By: Nick Evanson Mar 28, 2007

Opening its doors to the world, a new online gaming portal called GOA (get the pun now?!) invites players from Europe to login and join the fun. It's free to join, and the games are free to download and play - so is there a catch?

Yes and no. At the time of this news report, the subscription service wasn't working so I couldn't sign up to try either of the two games currently available (a slightly mad looking golf game called Pangya and and a cutesy shooter named Gun Bound). But if it's all free then how would the portal make any money to survive? The answer lies in customisation: if you want your on-screen avatars to look better or have more skills then you can purchase little extras to do so.

Clearly targeted at casual gamers, GOA nonetheless looks promising but some people might be put off that one might to have pick up better characters by spending money although this can be done, more slowly, by earning gold by playing the games.

Have a mosey on over to the site here: http://www.goa.com/ (just make sure you have the latest Flash player installed on your computer).

Update: GOA.com is actually in a kind of beta stage so you might experience issues of the kind that I did. The multiplayer site will officially launch later this year with 3 games in total (the two mentioned above and a footie one called eXtreme soccer) and will support a variety of languages - English, Spanish, German and French. GOA also promise to have high quality games uploaded regularly to their site.

We'll take another look at what GOA has to offer once they're fully up and running.

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