[As posted on Japanator]

Many RPGs claim to be based in some kind of high-technology science fiction-y setting, but are surprisingly devoid of the things that would likely make up a real-life future. Some RPG folks still use swords in the far future and get everywhere by walking. 

Furthermore, where is the internet? I mean, it's become such an essential part of our lives in the present, but why is it somehow excised from our future? About the only games I can think of that have made effective use of it are of the .hack series. Where are my forums, my page comments, my RSS news feeds? I need to stay up-to-date with the latest skateboarding dog videos while in the middle of a random encounter!

However, thanks to Final Fantasy XIII, which you're probably sick of hearing about, the wonderful world of online shopping is coming to its in-game "Cocoon" city-world. Thankfully, I'm not talking about microtransactions or DLC - not for real money - yet. Instead, save points inside Cocoon will allow access to an "online" item store from which characters can do the buy-and-sell.

Director Motoru Miyama thinks that it's all rather "cool" and "different from the traditional FF series," also implying that some secret characters might appear on the faux-digital storefront. Wait, what? Secret characters? We can buy people online? Perhaps FFXIII's use of the intertubes is even more realistic than I imagined...ewww.

Anyway, I hope their item shop includes product commercials. Imagine being encouraged to buy Elixirs by the videos below...

 

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Goozex sure has grown up before our eyes. Whenever there was a sighting of Bargain Bin Laden, Goozex was there with the game on the cheap. It's a service I love and cherish, and I'm glad to see that the site is going strong as ever.

If you've never tried the site before: do it. It's a fantastic alternative to Gamestop, as you'll actually get a decent value for the games you ship out, and pay a cheaper price for what you get. The site's already exchanged more than $2.1 million worth of games -- a good majority of that in this year.

A good majority of my collection has come from Goozex -- trading in a newer title that I was disappointed with, and picking up ten older titles for the PS1 and PS2 is a distinct possibility. Only the words of Chad can describe it properly: "Amaaaaaaazing!"

Enough of my throbbing erection for the site. The boys also sent us a couple of lists, including the most requested, most traded, and most offered games for the first half of '08. Here's the top traded games:

1. Mass Effect – Xbox 360
2. Gears of War - Xbox 360
3. Assassin’s Creed - Xbox 360
4. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - Xbox 360
5. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune – PlayStation 3
6. The Orange Box - Xbox 360
7. BioShock - Xbox 360
8. Halo 3 - Xbox 360
9. Resistance: Fall of Man – PlayStation 3
10. Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction – PlayStation 3

Interesting to see that Resistance is still traded actively amongst PS3 owners, since it was a launch title and all. After the jump are the other statistics for the top requested and top offered games. I hope that Jonathan, Mark, and everyone else at Goozex are enjoying the high life, and that their success will be continued. Also, if you haven't already, check out Nick Chester over on the Goozcast!

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As an American, I know very little about soccer (for simplicity’s sake, that’s what I’m going to call it). Most of my closest friends played the sport when they were kids — even the uncoordinated nerds — but I spent ten years playing (read: sucking at) my favorite sport, baseball. But soccer is the biggest sport in the world once you leave the United States, and I don’t blame Mad Catz for trying to capitalize on that in the European market.

So Mad Catz, maker of crappy controllers for nearly two decades, will be bringing you soccer-themed videogame stuff! According to Gameinfowire.com, Mad Catz Europe, Ltd. has licensed Arsenal FC’s logos and such for “customized videogame controllers and other accessories” in a multi-year agreement. The list of stuff that will be branded with the Arsenal crest (see header image above) includes controllers, faceplates, “Console Skinz”, and carrying cases for the PS3, 360, Wii, PS2, PSP, and DS.

Again, I don’t know anything about specific teams, but from some quick reading, I gathered that Arsenal FC is one of the most successful soccer franchises in England, and they’ve been around for a very long time as well. So would I be correct in my analogy that Arsenal FC are like the Yankees of English soccer? I’ll leave it up to Destructoid’s British readers to confirm or refute that. All I’ll say is this: I’m a huge Yankee fan, but I’d never buy a third-party controller with the team’s logo plastered all over it. Would you?

[via Gameinfowire.com — Thanks, Jonathan!]

In the PC gaming world, there are about a million choices on what case to buy. Do you buy a store bought PC? Not me. Do you build it? Of course. Do you cut and slave to mod out your own case so that you have something original? Well ... it sounds good until you actually do it. So what do you do? Coolermaster might have the answer.

Coolmaster has a new line of CMX cases that I got to check out up close at this years CES. I have to say that I really was impressed. Look past all of the pretty colors and these are still very solid cases. I have built 100s of PCs in my life, and this case was made for hardcore people like me in mind. At the price point of $899 to 1,300 bucks, what do you get? That is the only issue.

You get a case that is hot as hell to look at, and a few fans to keep the insides cool. That is about it.  It will in fact, fit much larger power supplies, and has enough expansion bays and room inside for Jim Sterlings ego, flux capacitor, everything you will ever need to put into a PC. Each case is hand-painted as well as numbered, and some are limited to only 200 made.

Bottom line: If your wallet is heavy and you have a pimp office, and would love to have a Volkswagen Bus humming away in the corner, Coolermaster has everything you ever wanted and then some. If price is no object, I would give it an 11 out of 10.

Courtesy of Siliconera we bring you that picture above from (where else?) the Land of the Rising Sun.

Yes, it's funny that Pokémon are so famous, and Piplup is adorable, but I think the real point here is how utterly ironic this whole thing is. Japan, in creating these ornamentations, has inadvertently begun celebrating a God forced upon them in days of yore by Caucasians by deitizing a brand that has become simply godlike in terms of its following and units sold, which they themselves have been pushing to our side of the globe for a decade or so. In a way it's the ultimate expression of the triumph of capitalism over religion during the Christmas season, and an excellent example of the subtle Japanese manipulation of the world around them.

On the other hand, Piplup is really adorable.

Recently we've had a string of strikingly original FPS games. BioShock introduced a whole generation of gamers to Objectivist theory, and Portal taught even the most jaded of us that finding true love is a close as the nearest inanimate cube. That above clip demonstrating the single player storyline for the soon-to-be-salivated-over Unreal Tournament 3 however, seems to push us right back towards the rote run n' gun n' look surly approach FPS developers have been masturbating over since John Carmack first decided he had something against demons.

The clip itself looks gorgeous -- that's undeniable -- but I swear that plot is an amalgam of Gears of War and John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars. I wish I had something nicer to say, but when your plot resembles a film that can be best summed up as Ice Cube vs Marilyn Manson: Mark of the Millennium 2176, you might want to spice it up with a Faustian subplot, or some incest undertones. I'm hoping gaming won't immediately back slide to the lowbrow after Valve and 2K showed us a better way, but I also had high hopes for the Yankees this year.

Ooooooh! Topical!

I've seen enough cheesy gamer shirts to last me a lifetime. That's why a company like G8 catches my attention by taking a different type of approach. The concept here is both brand-aware and dynamic - a more understated look for some styles and a totally over the top look for others. The Tetris and Space prints are my personal favorites, but I'm definitely interested to see more of what they will do in the future. The  goal is to go for a Quiksilver type of brand, but aimed at the gamer lifestyle and produced in limited quantity.

G8 is owned by Tony Crisp, who has won an award for Best Fashion Designer and spent solid time in the fashion industry. With a brain like that behind the idea, it could be great. However, most gamers will tell you they just want to buy a t shirt. We've laughed at high-end designers incorporating game references into their products before. With a price point higher than the average shirt, but not venturing into the laughable range, would slightly higher-end gamer apparel appeal to you? 

It would be redundant of me to go over the entire history of game-to-movie adaptations to prove to each of you mathematically why this movie will suck, but I find it interesting that film companies are demonstrating a new strategy in order to avoid a quick exit from theaters with this latest RE film: completely changing the plot of the games to suit their own needs. Sure, the thing still has zombies, it's got evil crows, and it has the obligatory phallocentric tentacle guy, but otherwise the whole thing resembles Mad Max 4 as envisioned by a drunk George Romero.

I don't recall the parts of the Resident Evil series where we had to reconstitute our urine for the precious water it holds or dig a sand cave to protect our pale skin from the harsh sun, but I have always been a proponent of adding a cage fight with a gigantic mongoloid.

To be honest, Marks & Spencer is known more for giving upper class wannabes a place to shop than providing gaming hardware, but its recent decision to decline sale of the Xbox 360 can be nothing but a damaging blow to Microsoft's already shaky PR in the games world. After offering a free 2 year warranty on all its electrical goods, Marks n' Sparks has perhaps wisely chosen not to sell the notoriously unreliable 360, not willing to put faith in a machine with such infamous faults.

Rival machines in the PS3 and PSP are already offered by M&S, who will also be bringing Nintendo products to its shelves once a steady supply of Wiis can be guaranteed. The reputation, however, of the deathly red rings precede Microsoft. Granted, it is only rubbishy Marks & Spencer, but could stories like this become a trend? What do the Dtoiders think?

In an effort to make every one of William Gibson's predictions come true, South Korea has instituted a tax on the sale of virtual goods. Companies like IGE have managed to promote virtual item and currency sales into a cottage industry with annual profits on par with many small countries, and many industry experts saw government sponspored taxation on such sales as an inevitability. The only question that remains now is how long it will be before the IRS creates its own Americanized version of this tax.

There are two possible outcomes available based on this move. The first is that MMO manufacturers are going to feel a huge hit in the number of subscribers they have, and the profitability of the entire industry will drop. That will, in turn, cause fewer developers to throw their hats into the MMO ring, and the oversaturated market will dry up a bit. The big players -- World of Warcraft, Everquest, Lineage -- won't feel much of a sting, but the smaller fish will be sucked into the government-created intake fans.

The second possibility is that this tax will only serve to discourage gold sellers. The farming operations, already running on a razor-thin profit margin, would take a mortal hit from the tax, and the MMO landscape would become devoid of Night Elves with Chinese characters in their name and no social skills. Obviously this is the more desirable possibility, and even if the tax causes a price-hike for MMOs, the filtering out of the undesirable element would be worthwhile to many. 

Vivendi has released some new screens of the Wii's new killer-app, Geometry Wars Galaxies, and there's definitely a few things to note if you're paying attention. 

First of all, it pretty much looks like Geometry Wars as it's been presented on Xbox Live Arcade and the PC. But Geometry Wars fanatics will notice what appears to be some new biohazard geometry (which hopefully means we'll hear "Tears of Blood" somewhere on the soundtrack), among others. And last but not least, it looks as if a counter has that keeps track of how many enemies ("Geoms") you've blasted.

In case you didn't know, Geometry Wars is just a really great game. It's about a simple as a game can get, too -- you move a ship around with one analog stick, and you shoot with the other. You get bombs which you can deploy to destroy all and any of the game's eight enemies that appear on the screen. That's it. It's nice. 

I certainly hope adding new "geoms," motion controls, and a single player campaign doesn't tarnish the core experience. But really, I think you'd have to actually try very hard to ruin Geometry Wars ... it's that good. 

Hitman, the game, explicitly promotes murder as a means to one's own ends, and as such likely drives parent's groups, Jack Thompson and anyone else inclined to affix scarlet typeface to the misfits of society into the sort of frothy holier-than-thou rage generally reserved for Spaniards with an Inquisitionary bent. So, of course, a movie aimed squarely at the same post-teens who get an erection for quoting Latin scripture and gratuitous gunplay, was inevitable.

Above, you can catch a glimpse of the trailer for the film, and I have to say, everything I obtusely mentioned in my first paragraph was entirely justified. With a Boondock-Saints-as-written-by-Alan-Moore feel, the film will no doubt excite the dopamine receptors of American youth yearning for a complicated, dark murderer to sweep them off their feet like so many members of the royal lineage of Charming. Of course, whether or not that translates into actual box office success remains to be seen, but according to this calendar, it's no longer the 1980s, and America may not be as easily charmed into cheering for an assassin with a large enough cache of weapons to choke Charles Bronson as it once was.

Square-Enix is a company waist-deep in adorable mascots and eyeball-deep in Japanese folk who, instead of eyeballs, have constantly rotating, glowing dollar signs (yen signs?). As such, the good folks at the Squenix Maibatsu have decided to fulfill the lifelong dream of Colette Bennett by opening an American branch of their online retail outlet.

Often referred to as the Amazon.com of Mog vibrators, the Squenix store should serve as your first destination whenever you need to buy a birthday, Christmas or Bat Mitzvah gift for that cute girl down the lane who eats lunch alone and stares longingly at stylized illustrations of Trent Reznor.

[Via Game|Life]