"We think its about time PC gamers had games that allowed them to arrange their information their way," says a developer. Instead of building a traditional console view, they're developing one that accounts for the increasingly customizable PC gaming experience, which needs to account for multiple monitors as more the norm than the exception.

That's the screen of the in-development game above.

"The gadgets are really flexible and offer a wide range of display options: docked/undocked, floating in the game window or just sitting outside of the game space," says the dev. "A lot of gamers now have more than one monitor so you could keep the game window entirely clean and then have all the gadgets sit in the other monitor."

NFS: World Online gets a release in Asia this year before going to the rest of the world. It'll be a free, web-based MMO set in the racing world.

NFS World Online Interface Revealed [Need For Speed Official blog, via Evil Avatar]

Of course, we see this after Maggie (sniff ... sniff) is gone - she could read this stuff cold and tell us what is up. I ran a chunk through Babelfish and found out it translates as "Terminal Velocity Pleasant Sensation Online." Ohhhhh, brother ... All the text is in a flash presentation, so running it through Google's translation does no good.

It'll be free to play (as per the norm with many MMOs in Asia) and probably monetized through microtransactions. An extremely broken-English writeup at Online Games Magazine suggests this game is about three months away from launch in Taiwan.

Need for Speed: World Online [site, in Mandarin, via Online Games Magazine]

Speaking with Eurogamer, EA have revealed that there'll be three new NFS games released in 2009, the idea being to seperate the series and provide games for the "core", casual and online gamer alike.

Need for Speed: Shift is the "core" title, and will be out on PS3, 360, PC & PSP (which is seemingly another nail in the coffin of the existing NFS PSP project) this fall. Also out in the fall will be Need for Speed: Nitro for the DS & Wii, which presumably has giant-head racers and car vaults. Finally, Need for Speed: World Online is a free-to-play online title, due for release in Asia in the summer before a Western release around Christmas.

So who's behind these games, now that Blackbox staff (the most recent devs on the series) have been gutted? Four different studios, and Blackbox are still one of them.

NFS: Shift is a far more serious take on racing than previous titles. Which you'd expect, with Slightly Mad - new custodians of GT Legends and GTR 2 devs Blimey! - working on it.

NFS: Nitro is being developed by EA Montreal, and will be an "arcade racer with a fresh and unique visual style that is very Need for Speed. The game will be rich and deep and will appeal to experienced arcade racers as well as casual players". Right. Expect Mario Kart with loud mufflers and garish paint schemes.

Finally, NFS: World Online is a joint project between the remnants of Blackbox and EA Singapore. There's no mention of microtransactions yet, but as a free-to-play game, we'd imagine driving anything beefier than a Mazda 3 will cost you real-world money.

Revamped NFS series launches this year [Eurogamer]