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Bill Gates Doom video found!

Ever since I read Masters of Doom, I’ve longed to see the video of BIll Gates inside of Doom, dressed in a black trenchcoat and holding a shotgun. The video was made for a special Microsoft event where they were hyping Windows95 games and was yanked by Microsoft as soon as they saw it. Apparently , they hadn’t seen it and were so shocked by the video they never let it see the light of day again. …untill now!

Slashdot has a story, “Bill Gates’ Doom Video From 1995,” that links to Reel Splatter who has the infamous Bill Gates Doom Video! After all this time, it is kind of tame, but it is still awesome to finally see this.

Fun and games with ads?

After talking about the biased coverage of the Strickland vs. Sony case, and Jack Thompson’s role in it, I noticed the ads that Google had put at the top of that post. Oddly enough, they were about class action law suits, and Vioxx lawsuits. This caused me to begin thinking of the ways you could play around with the content of a post to see what type of ads would appear on the page. Would that be a game? Or would it be play?

I know that there are lots of spam blogs out there that are just about getting Google rank and linking to other spam blogs. I also know that there are allegedly some people out there that have started blogs about asbestos and mesothelioma just because the payoff on ads relating to asbestos and mesothelioma are supposed to be incredibly high. So just by mentioning asbestos or mentioning mesothelioma am I trying to force the ads to display things related to that? Is it cheating to just talk about mesothelioma or asbestos just so those terms show up? I know Google probably has some filters to make sure that people don’t just “game” the system so that they get ads that pay the best, so is that Google playing the game as well?

What about asking my readers to click on the ads? I’ve heard of people making lots of money off the ads, but I’ve had those ads up there for a year and have only made a little over $35. Of course you only get paid when you earn over a hundred dollars. Of course if people were to start clicking on the ads more frequently, if because I were to make a pointless post about asbestos and mesothelioma, would that be cheating?

Of course, it could also be that I’m playing more than one game at a time. One with Google, and one with my readers? They could play their own game back, I suppose…

That Damned Biased Mainstream Media!!!

I guess those who complain about how biased the media is might have a point. The big news in videogames is, of course, the Jack Thompson Grand Theft Auto is a Murder Simulator, Devin Moore Video Game Violence Made Me Do It Case of Strickland vs. Sony. I’ve already covered 60 Minutes‘s horrible story about the case. In that story, I noted that Ed Bradley hadn’t even bothered to put Thompson’s name into google to find out about Thompson’s “colorful” history. Now, we have an even more egregious example of the portrayal of videogames in media.

Game Politics has been doing a great job of covering the case and they link to Tuscaloosa News who has two articles covering the case, “Attorney is subject in ‘video game’ case” and “Lawyer pushes to have standing in video game lawsuit” (stupid registration required, unless you head over to BugMeNot). The second story also links to a short videoclip of a local televison channel’s coverage, which they call, “Lawsuit Against Video Game Makers Continuing In Fayette.” All of these stories are mainly concerned with what is currently going on in the lawsuit, which is a challenge over Thompson’s ability to try the case. He is a member of the Florida Bar, and since the trial is taking place in Alabama, he has to get special permission to try the case there. So because of his numerous inflammatory press releases and hijinx with Penny Arcade, the defense is trying to get him removed from his case.

The story has been picked up by the Associated Press and is called, “Judge Asked to Dismiss Video Game Civil Suit and is said to be based on “information from: The Tuscaloosa News.” The funny thing is, nowhere in the AP story is it mentioned that the case is currently centered on Thompson himself. Oddly, the AP story does include an anti-videogame quote from Thompson.

Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be that big of a deal. The AP edits down stories all the time. In this case, however, the AP has completely changed the message of the story, distorting it so that they are only concerned with the dismissal of the case, and not the question of Thompson, himself. Someone said, “No, we don’t care that this guy is being accused of being sensationalist and unfit to be involved in this case, we just want to get a quote:

“These Grand Theft Auto games are unique,” lawyer Jack Thompson of Miami argued on behalf of the victims’ families. “They are murder simulators. The only thought they convey is how to murder people and how to enjoy killing.”

So now I ask you, if videogames can’t even be fairly represented in a story that was originally about how a guy is sensationalistically misrepresenting videogames, then what hope is there?

If you didn’t like the Doom movie, then you are no friend of mine!

I saw the Doom movie this afternoon and I have to give it seven thumbs up. Lots of shooting and very little plot — just the way I like it. It was the best movie I’ve seen today and the best videogame movie ever. The only flaw was that they had Eomer beat the Rock. Yeah, as if!

From a scholarly point of view, the most interesting thing about the film was the closing credits. For the unfortunate few who have not yet seen the film yet, during the first part of the end credits they show a FPS-style clip where a gun runs around shooting the credits. What made it so interesting was that the graphics of the clip were of very low quality. It was some sort of psuedo-wireframe animation that almost looked like the Doom 3 game without the textures. I found it very interesting that in order to have the end credits “look like a game” they had to make the graphics look significantly worse than the graphics of the actual game. Presumably, if they had just done some sort of machinima with the Doom 3 engine, it wouldn’t have had the “look” they wanted. The graphics of the game seemingly didn’t match the conception of what the filmmakers thought a game should look like.

Another feature of the film of interest (but of less interest to me since I heard about it going in) was the first-person sequence. It was a neat gimmic, but I kept wondering of the logic of it. Why were we seeing things form his point of view? Why did we stop seeing things from that perspective? There also seemed to be a couple times when there seemed to be cuts in the shot, so that it wasn’t all in one take, which distracted from the gimmic for me.

Anyway, the film is plain mindless fun. You do like things that are fun, don’t you?

Very Interesting Jack Thompson Video…

I went to yahoo’s video search and did a search for “Jack Thomson” and came across a video of good old Jack talking about Janet Reno. The page with embedded video (which starts as soon as you go there) is called, “Jack Thompson Exposes Reno at [IBT] Indianapolis Baptist Temple.” There is another page that just has the links to the videos. It is over an hour long, and I only watched part four, but it is quite and insight into how Jack Thompson thinks. In just that part he calls Janet Reno, Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt lesbians, Says that the Clinton administration was a bunch of witches and that if Janet Reno isn’t the antichrist, she is close to it. Now, I’m no expert on Janet Reno, and I didn’t vote for Clinton (I didn’t vote for Bush either, but I did vote!), but those are some extraordinary claims.

The videos are hosted on the American Patriot Friends Network website and while there’s no evidence that Thompson endorses or ever had anything to do with that site, it is a very interesting site. If you look around, you can find out the “truth” about the World Trade Center and 9/11, AIDS is a manufactured virus, and that the United States is secretly still a British colony…

Again, I have no evidence that Jack Thompson has anything to do with this website. However, it is interesting to know that Jack’s talk about Janet Reno was given at the Indianapolis Baptist Temple. I’d never heard of the place, so I did a search for Indianapolis Baptist Temple and it seems like the temple has a pretty colorful history of its own.

So I wasn’t far off on my guess of what Jack Thompson would say to the Florida Bar Association…

Yesterday, I posted that lots of people from Penny Arcade have been complaining to the Florida Bar about Jack Thompson and I jokingly predicted that he would respond to them in the same way he responds to gamers who contact him: with threats. I never imagined that he really would do such a thing. Well, guess what? He did!
In a message posted on gamespot, Jack Thompson addresses the Florida Bar. The message ends:

Now, let me be clear. Any Bar complaint coming from these morons arising out of the above incident is baseless and itself constitutes a violation of a specific federal civil rights statute.
If The Bar proceeds with any of these, it does so at its own peril. The Bar paid me once. I am certainly willing for it to pay me again, along with others.
Regards, Jack Thompson

Now, I’m not a lawyer, but I can only assume that attempting to intimidate the Bar Association can’t be a good career move.
The Advanced Media Network has some slightly different quotes, one of which states,

If America’s law enforcement officials allow pimple-faced geeks who use death threats to drive people of faith and with values from the public square, this country will not long endure.

I’m not sure why the two sites have slightly different letters from Thompson, unless he sent out two versions. However, it is interesting that he implies that not only are the people who oppose him “pimple-faced geeks” (but if they are pimple-faced, then aren’t they teens and therefore not to blame for their actions because of playing so many murder simulators??), but he also implies that they are people without faith or values. Now it goes without saying that Jack Thompson thinks people who play videogames are without values, but now they are without faith? Too bad there isn’t some sort of Christian Game Developers Conference, or that Christians can’t use Halo to witness to gamers…

It is also worth noting that Jack has updated his website, StopKill.com with lots more of his propaganda. I recommend reading it to see where this guy is coming from and the numerous inaccurate statements he makes.

I can’t open my browser without hitting a Jack Thompson story

Man, everyone has jumped on the Jack Thompson bandwagon, haven’t they? I wonder if this is the new All Your Base? Of course there’s the whole deal with Penny Arcade. While I like Penny Arcade a lot, I read it every day — yes I know that they only update 3 days a week, but that’s how much I like it! ,, however, you don’t mess with Penny Arcade! Hell, I’ve probably just unleashed a hoard of rabid fanboys by just linking to them!

So now, it seems that the people on the Penny Arcade forum have pestered the Florida State Bar Association and now poor old Jack is under investigation…

If he gets a letter of reprimand, his response will be something like this: “dear idiot: you initially contacted me. stop, or else. got it?

Jack Thompson, author

Jack Thompson, noted videogame hating, pithy email writing attorney has a book coming out. The title of the book is Out of Harm’s Way. The first chapter is available as a pdf and it seems to be an autobiography. Most of the first chapter is devoted to his conversion to Christianity. The odd part, however, is the the first before you get to that, Thompson has written a page and a half about Howard Stern, once saying that, “His new name should be Coward Stern.” Then we get three pages about an early encounter he had with Janet Reno (who Thompson once claimed was a closeted lesbian and would be unfit to be elected because someone might try to blackmail her about her sexuality… Except the fact that we know about this alleged incident seems to imply that it would be hard to blackmail her because Thompson already “outed” her…).

All in all name calling and offering a very unflattering portrayal of someone don’t seem very Christian to me…

Regardless, it once again raises an interesting dilemma. I really really want to read this book, but I also really really don’t want to give Thompson any of my money. Which will win out, my morbid curiousity or my morality? I guess time will tell once it comes out at the end of the year.

I get sent stuff for free!

Well, all my time spent watching Kathy Griffin beg for free stuff on her reality show is paying off. I got an email the other day from the developer of Professor Fizzwizzle and a link to download the whole game for free. If it wasn’t a good game, I would just ignore it and not mention it. However, Professor Fizzwizzle is pretty darn awesome.

It is a pretty straight-forward puzzle game where you control the Prof. who has to push boxes, roll barrels, use magnets, and other devices so that he can get from one teleporter to the other. The settup is that the good Prof made some robots but accidentally turned the switch to evil, so occasionally the evil robots show up to chse around Fizzwizzle while he tries to get through the level.

The game is really well made. I’m currently obsessed with the windows version but there are also versions for mac and linux. The “story” doesn’t get in the way and, like many of my favorite games, is really just a pretense for the action. The game starts off easy (incredibly so, actually!) and eventually gets pretty darn hard. However, if you get stumped, there is a neat solution feature which actually plays through the level for you but can be stopped at any time so you can take over if you figure it out once the game starts it for you.

So go buy Professor Fizzwizzle! …and maybe that way I’ll get more free stuff!!!