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With little to no fanfare, the "closed beta' test for Battlefield Heroes ended today, marking the official launch of the free-to-play shooter from developer Digital Illusions and publisher Electronic Arts. The game, which is set in a cartoon-style alternate universe where WWII apparently never ended, was supposed to be released last fall but the team delayed its release until today.

As we have reported before the game contains two playable sides, each with four character classes, along with four playable maps. While you can play the game completely for free you can also purchase "Battlefunds" that will allow you to add special clothing items for your character along with ways to level up your character faster.

By John Gaudiosi

Real golfers have to be very good to make it into the U.S. Open, where they can tee off against pros like Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. This year, anyone with a PC can experience the challenges of the U.S. Open's Black Course at Bethpage State Park in Farmingdale, N.Y. for free. World Golf Tour (www.wgt.com) has partnered with the United States Golf Association to integrate the real golf tournament, which takes place June 18 – 21, into a Flash-based high definition videogame that plays on any PC or Mac with no installation.

Better yet, World Golf Tour is offering an incentive for gamers to pick up the virtual clubs. While the pros are playing for money and prestige, the Virtual U.S. Open is offering prizes, including an all-expenses paid trip to the 2010 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach in California.

Tower defense games. Chances are you have played one, two, or a dozen, especially if you frequent browser game portals like Newgrounds or Kongregate. Most of them revolve around the simple concept of enemies going for a goal along a set path, and you have to kill them. Some even make use of mazing, which forces enemies to take different paths that you determine. But what if the enemy placement is random? And want if your towers actually attracted enemies before killing them? Well, you'd have No Home For Gnomes.

The gameplay behind No Home For Gnomes is so simple, yet completely untried elsewhere, that it truly impresses. Gnomes will approach your house from any angle, up to 180 degrees in front of the house. You must stop them by placing flowers, which gnomes can't resist! These flowers pull in the gnomes, and after a short while, damage them. If the flower damaged them enough, they die. If not, the gnome continues, the flower depleted for a short while. It's such an easy system to get used to, but trust us: it's hard to master. The game is short (you can beat it in 5-10 minutes) but really oozes quality of design and art. It's easily one of the best concepts to emerge from TOJam 4.

Shoot-'em-ups, or shmups, are a perennial classic for any arcade fan. They provide distinct challenges, such as huge waves of bullets or a unique mechanic, for players to overcome and show their skill. It's no wonder that some developers at TOJam 4 took some inspiration from classics like Ikaruga and incorporated some of the color-changing mechanics into their games. What is more interesting, though, is just how this bullet-type mechanic was implemented. Roshamblaster is the product of this thought process.

If you couldn't guess by the name, Roshamblaster is about the classic game of Roshambo, or Rock Paper Scissors. A horizontal shmup, you progress through the stages defeating enemies based on their color: yellow is weak to blue, blue to red, and red to yellow. These colors (yellow, blue, red) correspond to rock, paper, and scissors, respectively. Where it differs from other color-changing games, however, is that the bullets actually change with each color. Rock bullets sort of fling forward randomly, paper bullets fly forward in a straight line, and scissor bullets create a dual zig-zag pattern. It's a neat concept, and with some more refinement, could be a landmark indie shmup.

In preparation for the release of ArmA II, developer Bohemia Interactive has launched a new Flash game that could net you a free copy of the upcoming military shooter. The game itself is actually rather complex as you take command of a military unit engaging the enemy. You have to equip your men and use a overhead map to guide them to their targets.

Bohemia Interactive makes playing the Flash game more inticing by offering to give the top two scores a free digital copy of the real ArmA II for the next five weeks. The game itself will be made available for purchase and download via Steam in late June.

EA Sports announced a few days ago their plans to release Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online, a web browser-based for the PC and Mac. This week EA revealed during their EA 2009 press conference that their web-based gaming support will be extended to Madden NFL 10 . . . kind of.

No, EA Sports isn't bringing the pro football game back to the PC platform but it is launching what they are calling the Madden NFL 10 Online Franchise. While the game is still on consoles you can use your web browser to do things like "live drafts, player transactions, league message board" and more. Let's hope this is just a stepping stone to bringing a real playable version of Madden to the PC.

A couple of the folks behind two well known game developers are striking out again on their own. This week it was revealed that Jeff Tunnell and Rick Overman, who helped to found Dynamix and GarageGames have launched PushButton Labs. This new game developer is concentrating its efforts on making Flash-based browser games.

The company is developing their own Flash-based game engine (the PushButton Engine, natch) that they will use to not only create their own games but have created their game engine as an open-source tool. And even more interesting is the fact that Gamasutra is reporting the team is looking to relaunch "a classic game property [rescued] from the nether world of a PC game publisher collapse." Hmmmm...

Electronic Arts' sports head Peter Moore has been hinting that the future of their sports games on the PC platform is online. Now EA has announced the first major move in that direction, revealing that EA Sports plans to launch an online version of their Tiger Woods PGA golf game to web browsers.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online will be compatible with both PC and Mac browsers and will feature a number of courses and a roster of PGA tournaments. EA plans to add new content and features on a regular basis following its launch this fall. Pricing has yet to be announced but EA is planning a "multi-tiered" subscription service. The game's official web site is already taking sign-ups to beta test the game.

We are not sure how long it will be before id Software decides to push out a "cease and desist" order on this but while its there it's certainly cool to play. The Newgrounds web site has got a triple play of the original Doom, along with Doom engine games Heretic and Hexen, available to play for free via their Flash-based browser site.

The programmer who ported these games is simply called 'mike' online and he's done a terrific job of getting all three games to run well (although it does require the new Flash 10; sorry, other web browsers). He's been working on this for a while now under the radar but we suspect that since id still sells these games they won't take too kindly to having them available to play for free; that's what Quake Live is for.

[Via Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

id Software previously announced plans to release new maps for their recently launched free-to-play FPS Quake Live and this weekend they announced on their site that they plan to add a new map to the game every week for the next six weeks.

The first map, to be released on Monday, is actually a slightly revised version of Hidden Fortress, a level that was first created exclusively for the Sega Dreamcast version of Quake III Arena (which Quake Live is based on, of course). id promises that they will be adding a mix of classic and all new maps for Quake Live in the coming weeks.

A few years ago, developer Cyberlore released Playboy: The Mansion, a Sims-style PC game that let players become a version of Hugh Hefner as they tried to create the ultimate party mansion while also running the Playboy empire. That game was heavily promoted but was both a commercial and critical failure. Now Playboy is getting back into the game business with UK-based Jolt Online (who recently launched the new Legends of Zork game) with a just announced new browser based MMO title called Playboy Manager.

The game, which will officially launch this summer, doesn't have you as a Hugh Hefner replacement. Your role this time is a manager of models wanting to make it big. Your ultimate goal is to help promote to models so that they can become a Playboy Playmate and have a permanent room in the mansion. Of course thousands of other players will be doing the same thing.

The gameplay will combine "elements of trading card and turn-based gaming" and will also feature exclusive Playboy photos and videos of their various Playmates. Obviously this game won't be for the kiddies. Jolt Online is tempting players to pre-register with a contest that will let five people win lifetime subscriptions to Playboy magazine.

Playing free games via a web browser is certainly a growing trend for hardcore game titles such as Quake Live and the upcoming Battlefield Heroes. However, the downloadable casual game developer-publisher Flashbang Studios is trying to go in the opposite direction and will see if people will actually pay to play games they have normally played for free.

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal the company plans will launch a subscription service sometime in 2009 on their Blurst.com site that will ask people to pay $20 for a six-month period. People will be able to download the Flash-based games they make for that fee and the company will take requests for additional features. They are assuming that 5,000 people will have to sign up for the service in order for it to work. The company claims that 2.5 million people have played their free games so it will be interesting to see if a tiny fraction of those players would like to pay for the service. In the meantime Flashbang's newest game Paper Moon (seen above) is due for release on Friday.

There is clearly a fanatical audience for the classic adventure games made by the now defunct Sierra Online publishing company. While many of the Sierra games are now technically the property of Activision Blizzard they don't seem to be interested in releasing new games.

Enter Sarien.net. This new web site created by programmer Martin Kool has adapted a number of the classic Sierra Online titles (Space Quest 1 and 2, Police Quest, The Black Cauldron and Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards) to play for free via the site. In addition there's cool a new twist; you can actually see other people playing online in their own games and even chat with them. We do hope this site is allowed to keep going (although it's certainly possible Activision Blizzard could shut them down).

While we aren't doing any April Fool's stories ourselves, we always get a kick with some professionally well done jokes. The guys at id Software are getting into the spirit of things with the "revamp" of their recently launched free FPS Quake Live as a MMO game.

Yep, The World of Quake Live claims that the game has changed over to let players "max out your level and then seriously pwn some noobs" Ridable Orbb mounts are promised for players who reach level 20. Oh, and read the fine print at the bottom to find out just how much money the once-free game now costs. Thankfully all of this is a joke although the ridable Orbb mounts do actually sound kind of cool.

[Via Blue's News]

Nope this isn't an April Fool's joke (we don't play that game here). The previously announced plans to relaunch the classic Zork adventure game franchise had now indeed gone live. The browser-based online adventure title Legends of Zork is being handled by UK-based Jolt Online under license from Zork's owners Activision.

The game itself harkens back, at least partially, to the original Zork games as it is played with a text interface with some cartoon illustrations. While the creators have said it's not an MMO title per se, there are some MMO elements including persistant characters (you can even play as a female) and some Player Vs Player elements.