Your legs are on fire. Your ears strain to hear the orders of your commander. Just when you’re about to enter the melee against your hated enemy, everything goes dark.

Does this sound familiar?

No, we’re not talking about some sort of foreign battlefield. This is what many gamers experience when they’re playing MMOs on their laptop. Blazing hot batteries, insufficient speaker systems, and overheating graphics cards often lead to lackluster performance.

Last week, ZAM continued our ongoing beta preview coverage of Star Trek Online by offering readers a glimpse of ship combat and space gameplay. In this week's installment, we take a closer look at the other side of the MMO; the more-traditional, third-person gameplay carried out in away-missions (or when players are, for example, off-ship and docked at a space station).

Also dubbed "avatar combat" or "avatar mode" by the community, this gameplay style is similar to what most MMO fans are used to seeing; a third-person view of their character, with a familiar UI including action bars, unit frames and a mini-map. However, Star Trek Online employs a team-based "tactical" element, offering players control of the entire away team as well.

This week, ZAM continues our series of Star Trek Online early-preview coverage by giving you a first-hand look at one of its most exciting aspects; space travel and ship combat. So far, we’ve played around with the character creation system and experimented with a few alien races in an earlier preview of the closed beta currently underway. In this week's installment, ZAM shares our initial experiences with the "space" elements of STO, which account for about half of the game.

If you've been following the MMO's development, you know that gameplay consists of two main categories; ship tactics (in space) and away missions (on a planet's surface, in a space station or even within a ship itself). Until recently, we could only speculate on the details of how players would interact with these two gameplay styles. In this preview, ZAM takes you along for the ride as we explore our initial reactions to piloting our own starship throughout the first few missions in STO's closed beta.

These days, it seems there is very little in this gaming world that we players can rely on to be timely and dependable. Expansions get pushed back all the time, and the new fad in MMO release dates is to set one date and then release the game three months later. Of course, we don't mind if these delayed schedules also mean higher quality end products, but this certainly doesn't mean that a consistent and reliable development schedule is not something we appreciate.

With this in mind, if you were to speak to any fans of Dungeons & Dragons Online before it went F2P, timely and consistent updates would have been the furthest adjective from any of their lips. Back then, Turbine was heavily mired in the quagmire that is business negotiations, and, despite having already completed work on the much famed (and much delayed) Module 9, it was a whopping nine months (how fitting!) before the player population saw anything on their end. Flash forward to today, however, and Turbine's consistent monthly development schedule has been one of their greatest strengths in rejuvenating the franchise, and it was with great pleasure that they invited us back to check out DDO's Update 2, and the conclusion to their two-part story arc with the nefarious 'Dreaming Dark."

After publishing our recent news roundup about the biggest video game in Russian history, Allods Online, ZAM jumped into the upcoming MMO to get our own first-hand look. After all, the timing was perfect; gPotato (the game's publisher) launched its second closed beta on Dec. 1, and we scored a bunch of keys for our readers in last week's beta key giveaway. If you weren't able to grab a key, don't worry; you can register with gPotato to get in queue, or wait a little longer for the open beta.

In the mean time, our preview of Allods Online should help tide you over and give you a better understanding of what this free-to-play MMO is all about. Superficially, some aspects of the Allods Online might seem confusing or bizarre; the "high fantasy"-meets-"space opera" genre, buying items to shorten your downtime after death, unusual XP mechanics or even the lack of a mini-map in the game. But despite these differences—whether oversight or innovation—Allods Online is still polished and accessible enough to appeal to mainstream gamers looking for a "AAA" title.

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.