Nintendo of Europe has a brand spankin’ new Advance Wars: Days of Ruin video up on their site. Don’t be confused by the “Dark Conflict” banner, however. Instead, think of it as a prime opportunity learn about video game localization. I’ll let Wikipedia do the honors.

In case you haven’t been following the upcoming DS title with the same religious fervor as the rest of us, Day of Ruin ditches the usually bright and cartoony visuals of the Advance Wars series in favor of more dark and dreary fare. The gameplay’s received a few major overhauls as well, including the introduction of several new units, including powerful CO units. Most importantly, Days of Ruin will feature online multiplayer modes and allow you to download custom maps from other players through Nintendo’s Map Center. The details are all readily available in a handy preview/interview from 1up that reveals you can store up to 50 downloaded maps at a time.

Advance Wars: Days of Ruin will be available later this month and will potentially keep you glued to your DS for the rest of your life. It almost doesn’t seem fair releasing the console’s obvious Game of the Year so soon into 2008, does it?

38 Studios, the MMO developer founded by Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schillings, is old news. However, just this week at CES, the baseball star announced this would be his last year playing America’s favorite pastime. He told journalists “I’m done. This is my final year,” saying he plans to devote all of his time to the studios’ upcoming MMO.

The fact that 38 Studios would work on an MMORPG, of all things, doesn’t come entirely out of left field (horrible, horrible pun intended). Schillings is just as devoted an MMO player as he is a baseball player. His adventures in EverQuest 2 are especially well documented. He reviewed two of the game’s expansions for PC Gamer magazine and even hosted an in-game event to raise money for ALS patients.

Clearly, this is a man who knows MMOs. He’s assembled quite a team over 38 Studios too, including Todd McFarlane and fantasy author R.A. Salvatore. With any luck, they’ll create a game that can make a name for itself in the crowded MMO market.

You don’t have to wait until this March for the recently announced Codemasters Online Connect 2008 event in Birmingham, England to hear about the shiny new DirectX 10 graphical update coming to LoTRO… because you’re hearing about it now. Funny how that works, eh?

MMORPG.com has some comparison shots showing off the new graphical wizardry available to Vista owners. Improved lighting and gorgeously detailed shadows further cement the game as one of the best looking MMORPGs on the market, as Turbine continues to make good on the MMO’s promise of offering an ever-improving play experience.

If you’re not a fan of wizards and hobbits but still want your massively multiplayer experience defined by cutting edge graphics, EVE Online hopes to implement DirectX 10 support in the second quarter of this year and the much-hyped Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures from MMO-almuni Funcom will also deliver violently visceral visuals for those with capable graphics cards when it arrives this March.

The oft-delayed Crysis 1.1 patch is finally available, according to GameBump. Despite the surprisingly hefty 139 MB file size, the patch doesn’t really do a whole heck of a lot. Besides the performance tweaks and bug fixes typical for initial post-release patching, Crytek also snuck in a few balances changes that are easily summarized as “ROCKETS AM NERFED!!!11113″

Seriously, 139 MB for a handful of bug fixes and UI updates? I realize broadband Internet is thankfully pervasive at this point, but what kind of crazy future tech is Crytek dealing with? Tuesday’s World of Warcraft patch, which accomplishes about as much as Crysis’ 1.1 patch, clocked in at just over 5 MB. Clearly, either Crytek is doing something very, very wrong or, judging by the unprecedented technical achievement present in the ugliest Crysis screenshot, they’re simply working on another level entirely. Frankly, my money’s on the latter option. Maybe in a few years when the rest of the PC market has caught up with CryENGINE2, we’ll finally understand all this crazy voodoo.

Those eager to download the patch can find a lengthy list of mirrors at inCrysis.

Hit the jump for full patch notes in all their copy-pasted glory.

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The new year gets started for real this week, with a wide selection of middle-of-the-road titles.

Pick of the Week: Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom Kingdom of Fire sheds it’s pseudo-strategy, Dynasty Warriors-inspired elements and gets back to the basics: the hacking and the slashing. Circle of Doom is an honest-to-goodness action RPG complete with online multiplayer over Xbox live. Fans of the franchise will find themselves confused and disoriented and series detractors will unknowingly miss out on a title they might have enjoyed. Huzzah!

Runner-Up: Dance Dance Revolution: Disney Channel Edition Nope, you read that correctly; it is neither a joke or a typo. Sure, you might not want to buy this Disney-themed version of DDR that features music from Hannah Montana and High School Musical, but rest assured that your little sister is going to be hogging your PS2 for the rest of the month playing it. If the insane sales numbers generated by previous Disney Channel titles are any indication, this game is going to keep selling for a long, long time.

Chris Taylor has always been on the cutting edge of RTS design, having birthed both Total Annihilation and the recent Supreme Commander. Gas Powered Games’ newest title, however, promises action on a significantly smaller scale. 1up has the scoop on Demigod, a DotA-inspired online PC game that puts players in control of a single powerful unit, requiring you to play nice with allies in order to raze the opponents’ base.

If you’ve somehow managed to avoid the largest user-created gaming phenomenon since Counter-Strike, DotA is short for Defense of the Ancients, and is a wildly popular Warcraft 3 map. So popular, in fact, that it’s virtually impossible to play any other type of non-ranked Warcraft 3 game over Battle.net. If DotA’s continued success is any indication, it looks like Gas Powered Games has another hit on their hands. The uninitiated should check out the map’s official site and welcome their new gaming addiction with open arms.

No word yet on when Demigod will get its very own Swedish techno hit.

Regardless of how you feel about the game itself, World of Warcraft’s strength as a movie making tool is undeniable, having elevated the medium to heights never imagined in the days of The Marathon Vidmaster Challenge. Our own love for WoW machinima is already well documented. After nearly two years in production, the second episode of the Illegal Danish series is finally available, and while it is only twenty minutes long, it was certainly worth the wait.

Like the rest of Myndflame’s excellent library of WoW machinima, Illegal Danish 2: Escape from Orgrimmar is funny, slickly edited, and features a wealth of impressive special effects. It’s hard to say what’s more impressive: the movie’s hilarious dialogue or the gorgeous visuals. Any movie that leaves us too tongue tied to say anything snarky is worthwhile fare indeed.

Wired’s Game | Life blog is reporting that a Chinese MMO player (surname Zhang) sued Shandra Interactive after they failed to return his in-game items… and won. The game company has been ordered to pay Zhang the equivalent of $680 for items originally taken as part of a police investigation into the sale of stolen virtual goods in World of Legend, a Chinese MMO. Shandra failed to return the items after the investigation ended and now must pay for the mistake. Zhang also plans to take Shandra to court over the $20,000 he claims to have spent on the game over the last five years.

So, there you have it. Virtual items have real world value in China. It’ll be interesting to see how this scenario plays out when it inevitably ends up in courts in other parts of the world. It’s typical to sign away all your rights by agreeing to a draconian EULA before playing any MMO, but with more and more MMOs dumping monthly subscription models in favor of free to play schemes that allow players to spend real world currency on in-game items, the question of who owns these virtual items becomes increasingly relevant. It’s one thing to pay $5.99 to flip a variable on a server and wield an Ethereal Dagger of Demon Flaying; it’s another thing entirely to not even really own it.

No, you didn’t miss it. There was no multiplayer release list last week because no multiplayer games were released. In fact, no games were released. And frankly, we would have been better off had that trend continued for another week. The new year brings with it four budget PS2-to-Wii ports of years old racing games from Destineer. No Pick of the Week or Runner-Up this week; just four games you’d be better off avoiding.

Available this week:

Classic British Motor Racing Originally released in February 2006 for the PS2, the game finally arrives on the Wii this week. It features 13 cars and 6 tracks, and yes, is just as pathetically content-starved as it sounds. Still, if you really love classic British cars and have managed to remain completely uninterested the dozens of great games that hit the shelves over the last few months, this game might be worth checking out. Actually, no. Not even then.

Kawasaki 4X4 Quad Bikes What is it about the Wii that screams “port your year old PS2 game to me!” Oh, that’s right, throngs of new console owners that don’t yet know the difference between quality titles and shovelware. Enjoy your profits while they last, publishers, consumers aren’t as stupid as you think. Right?

Monster Trux: Offroad This game was originally released in Europe in July of 2005 for the PS2. It is two and a half years old. You should only buy this for one of two reasons: (1) You’re extreme “enuff” to handle “trux” or (2) you want publishers to keep saturating store shelves with this garbage, inching out worthwhile labors of love in favor of cheaply developed cashcows.

Rig Racer 2 Wait, hold on. Enough people bought the first Rig Racer to justify a sequel? Hold me. It’s getting dark.

As terrorist and counter-terrorist activities continue to dominate the news, and as game developers continue to exploit current events as the basis for new games, more and more players are turning to the original to live their escapist fantasies. According to Online Gaming Zeitgeist, Counter-Strike is still the most-played first-person shooter on the PC and is now actually more popular than at any point in the previous three years. Its technological update, Counter-Strike: Source, is also wildly popular, second only to the original. Battlefield 2 comes in an extremely distant third.

Of course, this stands in direct contradiction to Nielson’s numbers, which places the PC versions of Halo and Halo 2 well above the big little Half-Life mod. According to Nielson, 0.19% of PC gamers are playing Halo 2 in the average minute, while just 0.10% of them are playing Counter-Strike. Clearly, someone’s data is incorrect.

Though Nielson may have ratings gathering experience from years of television work, they’ve only been covering video games for a short time – less than a year, in fact. Online Gaming Zeitgeist, on the other hand, has been watching you play games for three years now. I know many people that still play Counter-Strike online on their PCs, and not a single person that even owns the Vista-exclusive version of Halo 2. In this case, I’ll believe OGZ until I have reason not to.

Dylan Jobe, game director for Warhawk, has some new information on Omega Dawn, Warhawk’s first booster pack, at Sony’s PlayStation.blog. In the lengthy FAQ Jobe discusses the number of dropships per map (two), the possibility of a snow-themed map (outlook good), and whether or not fans can expect any free new content in the future (signs point to yes). Besides the new dropships, Omega Dawn also features some interface enhancements and a new battlefield for the best online game on the PS3 (sorry, Unreal Tournament 3). Omega Dawn will be available through the PlayStation Store and Warhawk’s own in-game store on December 20 for $7.99.

I have a confession to make: For two years I played World of Warcraft like there wasn’t much else in the world worth doing. I have little to show for it, of course — some transactions on my bank statements, a growing sense of personal failure, and a massive collection of epic loot.

Figure Prints is a new service going live on December 11th that promises to make 3D printouts of your World of Warcraft character, gear and all. It’s an officially licensed Blizzard product, so the 4-inch statues themselves are of the highest quality. Check out the official FAQ for more information. Whether you’re still a hardcore WoW addict, or a former raider looking to remember your glory days, this looks to be the coolest (real world) World of Warcaft loot yet.

I’m seriously going to order one.