GameStop Robber Calls for Madden by Name
A confused man with a handgun walked into a GameStop last week, mistaking the game retailer for a nearby liquor store. The robbery went on while the man made demands for liquor and cash before realizing the mistake.
“I recognized that he was disturbed when he started digging through our $49.99 bargain bin to look for something,” said a GameStop employee. “He went from rack to rack muttering something, when he couldn’t find what he was looking for the robber pointed his gun at me and demanded a copy of Madden ’09. This was confusing, since Madden 2010 is out now but we humored him anyway and gave him a refurbished copy of the game, which we bought for five dollars.”
Luckily, the only casualty in the robbery was the GameStop manager who was shot in the head six times after he made several suggestions to buy a strategy guide to go with the man’s purchases.
Kurt Cobain Resurrected for Guitar Hero 5
Activision may be losing ground against Rock Band in the war of the rhythm game franchises, but that doesn’t mean they’re not ready to go the extra mile to grab the attention of would-be customers. So, when Activision announced they would be exhuming Kurt Cobain’s corpse from its not-so-final resting place to record 10 new tracks for Guitar Hero 5, gamers barely batted an eye.
“Technology has come a long way since our first attempts to resurrect John Travolta. CGI and robotic technology have really advanced exponentially since that ghastly mistake. We’ve made a lot of improvements to the AI programming,one of which will correct a fatal flaw that interpreted the dance command as ‘join weird religious cults’,” said a lead scientist on Activision’s special research team. “This generation of operating systems gives us complete control, not only of the body but also creative control over the music the robotic analog makes. This allows us to continue to make hit songs, even on those days it’s programmed to act like it’s done too much heroin.”
Fans of both Guitar Hero and Zombie Cobain have warmed up to the idea but skeptics are worried that this may be the first step of the impending robotic zombie uprising.
UN Committee Asks Japan to Ban Rape Games
The UN Woman’s Rights Committee, having nothing better to do with its afternoon, has turned its attention to Japanese games featuring violent acts against women. The committee is asking for a ban of all materials that normalize sexual violence against women in Japan’s adult game market.
But Japanese adult game developers have called the UN’s involvement in the process “censorship,” citing that Japan has a culture of emotional suppression, thus leading to more people that need an outlet to relax, which in this case is stalking, raping, and sexually molesting women and young girls.
The UN request comes after recent pressure from foreign governments to have Japan take steps to more effectively regulate games containing sexual violence. One law that was recently passed by the Japanese government forces adult game developers to change all female characters in their games to a cute penguin named Sobbu, though it is still unclear as to whether this will just cause an entirely new set of problems. The UN committee feels that these steps still don’t go far enough and suggests that anyone who disagrees with its opinion may be a rapist.
Sony: No Features Is Good for PSPGo Consumers
Sony says that its new handheld gaming experience, the PSPGo, will be as intuitive and accessible as possible. To that end, Sony has been working on ways to bring the customers more, with less.
“The Go is the pinnacle of Sony Engineering. It’s true we’ve changed a lot of features. There’s a smaller screen, the UMD is gone and now we’ve turned to that bastion of reliability and customer convenience, the internet, to deliver your games directly to the portable gaming system,” said Kenji Miromata, a designer at Sony’s development team in Japan.
“But there’s a lot more too; we’ve added a lot of useful features like DRM that will make it harder for hackers to pirate games, and a non-removable battery that is 100% hacker proof unless they the somehow acquire screwdrivers, but we don’t think that’s likely. We see this iteration of the PSP as a step forward in bringing consumers exactly what they want, a PSP that has fewer features and more ways to protect Sony’s profit margin.”
However, not everyone is content with all these new features. Several protesters mistakenly showed up outside Sony’s headquarters in California to protest the lack of backwards compatibility with newer models of the PS3, only to find they were sorely out of touch with the current trends in Sony-related ire.
Teen With Uncanny Googling Abilities Beats Game Site to News
Lucy Lawless may not care, but the teen that made the forum post regarding the new Xena: Warrior Princess game is up in arms about what he is calling “a case of gross plagiarism.” The accusations came after the popular gaming website posted a news article nearly five minutes after his original post in the site’s forums.
“I was browsing through my RSS feeds and noticed that one of my favorite websites didn’t have the Xena story yet. That’s when I decided that people needed to know! It was going well for a few minutes, but then I noticed the website had also posted the same story. So, wanting to protect my 83 character masterpiece, I made a belligerent post in their ‘official’ news story letting them know the news was old and that it had been posted it in the forums already. I haven’t heard back from them yet, but I expect an apology any minute now. If they don’t, I am considering legal action. Hey, do you know any pro-bono internet lawyers?”
Guerrilla news reporting is gaining popularity with anonymous douchebags all over the internet. The unique style of news and opinion frees users from the restrictive hassle of fact verification, research or integrity of any sort.
