Nearly a year after the manifesto was first penned and we took a look at founder Greg Costikyan's plans for revolutionizing independent gaming's foundations with Manifesto Games, the covers have been pulled back off of the site for an initial open beta test.

Though self-admittedly by no means feature complete, the site has launched with an impressive array of titles both bedroom-coded and professional, and an allegiance of developers both familiar and new. The inclusion of niche hits like Cloud and Gibbage, for instance, wasn't surprising, but running across Codo's Laser Squad Nemesis and Funcom's Dreamfall was.

What the site may lack in promised polish, it certainly makes up for in a spirited adherence to its own unyielding anti-establishment cause: "This," Laser Squad's description reminds us, "and not some $40 million budget game developed by hundreds of drones in an EA sweatshop--this is the future of games."

You can test-drive its recently unveiled engine and lift your skinny fists in unison here.

Though the inspiration is clear -- shameless, maybe -- there's still something irresistibly hypnotic and endlessly addictive about dan-ball.jp's Java time-waster in the vein of d_of_i's Sand works. This time centred on liquid physics, the curious creations of water, magma, and swirled paint can only be called a game in the loosest, most emergent sense of defining your own goals, but toss in a few rubber ducks and you're only a few squints away from your average Sony hardware demo.

d_of_i himself has continued to update the formula that brought him net-fame, returning to basics (and apparently giving up on creative titles) with Sand Sand Sand, this time adding fractally-branching trees to the mix. He's also widened his oeuvre with an oeuf in Egg Way, a game we wouldn't be surprised to hear was inspired by some of the DS' early library, where the player guides the freefalling innards of a cracked egg by drawing a safe path into a welcoming frying pan.

It's been at least since the year-and-a-half old Super Monkey Ball Deluxe spots that a Sega viral campaign has been this appealing, and if you haven't already shared in the black ultra-violent warmth of their ongoing Yakuza campaign, it's probably time to start.

Split into four ten minute subtitled sections, the second of which has just recently been posted, the company is giving fans the entirety of inimitable director Takashi Miike's live-action take on the Yakuza underworld both in streaming and downloadable high-quality formats, leading up to the game's forthcoming western release. Equal parts coming of age and coming of killer, the movies are part of a smart campaign, and a perfect tie-in to the crisp bleakness of the game itself.

It's been some time since we last visited the dark laboratories of the Experimental Gameplay Project, but we're happy to discover that there's been no discernable lack of engineering going on in the interim. Specifically, project founder Kyle Gabler -- currently employed by EA where, he notes in his resume, he was "regretfully responsible for the controversial censorship of the middle fingers" in the Urbz -- has unleashed his latest "thrown together" work, Disco Extermination Nation.

Running dual purpose both as open-source framework for prospective creators to have a foundation on which to build their own games (a helpful nod toward its latest design competition), and as sample game itself, Nation is the group's first foray into peripheral support. In it, players can use their favorite PC-compatible dance pad to act out Gabler's special breed of indiscriminate cartoon violence by stomping hapless dancers in true grotesque Python-esque style. For the dance-pad-less and the out of shape, the game also supports keyboard control, but the temptation to rain down an otherwise physically impossible rapidfire flurry of feet makes the pad a preferable option.

While you're there, be sure to also stop by project co-founder Kyle Gray's way, as his own latest, Child Eater -- a paper-cut one-button keep-alive/kill-everyone combo -- is just as intriguing.

Though it's obviously yet to achieve the same monumental success as its goal-driven MMO peers - with large swaths of developed but unpopulated areas between the sex and Tringo parlours - there's little denying that Second Life has become the virtual-space-du-jour of the digital elite, and, increasingly, retail outlets and entertainers looking to reach out into this new space.

The BBC reports that the latest of these is Duran Duran, who, likening it to the advent of the music video, find the service a new frontier to connect with fans who they hope will turn their new space into a digital utopia. Meanwhile, similar musical and more academic diversions have been taking place via The Infinite Mind, who recently hosted Suzanne Vega giving a personal avatar enhanced performance (unlike previous U2 fan-recreations), and will be accompanied by MIT Media Lab's John Maeda and author Kurt Vonnegut, the latter presumably conducted via audio only.

Perhaps it's simply a law of averages -- while 2006 has seen MMO subscriptions climbing to consistently higher record numbers every month, so too must go its admonishing cutbacks. Final Fantasy XI recently announced an additional 2000 accounts removed for using prohibited third-party utilities, a number which seems comparatively large -- more than the accounts removed throughout the rest of the year combined.

But World of Warcraft, its population far-outpacing any other, takes the fell-swoop award for its just announced removal of 59,000 accounts from its roster, for similar gold and farming cheats. The number is in addition to another 30,000 deleted throughout the month of May, and several smaller bans before it.

The numbers of players whisked away are themselves impressive, and indicative of the enormity of the problems continually faced by MMO developers in keeping their worlds running smoothly, but working out the maths and realizing what an enormous yearly loss in subscription fees the bans represent is much more sobering.

Two weeks after Ultima Online began utilising online third-party cheat detector PunkBuster, it has announced the closing of 180 accounts and the removal of a massive portion of its economy. After discovering cheques held in accounts for amounts more than the current million-gold restriction, UO mods have permanently deleted an approximated 15 trillion gold pieces from its world.

Spring has sprung and with love in the air, the Wall Street Journal has posted a look at romance on- and offline through the medium of the MMORPG. Now a well-established net-wide phenomenon, the players profiled in the piece cite the sense of trust and understanding gained through months of group questing as the foundation of their affection, and recommend the use of a little language play, with one Everquest 2 player learning the other's elfin dialect to woo his future spouse.

Though as late its more often been referenced for its seamier underbelly and devious denial of service attacks, MMO veteran Raph Koster points out an exciting emerging technology cropping up in Second Life's landscape.

Created by reported former Lionhead developer "Laukosargas Svarog", Svarga is a Second Life territory with a procedural and self-sustaining ecosystem of plant and insect life. In development for a year and still in its early beta stages, Svarog points out that already emergent behaviour is taking hold, with genetic mutation causing over- and undergrowth on its own, and dominant genes washing entire fields with a single colour.

As Koster points out, the development isn't the first of its kind, but it is an underutilised resource in virtual worlds, surprising as in the long run it can often be more cost-effective. With Spore on the cusp of championing similar technologies, it could be that dynamic worlds such as these might just be a defining characteristic of the next generation.

Swedish developer MindArk, creator of MMO Project Entropia, most recognized for its recent headline-grabbing purchases of virtual property by player (and, perhaps not coincidentally) "US spokesperson" Jon 'Neverdie' Jacobs has announced the launch of a new service further entangling virtual economies with their real-world counterparts.

The company has begun to issue real-world cash cards capable of drawing funds from in-game Entropia savings, at the established exchange rate of 10 PED per dollar. Though there's no mention yet of participating countries and the networking logistics behind it, it means, for example, the estimated 120,000 PED Jacobs is alleged to make on his virtual property translates into $12,000 (£6600) in available monthly funds theoretically redeemable at any local ATM.