The indication from early Fallout 3 reviews bodes well for Bethesda’s much-hyped big-budget title. The sprawling, open-world action RPG has been rated maximum scores on 1Up, Eurogamer, Gamespy and Official Xbox UK and scores in the nineties on Metacritic. Incidentally, PC Gamer rated Fallout 3 at 90%, 4% less than Far Cry 2 in its September issue, which would indicate a lesser game to the undiscerning eye…

Look out for our Fallout 3 review in issue 14 of Total PC Gaming magazine, on sale 27 November.

A Dutch court in Leeuwarden has sentenced a 16-year-old boy to do either 160 hours community service or 80 days jail time after stealing virtual property. The ruling comes after the defendant was charged with beating a 13-year-old boy and forcing him to hand over money and virtual property from a character on his Runescape account. The defendant was accused of wielding a knife with intent, but the civil case dealt not with the threat to the boy’s life but with the theft of the virtual amulet and mask. It’s the first time a Dutch judge has treated theft of virtual property as an illegal act, stating that “Goods don’t have to be material for the law to consider them stolen.”

Lucasarts and Bioware have confirmed what has been suspected for some time: they’re developing a Star Wars-themed MMO. They’ve named it Star Wars: The Old Republic, which isn’t much of a stretch from Bioware’s last foray into the Star Wars universe with the RPG Knights Of The Old Republic. In fact, founders Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka joked about the size of the game, saying that “Internally, we’re making KotOR 3 through 10.”

The Old Republic is set thousands of years before the time of the Star Wars films, players can be a Jedi, Sith or other character and Bioware claims that this is the first truly story-driven MMO. To date, there’s only been one other Star Wars MMO - Star Wars Galaxies, though Sony can probably expect a sizeable migration from their SWG player base once The Old Republic is released a year or two from now. Check it out here.

Lord Of The Rings Online developer, Turbine, has snapped up two of the floundering former bigwigs who worked at Flagship until they were made redundant in July. Dave Brevik and Jeff Lind, who headed development of Hellgate: London, join Turbine’s newly formed West Coast studio in Redwood City, California as chief creative officer and director of engineering, respectively. Turbine said that the new studio currently has no specific objectives other than playing a role in its ‘corporate vision’.

Mythic Entertainment has now banned in excess of 10,000 accounts for its recently released MMORPG, Warhammer Online: Age Of Reckoning. These accounts aren’t your garden variety MMO gamers, though: these belonged to gold farmers, widely regarded as spammer scumbags by honest gamers and despised by MMO developers for breaching intellectual property rights and the T&Cs of the game. The figure currently stands at 10,578 accounts banned – which pretty much equates to sticking heads on poles as a stern warning to the 750,000 other subscribers. Check out the current Banhammer figure here.

Codemasters Online’s Lord Of The Rings Online is to get an in-game social networking site. Developer Turbine’s boss Jim Crowley announced this morning at the Tokyo Game Show that it would be “a version of Facebook or MySpace that sits directly on top of the gaming world.

“This is a fully featured, rich, robust social network. It has every single feature that you would find in the major commercial social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.”

It will launch at the end of this year and feature profile pages for all LOTRO player characters, with friend lists and communication tools as an extension of the current social networking system. It will also launch for Turbine’s other MMOs around the same time or next year.