about their
next game. Their May, 2008 press release told us that "The Secret World (TSW) is inspired by history and mythology, modern conspiracy theories and ancient mysteries."

But
despite the secrecy, or perhaps because of it, it's clear gamers are
intrigued. Annatar managed to find a snippet of information about the
game that has our forum community buzzing. Has TSW piqued your
interest? Check out this thread to discuss the possibilities.

=================================

Awesome Quote from the
Epic Thread:


"Some interesting facts everyone might be unaware of:



Cthulian mythos is the fundamental metaphysical basis in Conan. Howard
and Lovecraft palled around some, and Lovecraft agreed to let his old
gods be used in Howard's books.



Basically a little while into working on Conan, [Funcom] realized that they
could possibly tap into the as-yet unrealized Horror MMO market."

- Koshira
=================================



Do you have a favorite Epic Thread? Let
us know!

5 new MMOG hand-crafted articles today! 5 in February! 131 in 2009!

New MMOG Articles At Ten Ton Hammer Today [Thanks Phil Comeau for links and Real World News]

Interviews

• Atlantica Online - Succeeding in the West

Reviews

• Holic Online

Features

• Top Ten Free-to-Play Games - "Trick Question"

Community

• Geeked: "Moderation Priviledges"

Guides

• World of Warcraft: Druid Spells and Abilities, Lvl 1-40

Hot Content - Or, what I took a fancy to:

1. Atlantica Online - Succeeding in the West
2. Holic Online
3. Top Ten Free-to-Play Games - "Trick Question"
4. Geeked: "Moderation Priviledges"
5. WAR Call to Arms: The Slayer, Choppa, and Land of the Dead
6. Goob & Begud: "The Latest Craze"
7. Forever Fantasy: The Forgotten Realms MMOG Dream
8. Dofus: Preview of the Search for Power
9. Preview of Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn
10. The Tabula Rasa Autopsy: What Makes Games Die?

Real World News

• Porn interrupts SuperBowl broadcast in Tucson
  
  Happening at the end of the game, Tucson viewers had to make do with a 'reasonable facsimile' of spraying champage around on everyone.
• The apostrophe is vanishing from Birmingham signage
  
  Exclamation of shock from the public, as man in period costume seen removing the marsk.
  
• 'Two children should be the limit,' says UK's 'green guru'
  
  Well, that all well and fine, but sometimes I can wolf down at least half of one more before dessert and aperatif.
  

Thanks for visiting the Ten Ton Hammer network!

-Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle and the Ten Ton Hammer team