Coming very quickly, as in this fall, The Lord Of The Rings Online will be turning into a free to play game.

“Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment is bringing quality games based on The Lord of the Rings to multiple platforms, and the franchise’s expansive adventure story lends itself perfectly for LOTRO free-to-play, giving a wide range of players the opportunity to experience the game,” said Jeff Junge, Senior Vice President Online Games and Digital Games Platforms, Warner Bros. Digital Distribution and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. “We are focused on expanding our game franchises onto new digital platforms to maximize quality experiences for gamers worldwide and LOTRO’s new model is a great leading example of this.”

This means that I will soon be downloading LOTRO and getting online with my roommate.  Heck, the financee might even want to download this considering she won’t have to pay for it.  From the looks of it, to offer this as a free to play game with options to purchase content really won’t limit the free players at all.

Here’s some of the features offered.

• Free means Free! – Players will download LOTRO by visiting www.lotro.com and join with millions of other adventurers as they explore the most complete and authentic recreation of Middle-earth ever created and participate in LOTRO’s award-winning epic story up to level 50 for free.
• Visit the new LOTRO Store! — The LOTRO Store is loaded with thousands of convenience items as well as expansion packs, premium content, additional character slots, potions, character customization and more! The LOTRO Store is seamlessly integrated into the game and lets the player identify new and exciting ways to enhance and customize their experience using points which can be purchased in the store or earned through gameplay.
• Be a LOTRO VIP! – Players who elect to become a LOTRO VIP will have unlimited access to all premium content, receive priority server access, 5 character slots, a shared bank slot, and a monthly allotment of points to spend in the new LOTRO Store.

In fact, there will be a beta to test out these new features.  Be sure to visit http://www.lotro.com/betasignup/ to get signed up for that.

Rusty Axe Games is hitting the net with a closed beta of a new dungeon editing system.  The program is geared towards not only computer game developers who need dungeon art, but also toward pen and paper gamers.  Dungeon Demon provide both novice and skilled game creator with enough art to design beautiful looking dungeons with ease.

Dungeon Demon is a top down, graphical object oriented editor that mixes tiling and simple graphical object editing to produce a fast and easy to use dungeon editor. Users can specify up to nine named graphics layers, each with an optional grid system. Legend items can be dropped into any layer and can be used for traditional text markup or for more technical purposes if being used for computer game map editing. Maps can be printed, exported as bitmaps or saved in a flexible XML format for use by other programs.

Find out more at www.RustyAxe.com/apps/dd/index.php.

Closed beta signup can be found here: http://www.rustyaxe.com/apps/dd/beta_signup.php

If  you bought the Modern Warfare 2 Stimulus Maps on Day 1, you may have been affected by an outage.  Modern Warfare 2 was not yet updated in order to allow the maps to be played.  In the end, you may have received a message on Xbox Live from Microsoft themselves stating the following:

“To thank you for your loyalty to Xbox LIVE and for buying the Modern Warfare 2 Stimulus Package on day 1, we will extend your Gold membership for 7 days of adrenaline-pumping action with your friends on LIVE. Your account will be updated on May 1.”

Well thanks Microsoft!  Wait, what are you actually kicking me back?  A standard year of Xbox Live Gold costs around $50.  Seven days is only worth around 95 cents.  However, many time people will find cheaper cards on Amazon and those run about $35.    So  for me, I just got 67 cents back.   I think I should just mail MS a dollar and say “Thanks, but no thanks.”  I mean, whatever happened to free arcade game day for their screw ups?

That’s right, the Blur beta I was telling  you about a few weeks ago is now open to all!  Simply head over to the Xbox Live Marketplace listing and click to get it queued up to download to your own 360.  The other news is that recently the Blur Beta expanded itself from a level 10 cap to a level 15 cap allowing an expanded look at cars and other power-ups.

Why not take a look for yourself?  Blur is being described not only by it’s creators, but also by the people playing it as Mario Cart meets Project Gotham Racing.  Of course, it could be they say this because the developer MADE PGR!  See for yourself!

So the Blur beta from Activision and Bizarre Creations has been going swimmingly.  I am absolutely floored by this racing game.  In fact, I’m surprised that I even like it since I don’t tend to play racing games all that often.  I think its the fact that it is easy to get into and has awesome power-ups.  Would you like to get in on this too?