During my childhood, I can remember spending hours over at my grandmother’s house, tinkering with her enormous boxes of decades old LEGOs. I would build and build, creating enormous four-color towers of epic proportions, only to have my younger brothers smash them to bits with their Ninja Turtle action figures. Over the years, my love of LEGOs has waxed and waned, but nothing has caught my attention more than the recent glut of LEGO video games, especially the upcoming MMO, LEGO Universe.

Recently, the ZAM staff had the chance to chat with the developers at Colorado-based NetDevil Studios to check out some of the long-awaited details about this “game-for-all-ages.” As I entered the demo room, with a hint of excitement, LEGO Universe’s Creative Director Ryan Seabury directed my attention to a wall-mounted viewing screen where the log-in area for LEGO Universe was being displayed.

There are very few development teams in the MMO world that can boast of being able to release new content on a consistent basis, but it seems as though Turbine and their Lord of the Rings team has gotten that down pat, as December 1st will see the launch of their next digital expansion: The Siege of Mirkwood. The Siege of Mirkwood is also quite special for LOTRO fans, as this will act as the conclusion to Volume II: Mines of Moria, thereby suggesting that we may see a new expansion coming in the not so distant future.

Either way, just as constant as the dev team is with their content updates, their PR guys work equally hard, making sure that with every coming book release also comes… an in-game tour! So today, Turbine invited ZAM.com to sit down with Adam Mersky, Director of Communications, and Aaron Campbell, LOTRO's Live Producer, to check out what makes Book9: Siege of Mirkwood one of the most action-packed expansions to come along in quite some time.

It was only a week ago I visited the universe of Dungeons & Dragons Online to check out how the game had managed to make the transition from its former pay to play model, to its current free to play micro transaction model. One important thing that I noted in my write-up was that when most MMORPGs make that shift from pay to play to free to play, development cycles and development "quality" tend to go down. If you don't believe me, feel free to check out games like Sword of the New World, a game that made the same shift as DDO, but ended up with zero updates for almost a year after the shift.

Of course, there are other MMOs that have made a much smoother transition, but DDO comes with a more awkward past, as the famed "module 9 update" ended up taking almost nine months to see the light of day (and the module was ultimately released with DDO's F2P shift). In this way, when Turbine announced that the free to play DDO would see more development than when it was subscription based, you can imagine how sceptical some people became.

With the eerie celebrations of Halloween on our doorstep, nearly every MMO on the market is gearing up some sort of spooky event for players to participate in. One of the most ghoulish is coming to Champions Online in the form of the “Blood Moon.” Along with the details of the event, ZAM sat down with Cryptic’s Bill Roper to discuss their post launch progress and what players can expect from the future of CO.

The time’s come to bust out those old LEGO kits and start touching up on your construction skills. LEGO Universe is on its ways and will be arriving on gamer computers in a relatively short amount of time. Dates have been announced and demonstrations have been given to the industry press. Most importantly, the game is fun.

How does ZAM know all this? Our staffers, along with other members of the press, were invited to a special demonstration of LEGO Universe that featured the game’s first ever live demonstration, along with extensive time to ask our own questions of Creative Director Ryan Seabury.

Although we’re still digesting all of the information that the LEGO Universe team dispensed, we couldn’t wait any longer in getting all of the pertinent facts put down on paper. You can expect a fairly lengthy preview and interview in the days ahead, but for now, here’s a quick cheat sheet on what we know about LEGO Universe.

It was only about two weeks ago that BioWare invited us over to their development offices in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, to check out Dragon Age: Origins. If you consider it, you'd think that waiting for two weeks, for the NDA to lift, to tell all of you about our hands-on experience with the game isn't a very long time to wait.

You'd be wrong.

In reality, I've been itching every one of those days to sit down and tell you all about what an amazing game this is, and why I truly believe that Dragon Age: Origins is the next step forward in RPG gaming. And now that I can, you can finally hear about ZAM.com's hands-on preview with BioWare's latest foray into the fantasy RPG world.

Patch 3.3 is up on World of Warcraft's PTR, and our comrades at Wowhead have pulled the 3D models of a number of important NPCs and items from the Icecrown Citadel.

After the break, you can see Jaina Proudmoore's's new model, as well as Shadowmourne and Quel'Delar, in full 3D! Now there are a lot of models that aren't represented in Wowhead's initial batch—they're just digging through them for now. But we'll have posts up soon for T10, as well as many others.

To see more of the models from WoW's patch 3.3, click here!

Free-to-play, browser-based MMOs are nothing new. After all, RuneScape's been around for years and has been recognized by Guinness World Records as the world's most popular free MMORPG. Despite such competition, Sparkplay Media plans to take this sub-genre of online games to the next level with Earth Eternal, an MMO that puts players in the shoes of anthropomorphic animals and creatures instead of elves and orcs. I got a chance to participate in the game's closed beta and speak with members of the Sparkplay team, and it's clear the company is dedicated to putting out a fun product for its first release.

Sparkplay was co-founded in 2006 by CEO and Creative Director Matt Mihaly, to focus on the development of Earth Eternal and other projects. The company actually spun off from Iron Realms Entertainment, which Mihaly launched in 1996, to develop text-based MUDs (multi-user dungeon). "When we started the business, it was just me," Mihaly said, looking back on the creation of Iron Realms. "I was kind of casting around for how we could make money. I ended up pioneering the virtual goods model." This model can be seen in Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands, an MUD that was released in 1997. The game is still running strong and is touted on its Web site as "the most successful new MUD of the last nine years."

Space may be the final frontier, but Cryptic Studios is boldly going where no other game company has gone before.  Star Trek Online, the first MMO based on the legendary franchise, was one of the most exciting new games we previewed at PAX '09.  We got to experience first-hand Cryptic's unique blend of space combat, role-playing and epic exploration, and we're more stoked than ever to pilot our very own capitol ship when the game finally hits store shelves.  Taking a break from his primary duties during the convention, as Ambassador to Planet Nerd, Craig Zinkevich, Executive Producer from Cryptic, talked to us a bit about the game and gave us a taste of what it's like to pwn a Klingon battlecruiser with a full-spread phaser salvo.

As our stalwart crew engaged the enemy in orbit around a hostile alien world I quickly realized just how much a tactical officer really has to keep track of: positioning of the ship, relative energy levels between shields and weapons, firing arcs and reload times and some suicidal captain shouting highly illogical orders over his shoulder even as the bridge is rocked violently by torpedo volleys.  The over-zealous captain in this case would be our very own Andrew Beegle and, despite his lack of proper academy training, we ultimately triumphed against the bloodthirsty Klingons.  How did we do it?  Human intuition, you silly Vulcan.  Intuition that is on full display in the game's interface and makes it easy for nublets like us to quickly grasp the mechanics of interstellar travel and combat inside a gravity well.

Shadow looms over Mirkwood. On the western edge of the forest an ancient tower, Dol Goldur, harbors incomprehensible evil. To the brave souls who would dare stem the tide of darkness and challenge Sauron's dominion, remember: "There is always hope." As in level 65, baby. Nazgul? Bring it!

Lord of the Rings Online's newest expansion, Siege of Mirkwood, promises quite a few exciting features, and we were lucky enough to see many of them first-hand at PAX '09, showcased by Executive Producer Jeffrey Steefel from Turbine. Some of you might know the end-game raid properly as The Necromancer's Tower from "The Hobbit," only briefly mentioned by JRR Tolkien in that book but later expounded upon in "The Lord of the Rings" appendices and "The Silmarillion." Apparently, one o' them no good Nazgul has taken up residence by order of The Dark Lord himself, and it's your job to send him packin'. Before we get to that, though, I'd like to cover some of the other elements of the expansion.