Last year was a big one for Ultima creator Richard Garriott. He had a 12 day jaunt in space and he parted company with NCsoft leaving the ashes of MMO Tabula Rasa in his wake. So what’s next for the video game designer cum space adventurer? He’s going back to his roots, telling the Beeb that he’s keen to get back into medieval fantasy, and probably of the online kind.

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Worlds.com – a company with an expensive web address, a fistful of wide-ranging patents, an expensive lawyer and no discernible product – is suing MMO maker NCsoft, for making MMOs. Welcome to the wacky world of patent lawsuits. Worlds.com believes that NCsoft has violated U.S. Patent 7,181,690, to the detriment of its business, and presumably wants some kind of cash handout justice.

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When we first got our hands on Home, we weren’t terribly impressed. There’s bags of potential in the service, sure, but at the moment it needs a major injection of soul content to be anything more than a brief conversation piece. We also said it would be a cold day in hell before we paid real money for virtual apparel, but it turns out that some people are more than willing to lay down the cost of a bag of salt and vinegar for non-existent T-Shirts, and Sony is reporting significant revenue from its first week of virtual sales.

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“It’s still beta”, “It’s not a game, it’s a social network”, and “You don’t have to use it if you don’t like it”: these are some of the most common arguments being voiced by Home supporters in the wake of an underwhelming, long awaited launch of the PS3’s latest, erm, thingy. We doff our hats to Sony in at least one regard: Home has certainly got gamers talking. Which was main the idea behind the whole exercise, even if it’s not quite in the manner Sony first envisioned. We’ve had a few hours checking out the Home experience now – read on for our first impressions.

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Sony Computer Entertainment has at last decided to take the training wheels off the PS3’s long-awaited PlayStation Home virtual world cum social gaming community cum Second Life rip-off - and slightly sooner than expected. Tomorrow, December 11^th, the service will move beyond its invite-only closed beta stage and step up to full public beta. A free download will be made available (presumably within PlayStation Store) which will open up the service, placing a new Home icon on the XMB.

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Add another intriguing item to the list of features coming to Sony’s elusive PlayStation Home. Some beta users have let slip that Home developers are considering introducing virtual money into the online world. Home currency will allegedly be earned by scoring Trophies. If you’re a bit of a Trophy obsessive, you’ll be pleased to learn that you’ll get virtual cash from your existing Trophy cabinet too.

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