|
|
Bi-Weekly Roundup 2000-12-06 Erik | A roughly every two week recap of the last fourteen days in gaming. Thanks to Andrew and Scum Bunny. |
| | Two weeks ago today I was
playing a pre-release version of Carmageddon 3. For those of you unfamiliar with the
series, it's like the Sims only instead of helping little computer people decorate their
apartments, you run them over with a truck. About ten minutes into it, I yawned.
I only planned to execute a regular yawn, but to my surprise it turned into one of
those open mouthed, full bodied, eye-fluttering sighs that anyone who's played the lead
role in a movie or play about Caligula will recognize as a good way to express how jaded
you've become about everything. That's when it hit me: I live in the future, I
own the most powerful electronic brain money could buy nine months ago, I'm using it to
accurately simulate a murderous rampage, and I'm still bored. I
realized that I needed a break from games. I've discovered that a good antidote
for this feeling is to turn off the computer and either get some excercise or place a few
jew-baiting crank calls to NPR. I did almost an entire sit up before I lay back
down, grabbed the phone cord, pulled the handset across the floor and onto my chest, and
dialed the Diane Rehm show. I planned to
say something like "Hi Diane. Love your show. Here's a thought: The
Holocaust - Never Again or Never Happened in the First Place? I'll just hang up and
listen to your guests respond to this." Instead, there was a pretty crazy NPR
mixup, and I was offered a job at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank,
which I immediately accepted. I was like "see ya, Chet. I got a job at a think
tank," and he was like "Whatever, man. Don't let the door hit your
giant brain on its ass on your way out." As I was leaving, I fished Rune out of the trash so that I could toss it back
in as sort of a dramatic goodbye to gaming.
The Brookings Institution lady put me at a desk and gave me some vague instructions
about researching a new framework for relations between America and China. At the
staff meeting seven days later, everyone sat in a semi-circle and presented their policy
briefs to the group. Mine was called "When the Chinese go 'Ching Chong Bing
Bong' they're trying to talk!" This is the point where I'd
normally say "to make a long story short" and condense the events that followed.
But the preceding sentence has actually made this account longer than what actually
happened, because before I even got all the way to the exclamation point, the Brookings
Institution lady said "You're fired," and that was that.
So I'm back. A lot has happened over the last two weeks. Of course the
biggest news is Jaleco's release of its long-awaited Beer Party controller. The
entire page is in Japanese, so I don't know what the game is about and I'm not even sure
what passes for a beer party in Japan. But if I had to guess, I'd say you capture
schoolgirls, bind them to potty chairs, then spray beer up their asses until their
stomachs burst.
While I was gone, Gamecenter interviewed
Simon Jeffrey, the president of LucasArts. They asked him why Force Commander
sucked so much. Here's his response:
Artist's conception of Simon Jeffrey
|
Force Commander had quite a
checkered and interesting history. I think that ourselves, along with a couple of other
publishers, found out that the real-time strategy
market wasn't quite ready for the jump to 3D. We
made a bet, a gamble, that the real-time strategy market was looking to evolve beyond the Command
& Conquer or StarCraft-style of gameplay and go into the 3D world. I think that we
came up against a bit of a technology |
| hurdle, and we realized that it
was hard to implement something that is real-time and strategy in a 3D environment,
because there isn't the same kind of direction. [Two-dimensional] real-time strategy games
almost always are linear in their gameplay, and that may sound trite, but in some ways I
think that was what part of the problem was. And we've seen other 3D real-time strategy
games that have suffered from the same problem; when
people are in a 3D world, they don't know what to do--they aren't so directed--and their
strategic thinking is more muddled and more confused. |
 What he's
essentially saying is that someday evolution will produce a race of real-time strategy
gamers whose jumbo, vein-throbbing butt heads will permit them to finally appreciate the
genius of Force Commander. You hold on to that dream, Simon Jeffrey. You too,
George Lucas. And while I'm thinking about it, fuck you Ron Howard.
Is there anyone currently alive who's smart enough to comprehend Force Commander?
As Chet pointed out while I was away working for the Brookings Institution, Game God of tomorrow and
self-proclaimed super genius of today, Relic's Alex Garden,
just might be. How smart is he? In his own words:
I only recently got a TV, I haven’t watched TV for about
three years and I read a lot of books
People who don't watch TV love to mention it and never fail to pair that statement with
the fact that they read books too. But as long as they're patting
themselves on the back for simply not doing something, it seems to me
that there are lots of worse things you could be taking credit for not doing. For
instance, next time someone decides to lord over you the fact that he doesn't watch TV, go
ahead and tell him "Good for you!" Then while everyone around you is
reflecting on his massive intellect, up the awful-things-you-don't-do ante by mentioning
that you don't rape people and then add that you watch lots of television
instead. Not only does that make you a better person - after all what kind of
psychotic jerkoff wastes his time not watching TV when he could be busy not commiting
violent sex crimes? - but it gives you sort of an air of barely suppressed operatic rage,
which makes you more like Batman.
Still, it pains me that all of us may be missing the pleasure we could be getting from
Force Commander simply because we're too stupid. So just in case there's something
to this reading makes you smarter business, I'm going to start an official OMM reading
club. Every week, we'll read a book, then discuss it in the Tetris
forum. This week's assignment is Charles Bronson Superstar.
Next week:
|
| | Designer Gut Match 2000-11-26 Staff | | |
Designer
Gut Match
If there's one thing better than sexy pictures, it's sexy picture games. Daily Radar
recently hosted a contest
in which readers were asked to match a notable woman's head with her breasts. It was
fun, and it was erotic. But other than being somewhat derivative of the Daikatana
strategy guide, it didn't have much to do with games. I mean besides the fact that
it was a game. We decided to take Daily Radar's idea and make it our own by
stealing it, smooshing a picture of Paul Steed's pie-filled torso on top of it, and
replacing the hot chicks with game designers. Since men's conservative fashions
rarely show much boob, we couldn't find any pictures of John Carmack's tits and were
forced to rethink the puzzle solving aspect of the contest. You're now matching the
industry's hottest designers to their distinctive stomachs. Is it still sexy?
Unless you're not turned on by the randiest organ in the sensual art of converting
snickers bars into feces, the answer is yes.
Personal Information:
If you aren't already a member of the OMM Prize Club, just
fill in this form to be entered into our prize distribution database.
By pressing the "submit" button you grant us permission to use the
information only in "any way deemed acceptable by the
governing body of Portal of Evil Inc., it's subsidiaries, groupies and hangers-on, UGO, or
id Software's Adrian Carmack", but you also grant us permission to give
you prizes! All fields marked with an "*" are mandatory for
winning prizes. Field marked with a "^" are
optional, but will help us coordinate our ongoing efforts to distribute
better prizes.
|
| Secret Of Game Development Revealed! 2000-11-16 Chet | I Found this interview on Big Kid while I was slumming it in the Australian ghetto of the Internet. |
|
 First off I want to discount this whole
interview. The interviewer starts right off by posting an outright falsehoods.
When talking about the PCGamer Future Gods of Gaming, he describes Stevie Case as "a certain female level designer and Playboy playmate" This is incorrect. Stevie is not a Playboy Playmate. Trust me
I know. That would be like calling the girls pictured in the 1-900 ads in the back
playmates, they aren't. When I masturbate to online pictures of Stevie (none appear
in the magazine Playboy), I do not use my normal playmate inner dialogue. It would
normally go something like this, "Oh yeah, take that you dirty little bunny - I am
going to give you a little white tail..." With Stevie my inner voice normally
goes like this, "Oh yeah! Take that you little sector 17 slut - I am going to
make a multiplayer map out of your ass baby..." Do you see the difference?
She is a game designer - not a playboy playmate. (We tried and tried to explain
to Chet that woman pose naked in magazines for other purposes than masturbation - such as
medical illustration and to help fathers explain the bird and bees to their sons - but
Chet never believes us. - Ed) Now to the interview with Alex from
Relic. Alex lets us know about his shortcomings early on in the interview:
there’s two types of people in the world, there’s
innovators and there’s everybody else. Ok? The innovators don’t need to put
things in a box in order to understand them, but everybody else does. And that
doesn’t make everybody else bad, it just means that... Example: in Seoul, they
don’t call them RTS games, they call them some bizarre...thing, right?
Alex is 100% correct. Korea is a country of innovators. While in the USA if
someone said something as stupid as the above we might say, "Excuse me?" in
disbelief. Not in Korea - home of the innovators - they say
"shilyehamnida". No wonder that apple pie you are eating was made in
Korea!
Sadly Alex and the rest of the Relic team is not Korean so we can't expect much in the
way of innovation from them. When asked how a bunch of talentless non-innovators
came up with a decent concept for a game, Alex replied:
...one day Erin Daily who is our lead designer came up to me
and said Do you know that we’re making an RTS game? and I said Really? and he said
Yeah! No dude, check it out we’ve got this this this this... I’m like Holy shit,
you’re right! He’s like ...we better copy Starcraft I’m like Yeah! so we
just ripped off Starcraft completely as much as we could.
So what is new for Homeworld 2? Alex isn't sure. With the Korean developers
Blizzard stating it won't release a StarCraft 2, Alex has been forced to start
looking around at other Korean developers for "inspiration". Who knows
what will be next from Relic? Maybe a fantasy RTS?
*We have a question mark by the Curtis Picture. I couldn't find a picture of
a bald guy in the Relic bios - but they did have a pic of a guy's dog - I guessed the bald
guy would put up a pic of of his dog. |
|
| Mails 2000-11-03 Erik | AYIEIEIEIEIEIEIEIEIEIEIE, WE GOT MAILS! Thanks to the entire continent of South America for that awesome impression of mexican banditos excited about getting mail. This is part one of a new weekly feature in which we respond to reader complaints by thinking up different ways to call the author a fag. |
|
| We get a lot of hate mail.
If you stacked the photons that stream off of my monitor from all the electronic
hate mail we receive end to end, quantum tunneling would occur - assuming the first link
listed when I typed "photons" and "stacked" into google is a) correct and b) still correct if you just
skim it looking for scientific-sounding phrases. Regardless, I think I have
Attention Deficit Disorder because even though I crave attention, I don't get nearly
enough of it. Hate mail helps with that, so I don't mind it. Usually. Yesterday,
I received some belated hate mail from TV's Gerry
Allen regarding our not-so-recent expose on
adventure games. By "TV's" I don't mean to imply that Gerry has ever
been on TV or that his super-smart adventure gaming vibrating pussy has probably ever
watched TV, but only that he reminds me of a show I saw on HBO2 about gays. Here's
his letter:
From: "Allen, Gerry" Gerry.Allen@pfizer.com
To: "'feedback@oldmanmurray.com'" feedback@oldmanmurray.com
Subject: Adventures, Killed Fresh
Date sent: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 13:50:39 -0500
Gentlemen --
I don't often stop by your stable, due to the
overwhelming stench, but Chet wasn't around. I sat stupefied as I read your article about
dead adventures. The example of the Mosley masquerade shows how truly without a sense of
humor you are. You haven't the wit to recognize Jensen's tongue poking through her cheek.
Oh well, satire closes on Saturday. Since you couldn't recognize a trend with binoculars
and a guidebook, let me flip you a few facts. Adventures were always about story. Oh sure,
there were puzzles and occasional blood, but story was king. In text adventures, story was
aided by imagination, like reading a book. Then came graphics. Graphics replaced
imagination and fragging replaced story. Adventures tried to add graphics; remember FMV?
But only where story ruled did graphics aid adventures. The usual suspects may be trotted
out here: Maniac Mansion, any Monkey Island, KQs and the apex of Grim Fandango. I should
note that story has returned. Planescape: Torment comes to mind. The Longest Journey, too,
though I didn't like the story but what do I know? And that adventures aren't dead. More
of a niche market, like wargame simulations and Web-based gaming "portals".
You guys wouldn't know the truth if it came up to you and asked you to dance. The
important thing about the Gamecenter article (and several others in the same vein) is that
it represents the aging of the editors of these rags. Nostalgia always has gray at the
temples. New blood will see action games as the bogey shortening attention spans across
the planet and who-knows-what games the consequence.
Clear ether,
Gerry M. Allen
"Clear ether"? Way to be a fag there, Gerry. I really hope you
don't actually talk like you write. Don't get me wrong, I honestly hate you, but I
wouldn't wish that on anyone other than Roberta Williams. The experience of seeing
you string words togther is the literary equivalent of watching Liberace get dressed -
it's kind of gay to begin with, and then, against all odds, it just keeps getting gayer.
True, I haven't the wit to recognize her tongue, but permit me to gently remove Jane
Jensen's cock from where it's planted firmly in your ass to make room for my foot.
Do I remember FMV? I have no clue what the 'MV' stands for, but I have a pretty good
idea about the 'F'. Look, let me flip you a few facts: I don't
care if you like adventure games. Seriously, knock yourself out - with
amyl-nitrate. What you people do is no concern of mine. So don't email me all
the lurid details. It's gross. I like to pick my nose, but I don't send you fucking
mail about it.
I sent Gerry a transcript of my new Gerry M. Allen Email Adventure:
You have mail.
>LOOK MAIL
You see a fag.
He responded:
I won't bother copying your fellow miscreants. [I cc'd the PoE staff on it - ed] You do it so well. But it does seem to be the only thing you do well.
Besides, being pathetic, I mean.
Did you just call me a miscreant? The two
years I spent married to Jim J. Bullock were less gay than that. Here, I'll save us
both some precious being-an-insufferable-fruit time and compose a response to this news
update for you: "Why I never, you tin monstrosity, you bumbling
booby." And here's my response to that: "Did you just call me a tin
monstrosity? Jesus, you're a fag."
Also, did you call me pathetic? I can
only assume you were thinking about you, because I run a snotty
website about video games. |
|
| Annoyances 2000-10-20 Chet | Thanks to my pal Steve for all his support. |
|
| Sorry about the lack of updates
this week. I spent the last five days in the hospital. I finally earned enough
from the banner ads to buy some plastic surgery I've had my eye on. In what I hope
will become the male equivalent of breast enlargement and start a movement towards
redefining standards of male beauty, I had my scrotum augmented. Augmented is a
clinical euphemism for "made incredibly huge". Picture Andre The Giant's
head if it was skull-less, filled with fluid, had two coconuts floating around in it and
was almost completely covered with manly surgery scars and you're about halfway
in the journey of imagination whose endpoint is my enormous new scrotum. Now I just
need to legally change my name to something more appropriate to my enlarged, re-packaged
testis. I tested a few different male variations of "Mellonie Mounds" but
eventually settled on "Dr. Oliver Sacks". Not only does it allude to my
most remarkable new feature, it might make women think I'm a doctor, which I know they
like. Eat your heart out, Stevie Case. It'll probably be easier if you rip it
out through your back. This morning, I sat down on my new office chair - made from one
of those potty seats designed for toddlers but modified for the human form factor of
today's surgically-enhanced giant-scrotumed sexy web professional - and attempted to sift
through the week's gaming news. Maybe I'm extra cranky because my inner thighs and
the sides of my scrotum are chaffed and sore, but everything that happened this week is
bad.
I downloaded the Blair
Witch Project 2 demo. I could have sworn Blair Witch Project 1 came out just
last week, so I figured this was an inevitable Blair Witch game parody. This theory
was reinforced when I discovered that the game utilizes the Nocturne engine, which is kind
of a parody of a decent 3D rendering system. I never figured out whether BWP2 is
supposed to be funny. Upon starting the install program, I received this message:
To quote me, "What kind of crazy bullshit is this?" In order to run the
install program, I have to reboot my computer? It turns out Blair
Witch 2 has a game within a game - sort of like Major Havoc contained a complete version
of Breakout. While the computer reboots, your video card gets a chance to run and
hide from the installer. In case you're wondering who won Blair Witch 2 Installer
Virtua Hide and Seek, it was both of my resourceful video cards.
For all I know, if I hadn't deleted the entire mess, it'd still be looking for
them. The game runs in software, but if that idea appealed to me, I imagine I'd be
too busy churning my own butter to play Blair Witch anyway.
I'm taking Darvoset and that explains why I ended up at Computer Games Online reading a
Mech
Warrior 4 preview. It's actually less of a preview and more of an x-ray of lead
designer David McCoy's head. I think this black lump is his deep sense of
inadequacy:
"BattleTech is very much about a sense of power. You not
only have an important role, but you have something important to do. A lot of us don't
feel important, like the universe doesn't really grant me an opportunity to exercise my
'special-ness', if you will."
Dave, you might consider purchasing a humongous scrotum. It worked for me.
The preview also contains this analysis of the game's appeal from Battletech inventor
Jordan Weisman:
"It's characters' lusts and passions and conflicts. Like any
soap opera, that's what brings you in."
Topping the Jordan Weisman Mech Warrior Appeal List at #2? Giant Robot Combat.
Maybe. With Jordan and David at the helm, MW4 has a 50/50 chance of being
about dressing up like a girl then killing yourself.
Speaking of that, Lowtax thanked us on his Stile Project for people who can read, Something Awful. By us, I of course mean
Chet.
Obviously, I had nothing to do with that.
"Ever gracious and considerate Chet"? It's as if I woke up from my surgery
to a bizarre alternate reality. I know a lot of people think Chet and I are the same
person - though, I hope to God, nobody who reads Planet
Crap - but this is a real fucking slap to either of my tender re-manufactured enormous
testicles. It still stings that Francis the Talking France
never inflamed the imaginations of readers the way that JeffK has. But this bothers
me even more. I've decided to introduce a new character that an arbitrary sequence
of button pressing on my calculator watch proves will be more popular than JeffK.
Brace yourselves for sixteen year old Jason Ferrell, the kid you love to hate who really
likes the Jeffersons! Here he is talking about the Nocturne engine:
Eat that, Lowtax. My nuts hurt and I don't feel very sexy. |
|
| Adventure Gamers Continue to Amaze, Confuse 2000-10-12 Chet | Thanks to eric for pointing this out. |
|
 We like publicity. Good, bad, all we ask
is that you spell our name right. In fact, after seeing the mention we received on Christianity Today (at
right), we've officially lowered our standards and now demand only that you spell the link
right. We'd also like to correct the misconception that we're not a Christian
website. We are. Just because we're not a very good
Christian website doesn't mean we're not trying. It seems a little un-Christian for
mega-inspirational Christian supersite Christianity Today to fucking lord that fact over
us. It must be nice to have both a mandate from Christ and a
gigantic staff of well-paid Christian proofreaders and wage-slave Hindu fact-checkers to
edit out all the swear words. Even though the Christianity Today piece contains
some factual errors and a few cheap shots at our piety, we appreciate it. Not only
because it brings us one step closer to the Holy Grail of Christian websites - a link in
the Online Bible - but because it
drives traffic to the site. It's not even worth pointing out that the reason Old Man
Murray exists is to attract readers.
Leave it to adventure gamers, then, to once again turn logic inside out in much the same
way that fish creatures turned people inside out in the 1979 classic of turning things
inside out cinema, Screamers. Just
like they don't want any television programs to visit the area in front of their eyeballs
and aren't afraid to mention it every few sentences, genius adventure gamers such as
the ones that staff Just Adventure now
don't want you to visit their site. And they don't want anyone to advertise their
site for free. Adventure gamers really do confuse me and Erik. Never mind the
stupid posts in our forums
or the even more inane posts in their own forums,
this new twist beats all of that. They create content, and then demand that
no one looks at it. Just Adventure posted this walkthru for Blair
Witch Volume 1. Seems like it might attract a lot of new visitors if people knew
about it and if we lived in a magical world where Blair Witch Volume 1 was really
popular. But if you go here and read it, you'll notice
an odd disclaimer at the
top.
This walkthrough is the property of Just Adventure and may not be
reprinted, linked to,
or copied in any manner without the express permission of Just Adventure.
 This may just be the superior intellect
of adventure gamers talking, but they don't want us to link to it? I
don't get it. Please, Just Adventure, let us link to your Blair Witch Walkthru.
Please! We just want to link to it. We're
smart and sophisticated enough. Maybe Erik will use some more French words if you let us link to it. [Do
you know what the french word for pussy is? "Chat". Kind of makes
you think, eh Chet? - ed.]
|
|
| NHL Boo-Thousand And One! 2000-10-11 Erik | Thanks to God for creating puns before getting around to inventing a cure for cancer. N-H-Hell 2001! |
|
| A few days ago, I downloaded
Cryo's Devil Inside
demo. I was expecting a jackhammer blow to the survival horror receptors in my
brain. Instead, the game turned out to be a bizarre amalgam of Resident Evil and
Smash TV - bizarre because it's not nearly as good as that description makes it sound.
"NHL 2001 is scarier than this," I told Chet. I've been playing a
lot of NHL 2001 lately. Chet just shrugged because he was busy trying to figure out
whether the office's prevailing carton of milk had turned. He asked me to smell it.
"NHL 2001 pretty boy Michael Peca is less spoiled than this milk," I told
him. A little later, I was trying to get Chet to pay attention while I ran and
re-ran a movie I'd made with NHL 2001 that starred me as the Pittsburgh Penguins.
The replay showed us putting a wicked back-check on Buffalo Sabres massive fancy pants
Michael Peca. Around the sixth time I'd showed Chet the film, right before the part
where Peca hits the ice face-first and I use a girly voice I can do to mimic Peca
screaming "Oh dear god my beautiful teeth!", I noticed something:
Look in the bottom left corner, do you see the portrait of Michael Peca to which I've
taken the liberty of adding the fake beauty mark I'm sure he wishes the National Hockey
League would let him wear? That's not what I noticed. Aim your eyes up about
an inch to where the yellow arrow is pointing. Notice anything terrifying here?
NHL 2001 is the first iteration of the series to include coaches, but that sure
doesn't look like Ivan Hlinka. Just to make sure I wasn't imagining things, I zoomed
the camera in on the bench:
Sweet mother of Miguel of Fat
Chicks In Party Hats, it's Michael Myers. Run French-Canadian Penguins goalie
Jean-Sebastien Aubin! Here's our new Survival Horror mascot, former Adventure Gaming
mascot Francis the Talking France wearing a neckerchief made out French Guiana:
|
|
| Advice For Gamers 2000-10-10 Erik | Thanks to my own personal problems for today's update. |
|
| Instead of just swearing all
the time, I want to offer some advice to our many young readers who have live-in
girlfriends or wives. Here's something I learned just today: If your lady
friend is already not happy about the fact that she has to go to her shitty job while you
get to stay home and play Heroes of Might and Magic, don't point this fact out to her when
she asks you what you're going to do today. Women have a way of sarcastically
calling you "Hero of Might and Magic" that not only strips the words of all
their mighty magical heroism but actually makes the phrase surprisingly emasculating.
Try to remember to never mention the game "Wing
Commander" to her either, because after calling you "Hero of Might and
Magic" she might dredge that phrase up from the place where she stores facts she
eventually wants to employ against you, and use it to punctuate a question about when
you're going to do the laundry. Again, trust me when I say that - coming out of her
mouth and applied to you - the name "Wing Commander" is going to seem much less
cool than it used to. If she says something like "Why do I have to do
everything? Why do I have to be the superintendent of the relationship?" don't
answer "Why do I have to be the super-NIN-tendent?"
If you do accidently say this, and she asks you what the hell you're talking about,
pretend you said "superintendent" again or just start immediately washing some
dishes. Don't, don't, don'tdon'tdon't remind her that you're the one who has to take
care of the Super Nintendo. I used Excel to make a chart that compares how clever
you think that is to how clever she'll think it is: 
The graph clearly shows that while I thought "super-nin-tendent" was about
1000 on the clever scale, she was hovering down there around zero. I tried to make
the chart go to less than zero to more accurately reflect the results of the experiment,
but I couldn't figure out how. |
|
| Mandatory Verant Interactive Story 2000-10-06 Staff | This is dedicated to whoever the first person was to not only fantasize about Mario fucking Luigi, not only actually write these fantasies down, but proudly publish the entire thing on the Internet where I might accidently find it while looking for naked pictures of Mario Lemieux. |
|
| Marvin and I were watching Red
Dawn the other night. I'd never seen it before, but about halfway through I had a
pretty terrifying insight. I paused the tape and turned to Marvin. "You
know," I said, "this could happen here!" "This is
happening here, you idiot," he told me and grabbed the remote back. I guess I
missed the scene in Red Dawn where they explain that. Still, just because it was
happening here doesn't mean it couldn't happen here. Just
yesterday, in fact, the virtua Chairman Maos over at Verant Interactive ordered their fascist thought
police to ban an Everquest customer simply for role playing too hard.
And by "thought police" I mean the friendly "serve and protect"
type of thought police, not the kind who'll shove an Orwellian nightstick up your brain's
thought-hole, because it turns out that Verant Interactive actually banned the person for
writing fan
fiction. Like the lovable buck-toothed moon-faced little virtua
Chairman Maos over at Verant, we have a zero tolerance fan fiction policy.
Fan fiction
is quite simply an embarrassment to anyone who's ever liked anything. We applaud the
Everquest staff for taking such a bold stance against it.
To put this in Red Dawn terms: If Russians parachuted into my backyard, I'd be
the guy waving around my ornate nickel-plated derringer and screaming "You can have
America when you pry it out from under me and Patrick Swayze's cold, dead feet!"
But if they explained that they were only here to exterminate the authors of fan fiction, I'd be
like "Here, you can borrow my pistol and if you need someone to help hang drywall for
your forced labor camps, I'm also available for that."
I know that a few of you will email me this classic bit of Nazi horror wisdom:
First they came for the authors of fan fiction, and I did not speak.
They came for the Jews, and I did not speak.
Then they came for the homosexuals, and I did not speak.
Finally, they came for me, and there was no one left to speak.
But the way we see it, we can safely sit out this round, jump in when
Verant comes after the Jews, and still have plenty of time to save ourselves. So
that's what we're going to do. Good hunting, Verant! You can thank us by doing
something about this
page of Manimal fan fiction. |
|
| Religious Games Turn Crowd Violent 2000-10-04 Chet | We all knew that with the release of Catechumen, religious violence would soon follow. |
|
Witnesses said a man wearing a Gore T-shirt turned from an
argument between supporters of Gore and Nader, grabbed a 3-foot wooden cross from a man
holding it and broke it over the man’s head. msnbc
|
I asked
the new pope about the violence and he answered me with this:
A man with one watch knows what time it is,
A man with two is never sure.
The riddle of a man with two hats is beyond you my son. |
When was the last time you heard about a guy in a T-shirt cracking another guy in
the head with a 3-foot wooden cross? We checked and we think the results say never.
Sure, there has been violence previously with a cross. There was the whole Jesus being
nailed to it - but that was a giant 12-foot tall cross. This incident involved one of the
new breeds of crosses - the kind of small crosses thugs like to pack. They keep them
concealed until trouble starts - and then wham! Arguments that used to be settled with
fists or spitting are now being solved by violent cross swinging.
So why the increase in "Guys in T-shirts cracking other guys in the head with 3-foot
wooden crosses" crimes? Is it the easy access to 3-foot wooden crosses?
That's the simple answer. Better yet, why not blame this young man's parents for not
locking up the cross? What about the cross makers themselves? Shouldn't this
man have learned in school that cracking another guy in the head with a 3-foot wooden
cross while wearing a T-shirt is bad?
The tougher questions come into play when we, as consumers, look at ourselves. What
kind of example are we setting when we buy mildly violent religious based video
games? What are we telling the kids? Until the release of Catechumen there had
never been one single reported case of a guy in a T-shirt cracking another guy in the head
with a 3-foot wooden cross.
We missed our chance to cut the whole gun violence thing off early, lets not miss our
opportunity here. Write to
your congressmen today and demand that they pass legislation that puts an end to these
violent cross related crimes! We must ban mildly violent religious video games.
The children are our future; we must save the children! |
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