Good news to all those who’ve been waiting patiently for Hello Kitty Online Philippines: you can now pre-register for the Founders’ Beta.
Here’s an excerpt from my latest CNET Asia blog.
Hello Kitty is the world’s most famous feline character–sorry, Sylvester, Tom, Felix and Garfield–who is at the center of a billion-dollar empire that spans across nations, generations and multimedia platforms.
Read the full story.
Kudos to award-winning Filipino composer and gamer Diwa de Leon a.k.a. Master Diwa, whose Legend of Zelda medley – A Capella Voices and Violin video on YouTube has been featured on Kotaku and Newsweek’s Pop Vox arts and culture blog.
Check out my Play to Win blog entry for more details.
A Ragnarok player, Master Diwa is one of the outstanding members of the Level Up! Community featured on our Game Heroes site, which is now one of the finalists in the 11th Philippine Web Awards. Vote for us, OK, and tell all your friends.
Meanwhile, a lot of people are already excited about the new game we’re bringing to the Philippines, Hello Kitty Online, so check out this story by our contributor Joel Pinaroc. Joel interviewed UP Diliman student Tiffany Chua, a Hello Kitty fan who has been playing the international version of HKO — and loves it a lot!
No question about it, 2009 is an exciting year for Level Up! and our loyal LU! Community.
As a way of saying thanks for all the support our loyal community has given Level Up!, we’re launching our very first Christmas online show, LIVE! The Show: Merry LU! Christmas! on Dec. 15-19.
Time sure flies. We launched our very first Level Up! Live Blog on Oct. 4 during the Road to LIVE/Ragnarok Philippine Championships 2008 at the SM Mall of Asia.
Then, for the very first time, we had an official Live Blog and live video stream for Level Up! LIVE 2008, the country’s biggest online gaming event, which we held on Oct. 18 and 19 at the World Trade Center. LIVE 2008 drew a crowd of over 20, 000 at the WTC, while the live video stream was seen by 55, 000 viewers from 27 countries and the Live Blog was read by more than 12, 000 unique users.
It’s this kind of online success and overwhelming support of the LU! community that led us to launching another milestone — our very first online show, Reliving LIVE: The LIVE 2008 Experience. This time, we were creating an online project even in the absence of a major offline event, combining video footage from LIVE 2008 with live video segments in our studio, tying all this together with a Live Blog. Again, we were touched by the support of the community, who urged us to launch another online show this Christmas and in fact make online shows and video chat sessions with our GMs and other guests a regular offering.
We aim to please, and so here we are with LIVE! The Show: Merry LU! Christmas! This is our Christmas gift to the LU! community, so you can be sure we have a lot of fun segments, cool giveaways and exciting surprises in store for our viewers. So tell all your friends about it and make sure you watch our online show, which starts on Dec. 15 at 10 am, Philippine Standard Time.
In fact, you can use this e-mail reminder, so you won’t forget the date 
Thanks again to the members of our Multimedia team — Online Platforms Manager Kevin Codamon, Producer Niel Caruncho, Editorial Assistant Mel Villanueva, and Video Specialist Gelo Obosa — for all the hard work, passion and creativity they’ve poured into our portal and our online shows.
We’ll have segments for our different games — Ragnarok, RF Online, FlyFF, FreeStyle, Perfect World, Crazy Kart, and Grand Chase — plus find out more about the two new games Level Up! is bringing to the Philippines, Rohan Online and Hello Kitty Online.
Even if you’ve yet to play one of our games, I’m sure you’ll find the show entertaining and it will give you an idea of how fun online gaming is and how much it has become part of the lives of many Filipinos, particularly among the youth.
So keep visiting the Merry LU! Christmas! page to find out the complete sked and confirmed guests.
Sama na kayo, and have yourself a Merry LU! Christmas!
SEA Head of Social and Community of Yahoo! Southeast Asia. Catalyst, blogger, evangelist, gamer. Follow me on Twitter and add me on Facebook and Koprol. Visit Yahoo! Philippines, follow @yahooph on Twitter and Like the Yahoo! Philippines Facebook Page. Views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer, Yahoo! Southeast Asia.
