In an interesting footnote to last week's highly emotional and controversial EVE Online clothing release, the game's senior producer Arnar Hrafn Gylfason wrote a blog post defending his company's decision to have virtual clothing goods costing more than real-world equivalents.

Or, at least he tried to defend it. And hey, maybe in his head, before he wrote this, it made total sense. But what he actually wrote is a little nuts.

People have been shocked by the price range in the NeX store, but you should remember that we are talking about clothes. Look at the clothes you are currently wearing in real life. Do you have any specific brands? Did you choose it because it was better quality than a no-name brand? Assume for a short while that you are wearing a pair of $1,000 jeans from some exclusive Japanese boutique shop. Why would you want to wear a pair of $1,000 jeans when you can get perfectly similar jeans for under $50? What do other people think about you when they see you wearing them? For some you will look like the sad culmination of vainness while others will admire you and think you are the coolest thing since sliced bread. Whichever it is, it is clear that by wearing clothes you are expressing yourself and that the price is one of the many dimensions that clothes possess to do that in addition to style and fit. You don't need to buy expensive clothes. In fact you don't need to buy any clothes. Whatever you choose to do reflects what you are and what you want others to think you are.

We will gradually introduce items at other price points, definitely lower and probably higher than what‘s in the store today. We hope you enjoy them and are as passionate about them as you are of the current items that are for sale.

EVE players will no doubt look forward to the goods priced lower. Me, I want to see how high they can go, and how many people actually believe some 1s and 0s that you never actually own are somehow similar to brand associations on real, tangible products.

UPDATE - Gylfason has since posted a new message, saying that an "extraordinary meeting" of the game's leadership will be held in Iceland (like, in-person) at the end of the month, "to help us define and address the real underlying concerns, and to assist us in defining and iterating on our virtual goods strategy".

fearless, virtual goods, and rage [EVE Online]

Earlier this year, anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica took Japan's otakudom by storm. Now that the series has finished, it's time for the vultures to swoop in and make a profit.

Besides the knock-off products, there's already the inevitable porn parody, which is anything but vanilla.

Premiering in January, Puella Magi Madoka Magica is a magical girl anime that attempted to revive the magical girl genre. Magical girl anime feature, well, magical girls, and the genre is a long established one.

Magical girl anime like Pretty Cure and Sailor Moon were designed to appeal to young Japanese girls; Ultraman and Kamen Rider conversely were designed to appeal to young Japanese boys.

Sunday morning television in Japan shows both types of shows, with the boys' programming and the girls' programing typically shown in separate blocks. As an aside, what makes Sailor Moon so interesting is how it took elements from Power Rangers Super Sentai shows and mixed in magical girls.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica, however, is far darker and brutal than the typical magical girl anime and is not aimed at young girls. It was created by men for men—something that comes across in Madoka Magica and something that has invited criticism.

The show has been wildly popular among Japanese anime otaku. There is going to be a manga version and a novelization by game developer Nitro+. The inevitable video game spin-offs are bound to follow as Madoka Magica merchandising kicks into high gear.

The anime's official site has an array of goods available, whether that be cute plush toy, mugs, or t-shirts. One "doujin" group planned to sell a plush toy of the alien critter Kyubey, but was shut down late last week, leaving the group to apologize for its actions.

Japan isn't alone in this; whenever something is popular anywhere, you are bound to see non-copyright goods trying to make a buck. Likewise, America has been lampooning television shows and movies in explicit fashion for decades.

The fringe of Japan's porn industry tries to cash in, too. Whether it's cosplay pornos, which are quickly becoming a dime a dozen, or the far more extreme world of rubberplay and vacuum play, a hit anime or game can quickly penetrate (sorry!) the depths of Japanese dirty movies.

When Haruhi Suzumiya, the popular anime, hit it big, extreme flicks featuring a woman dressed in Haruhi's iconic uniform being placed in a plastic bag with only one hole for her mouth, and then having a vacuum cleaner slowly suck all the air out. That film didn't feature kigurumi cosplay, like the one featured in this story. In kigurumi all skin is covered, and anime heads are often worn. In Japan, it's widely assumed that men do kigurumi cosplay, dressing as female characters. A woman, however, performs kigurumi cosplay in this video, among other things.

This Magica Madoka adult film is making the rounds on countless Japanese forums, game sites and anime sites. The NSFW film is less than 30 minutes and is priced at ¥3,500 (US$43). It looks cheap, and it stars some no-name actress.

By being so extreme and brazenly parodying this popular show, it's got people talking. The reactions of Japanese netizens range from baffled to amused, disgusted to delighted. And that was the point.

What really set Portal 2 apart from the first game was its clever use of gels, each providing new ways to zip around a level (and occasionally stump the player). And now you can own some of your very own.

OK, so this stuff won't make you run faster, jump higher or open portals on the floor, but the slime does come in little officially-licensed containers, are coloured appropriately and can even be shaped into forms you'd associate with their in-game behaviour.

You can buy one gel for $15, or get all three for $40.

Portal 2 Interactive Gels [ThinkGeek]

George "GeoHot" Hotz, famed for his hacking of the iPhone and PlayStation 3 (and subsequent court dramas), has apparently found gainful employment. At social networking behemoth Facebook.

A report on Tech Unwrapped, citing hackers who have been in contact with Hotz since his settlement with Sony, says Hotz has been turning down new hacking challenges/opportunities because he "doesn't want that much attention", and is instead now working at Facebook.

According to those with access to his site, Facebook messages left on Hotz's account say that he began working at the site in May, and revealed the move to his friends on June 17.

Where this leaves GeoHot's rap career is anyone's guess.

We've contacted Hotz for confirmation on the report, and will update if we hear back.

Geohot Working at Facebook, iPad App in the Works [tech unrwapped]

While Nintendo was a pioneer of video game light guns, first for its elaborate shooting parlours and then its Zapper for the NES, it didn't create the first home version of the technology.

That honour goes to the aptly-named Shooting Gallery, a hardware/software combo for the Magnavox Odyssey, the world's first home video game console.

Like the Magnavox Odyssey itself, Shooting Gallery was invented by video game pioneer Ralph Baer, who as we know, had quite a thing for guns. He first built a prototype of the technology in 1968, before Shooting Gallery's commercial release in 1972.

SG consisted of three main components: a large, faux-woodgrain shotgun (it was called a "rifle", but relied on pump-action operation) along with two game cartridges, given the snappy names "Game Cartridge 9" and "Game Cartridge 10".

Being the early 1970's, the unit's operation was quite primitive even by Nintendo's early standards. To play one of the four games bundled on the two cartridges, users had to place a paper overlay on top of their TV screen, into which small holes were cut (or shapes left lighter in shade) for light to pass through.

Shooting was then (for all but one of the games) a two-player affair: one person controlled the "target", moving a small light source around the various "holes" using the Magnavox's controller, while the other player used the rifle to try and shoot it. There were no "graphics", no alternating challenges (you had to manually write your score down) or health bars. Just shooting at dots of light through a piece of paper.

The four games included at least varied their theme and setting, if not their "gameplay", subjects ranging from shooting at dinosaurs to fighting the Red Baron to taking on a gang of outlaws.

Because of a number of reasons - the peripheral was large and expensive ($25!), the technology fussy with regards to room lighting and there was an incorrect rumour that a certain type of TV required to play the game - Shooting Gallery only sold around 20,000 units, a far fewer number than the Magnavox Odyssey itself (making it a more collectible item these days).

Still, it goes down in history as the first commercial application of light gun technology for a home video console, more than a decade before the Zapper. And you should always appreciate things coming in a fake woodgrain finish.

A cymbal flutters like a pancake after being struck in this video, taken at 1000 frames per second, by the Fluke Corporation, makers of sophisticated testing instruments. (via Neatorama)

Stick Jockey: Don't Hate the Game, Hate the Player

Even as sports games implement more deterministic controls, more realistic ratings and more authentic player performances, little of that translates to the player taking responsibility for success or failure, in singleplayer games anyway. Regardless of our real-life ability to read a cover-2 defense or the green of No. 17 at Augusta National, we expect to execute against such things successfully in a video game, every time. More »

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Go-Karts? In Uncharted? It's More Likely Than You Think

What's next for Naughty Dog, makers of Crash Bandicoot, Jak & Daxter and Uncharted? Tim Moss, the director of technology at Sony's Santa Monica studio thinks he knows. More »

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EA Sports Won't Say MMA's Dead, but Won't Say It's Getting a Sequel, Either

To many, the UFC's acquisition of the competing fight series Strikeforce in March spelled the end of EA Sports MMA. While EA Sports' chief of development did not say that a sequel is in development, he did not say the label was quitting the sport altogether. More »

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Chrome Skins are Gears of War 3's Unlockable Reward for Loyal Gears Players

n December, Epic Games creative boss Cliff Bleszinski said Gears of War 3 would feature unlockables that fans can acquire by playing other Epic games, such as the first two Gears of War. Yesterday, Gears 3's executive producer let slip what some of them will be. More »

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Some of Ocarina's Original Glitches Were Deliberately Kept in 3DS Version

In building the 3D remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the mandate for the developer Grezzo was to preserve fans' memories of the original as much as possible. That meant, where possible, that bugs from the original Nintendo 64 game were intentionally left in. More »

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In building the 3D remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the mandate for the developer Grezzo was to preserve fans' memories of the original as much as possible. That meant, where possible, that bugs from the original Nintendo 64 game were intentionally left in.

"As programmers, we wanted to get rid of bugs," Grezzo's Shun Moriya said in the latest Iwata Asks roundtable discussion with the Nintendo president, "But the staff members who had played the old game said the bugs were fun!

"It wouldn't be fun if your friends couldn't say, 'Do you know about this?' So we left them in if they didn't cause any trouble and were beneficial," Moriya added.

Iwata asked if Grezzo "implemented them as you would specs, rather than treating them like bugs." Yes, Moriya said.

"If something simply could not be allowed to stand, we begrudgingly fixed it, so some bugs don't appear," he said. "But we left in as many as we could, so people will grin over that."

Iwata Asks: Ocarina of Time [Nintendo]

Does this look familiar? Aside from the wooden animations, of course. This is Unearthed: The Trail of Ibn Battuta by Saudi Arabia-based Semaphore, and even this Uncharted copy won't be playable on the Xbox 360.

Unearthed has versions on everything else it seems: PC/Mac, iPhone/iPad and Android, and PlayStation 3. The game follows fortune hunter Faris Jawad from Morocco to Damascus, Alexandria and Dubai, searching for the treasure of the famed Muslim explorer Ibn Battuta. Evil treasure hunters stand in Faris' way.

Yes, it's easy to bag on this. It may not be what folks in the west would buy (or what Saudi gamers themselves would choose to import), but the country is new to games development, and they've got to start somewhere.

Still, if it's going to be so ... inspired by Uncharted, couldn't it have picked a word with a different prefix for its title?

More screens at the jump; they look better than the video.

Saudi Arabia Debuts "Unearthed" an Uncharted Clone [RipTen]

The Arcade Edition of Super Street Fighter IV arrives for Xbox 360 and PS3 this week. Another anticipated drop is the "Annihilation" map pack for Call of Duty: Black Ops; it delivers another five maps, one of them a zombie level. After that, you're looking at maybe Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3.

Tuesday

• Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition (360, PS3) — Evil Ryu and Oni are two more characters in this latest installemt of Capcom's landmark fighting series. The PC version arrives a week later.

• Resident Evil: The Mercenaries (3DS) — Capcom's zombie-hunting series comes to the 3DS as a combination of the Mercenaries mini-games from RE4 and RE5. The release features a demo of the upcoming Resident Evil Revelations

• Call of Duty: Black Ops: Annihilation Map Pack (360) — "Hangar 18", "Hazard", "Drive-In" and "Silo" are your new standard multiplayer maps; "Shangri La" is the new zombie board, which also adds five achievements for you to collect.

Also: UFC Trainer (PS3, Xbox 360); Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3 (PS3, 360)

Looking Ahead

July 12: NCAA Football 12. July 19: Captain America: Super Soldier, Call of Juarez: The Cartel July 26: Catherine; El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron.

What are you getting? What do you want? What are you looking forward to? Sound it off below, and at #twig.

Sources: Video Game Release Calendar; GameStop

What's next for Naughty Dog, makers of Crash Bandicoot, Jak & Daxter and Uncharted? Tim Moss, the director of technology at Sony's Santa Monica studio thinks he knows. [h/t 8bitjay]

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