Today on Offworld our beta keys went fast for Metaplace's eponymous new virtual world service (just over an hour!), though there's still a chance to get on the waiting list. Elsewhere throughout the day we saw an Xbox 360 crammed beautifully into a laptop case from master of his craft Ben Heck, watched the latest trailer for the new Ghostbusters game, and examined the business of the iPhone App Store with Apple's 2008 top sellers list now out. We also posted the next Ragdoll Metaphysics column from Jim Rossignol, who looked at why 2008 was a crucial year for indie gaming, particularly generative MMO Love and 2D Boy's World of Goo, saw how Deus Ex's J.C. Denton responds to an ontological quandary, watched millions of copies of the Half-Life franchise fly off retail shelves, and previewed tracks from UK games podcast OneLifeLeft's new chiptune compilation CD. Finally, we played a Space Invaders game from an invader's perspective, and were excited to hear that news is afoot for Brütal Legend, the new black metal adventure from Psychonauts creator DoubleFine which stars Jack Black as its hessian lead....br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=5eff062cfccb5c432db0e158804b497bp=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=5eff062cfccb5c432db0e158804b497bp=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=5eff062cfccb5c432db0e158804b497b" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/