Well I guess that all good things should be expected to have some faults (yes I know thats an oxymoron). Its seems that if your a World of Warcraft player and have been on the game’s site lately, you probably noticed certain parts not working properly, or not at all. Well these problems have been explained in a recent post on the site. It states:

We’re currently undergoing an extensive maintenance on our web infrastructure in order to provide new features along with increased performance and security to our customers. As the maintenance continues, some website features will be intermittently unavailable such as account creation, password recovery, Paid Character Transfer, and/or adding payment. We will provide an update when everything is complete, thank you for your patience.

Well I don’t know about you but this might screw me over! I know my game time runs out soon and if I can’t put a new time card on it then I won’t be able to fill that little (or huge) WoW void in my day.

In other news: yesterday Funcom sent out a press release with the title “Age of Conan Reaches One Million Milestone.” At first glance, many took the headline as meaning the Norwegian developer’s massively multiplayer online role-playing game Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures had already enrolled 1 million subscribers. That would be a mean feat, given that it had only 400,000 subscribers last week. However, the 1 million figure refers instead to the number of Age of Conan games shipped to retailers, not units sold or actual subscribers. Of those, 500,000 units had shipped in North America, with the remaining half earning Funcom harder currency over in Europe. The game has topped sales charts on both sides of the Atlantic, where press outlets have given it enough critical praise (yes it actually is very nice) for it to rack up a solid 84 Metacritic average. Despite any perceived shipped/sold/subscriber discrepancy, the game has hit an impressive milestone. It’s a milestone that, according to Funcom, has not been achieved by any MMORPG since a certain Blizzard Entertainment title was released in 2004. “Sales data shows that Age of Conan is the biggest MMO launch since World of Warcraft,” Funcom vice president of sales and marketing Morten Larssen declared. “The numbers are very promising, and we are very proud to be one of the fastest selling PC games ever during launch month and the biggest simultaneous Europe/US MMO launch in history.”

As Strong Bad would probably tell anyone who e-mails him, the episodic adventure game bearing his name will come out once the funtivities can produce laughs enough to lacerate vital internal organs, or something. Be that as it may, Telltale Games’ revealed during this week’s edition of On the Spot (Gamespot) that the first episode in Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People has been bumped to July, from June, on the Wii and PC. Not entirely the bearer of bad news, however, Telltale producer Brett Tosti also revealed that the WiiWare and PC editions of the game will appear on both platforms simultaneously. Tosti noted that the game has been submitted to Nintendo for approval, and the team is currently adding the final polish to the title. Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People will be the first of a five-part series, and similar to Telltale’s Sam and Max episodic games, new installments are expected to be released on a monthly basis. Players will assume the role of the titular maybe-hero, solving puzzles and interacting with other denizens from the Homestar Runner universe. For more on what to expect from Telltale’s first Strong Bad episode, check out GameSpot’s On the Spot webcast (some gameplay footage around 20-26 min. in) or visit Telltale’s developer blog.

Last December, gamers worldwide got a most unexpected Christmas present a teaser trailer for Duke Nukem Forever, one of gaming’s most notoriously troubled projects. The game, which began development in 1996 before President Bill Clinton was re-elected, has undergone several complete overhauls, with the most recent version reportedly using the same id Software engine that powered Prey and Doom 3. (Those reports were initially denied, but have since resurfaced.) Now, six months later, Duke Nukem Forever, which, until December, hadn’t been seen in public since an E3 2001 trailer, has surfaced again.

The footage came via a curious medium, the debut of a new program, The Jace Hall Show, on online video network Crackle.com. Jace Hall is actually Jason Hall, former head of F.E.A.R. developer Monolith and ex-senior vice president of development and production at Warner Bros.Now head of his own production company, HD Films, Hall has taken the time to host and produce his own show on Crackle, which is also home to magician Penn Jillette’s own video program. For the premiere episode of the The Jace Hall Show, Hall lands quite the booking coup, the first gameplay footage of Duke Nukem Forever to be seen outside its Texan developer, 3D Realms. Upon arriving at 3D Realms headquarters in suburban Dallas, Hall promptly asks studio founders George Broussard and Scott Miller point blank, “What the **** is taking so long?” After blaming the delays in part on the staff’s communal World of Warcraft habit, the pair take the towering Hall into a back room for some hands-on time with DNF. The footage of DNF did indeed look very Prey-like, with various acts of violence occurring inside darkened interiors. After watching a man clinging to a chain link fence be impaled, a dual-plasma-pistol-wielding Hall blasted several headcrab-like monsters, a robot sentry, and what looked like a gigantic carnivorous mushroom. To see the footage of Dukem Nukem Forever, watch the first episode of The Jace Hall Show, which also features a brief interview with Greg Grunberg from TV’s Heroes and Alias. (The 3D Realms segment begins approximately 2 min. 35 sec. in. HD version available only the actual site)