EA is slowing moving toward providing more online social gaming experiences as seen with their Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online game and the recently announced FIFA Online. Now that it's got some sports games lined up EA is spreading its wings a bit and trying its hand at racing games; specifically, Need for Speed World. Billed as the first racing MMO, Need for Speed World is going into it's first beta period and you might just be able to get in.

EA's Black Box announced today that the closed beta for Need for Speed World has begun. The beta is expected to last several months and will include "thousands of players worldwide." If you want to get in, head over to world.needforspeed.com.

The beta itself features head-to-head racing and Need for Speed classics like police pursuit mode that spans 150 miles of the game's open world. The game will use cities and tracks from Need for Speed Most Wanted and Need for Speed Carbon so you might be familiar with a few of them.

Read more: Need for Speed World Enters Closed Beta Stage - We've Got Images

You know when I said now that the Stargate Worlds MMO was canceled it would make room for another franchise like Battlestar Galactica I was just throwing it out there on a lark. Turns out I'm psychic because NBC Universal just announced that Battlestar Galactica Online is in development for a Fall 2010 launch. There's a catch though, well two actually; it's being developed by a German company (Bigpoint) and it's going to be browser-based. This isn't to say that it will only be in German but that it's going to have a German kind of feel to it maybe, like the Anno games for instance. Euros might not notice it but there is a distinctive feel to these games noticeable to someone in the New World. Of course you probably say the same thing about games developed here like MW2 so it doesn't mean much.

Now if I could just forget the last season of the show I might be really excited by this announcement and maybe now that Caprica is redeeming the franchise a bit with some much needed backstory that doesn't involve angels (yet...) the game could be good or at the very least not suck as much as all the other game made based off of TV shows or movies.

Head over to the teaser site to be teased and sign up for more info: http://www.bgo.bigpoint.com/

Read more: Browser-based Battlestar Galactica MMO Being Developed

In a surprising move up the charts, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has passed MW2 in minutes played and is approaching the more popular COD4 on Xfire's top-ten games list.

I knew that BFBC2 would take over for BF2 but I wasn't so sure that it would move up the ranks so quickly. MW2, without dedicated servers had no right to ever place so high on the Xfire list so this is a good move that shows PC gamers want real servers hosting their games.

Read more: BFBC2 Beats MW2 in Time Played

It seems as if every big multiplayer FPS has problems on launch lately. Gamers went through MW2's growing pains (and still are some might say) with Xbox LIVE and the various other things that went wrong keeping people from playing the game, and now there are issues with the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 launch.

EA/DICE is aware of the problem and is looking into it so hopefully we'll have a fix soon or things are going to start getting ugly. Here's the official word from the OfficialBFBC2 Twitter feed

We are aware of the connection issue some PC users are experiencing. We are working on a solution.

Basically the game just doesn't want to let you play online at all or for very long. The list of issues ranges from getting kicked for a Punkbuster violation, random kicks, not being able to connect to EA Online through the game to login, servers missing from the master server list and even some cases of CTD (although those are rarer.) Clearly there are some strange things afoot in BFBC2-land.

Read more: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 PC Multiplayer Launch Has Problems

Tropico 3 is getting it's first DLC/Expansion pack this May. The Absolute Power DLC will have a new campaign, some new buildings, edicts, costumes, radio announcements, roads... basically more of everything. There will also be a new faction introduced - the Loyalists. These are the hard-core supporters that are so devoted to you they don't even want to bother with elections.

You'll get all this for about $18 (or 11.99 British pounds) some time in May. You'll need the full version of Tropico 3 to play so don't sell/trade that in just yet if you want to play the expansion.

Read more: Tropico 3 Gets Absolute Power Expansion