Bikinis Turn on Boobs
In 2003 Tecmo, makers of such classics as Tecmo Super Baseball, Tecmo World Cup '90 and Tecmo World Cup '93 finally happened upon the mystical secret to turning their generic, poorly made sports games into generic, poorly made sports games that people would buy as if they were gigantic titty simulators. The secret, it turns out, was to add a gigantic titty simulator. And so Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball became a thing, years after the idiotic Xtreme Sportz fad even qualified as an old joke.
And that was that, bar the predictably obligatory Christian-panic-media-grab that always erupts whenever games notice that girls are shaped differently than guys and have to pee sitting down so that their girl-penises don't fall out. At least until years later when Tecmo, during a rare break between releasing samey sports games and jacking off to some of the unsexiest, terriblest porn ever conceived by man, noticed that the internet was a thing that allowed people to do things.
Warning: Contains no Volleyball. Only horror and boner repellant.
What had happened was this: someone that knew how to do things on computers noticed that those girls up there don't have a lot of clothes on. This led to a patch being made for the game that allowed those girls to be played with, get this, no clothes at all! It was such a shocking and unforeseen turn of events that it is a testament to Tecmo's fortitude that they aren't still, to this day, caught in a perpetual spit-take upon learning of this.
After mustering their legal department, amid many grumbled curses of "why the fuck didn't we think of that?" Tecmo filed a lawsuit against the administrators of Ninjahacker.net as well as starting a manhunt to round up all alleged offenders. Tecmo claimed that "On behalf of the game industry, the gamers and all future innovations in gaming, the protection of intellectual property is a serious issue that affects everyone in the game industry, and can no longer be ignored," and took it into their own sticky, sticky hands to do something about it. Since that quote from Tecmo's General Manager contained no emoticons to denote that he was being silly or sarcastic, I assume he thinks people were meant to take it seriously.
(As an aside, the domain ninjahacker.net is available and quite easily the best possible website name for organizing a silent army of mystery and nunchucks.)
There are several reasons that Tecmo is acting like an omnipotent internet troll here. And believe me, I know internet troll. Beyond the whole "modders gonna mod, hackers gonna hack" aspect, the whole thing is absolutely rancid with jealous hypocrisy. DoAXVB was very, very obviously attempting to pander to a certain demographic and also very, very obviously attempting to not appear to be pandering. What the ninjahacker patch did was give players what they wanted and made a very simple, valid point: "who gives a shit? Guys like boobs. We gave them boobs. Your behavior is only weird because you're hiding behind bullshit justifications and the pretense of morality."
There's nothing inherently wrong with pandering. Pandering works. You see it every day on your TV and hear it on the radio. Every internet or magazine ad, every commercial and film trailer panders. The patch only highlighted the fact that if Tecmo hadn't been trying to play the 'moral' card and included a nude option as a hidden code or something they may have retained some dignity. Since we already know they're a bunch of amoral sexual degenerates the press release of "We are shocked that something like this made it into the finished game," would come as a shock to no one.
Another reason Tecmo takes the gold for Tecmo Super Troll '05 is that they can't possibly have any idea how the internet, people, video games or titties work. If the link for the nude mod was downloaded once, then the odds are it's still on the internet. As soon as one male with an Xbox, an internet connection and a copy of DoAXVB got his hands on that file it turned into the demon from Fallen. If boobs in a video game are an option then there is no force on this earth short of global blackout that will keep that from happening. That Tecmo didn't realize this sooner and chalk it up as a loss shows that even people that specialize in software for decades can still be really fucking stupid about software.
There's nothing inherently wrong with pandering. Pandering works. You see it every day on your TV and hear it on the radio. Every internet or magazine ad, every commercial and film trailer panders. The patch only highlighted the fact that if Tecmo hadn't been trying to play the 'moral' card and included a nude option as a hidden code or something they may have retained some dignity. Since we already know they're a bunch of amoral sexual degenerates the press release of "We are shocked that something like this made it into the finished game," would come as a shock to no one.
Another reason Tecmo takes the gold for Tecmo Super Troll '05 is that they can't possibly have any idea how the internet, people, video games or titties work. If the link for the nude mod was downloaded once, then the odds are it's still on the internet. As soon as one male with an Xbox, an internet connection and a copy of DoAXVB got his hands on that file it turned into the demon from Fallen. If boobs in a video game are an option then there is no force on this earth short of global blackout that will keep that from happening. That Tecmo didn't realize this sooner and chalk it up as a loss shows that even people that specialize in software for decades can still be really fucking stupid about software.
Bethesda Sues Language
America has a rich and storied history of greedy idiots abusing the justice system until money pops out. A Google search of 'bullshit lawsuits' returns over four and a half million hits. To put that in perspective, a Google search of 'nobel prize recipients' returns only two million.
So it should come as no surprise that poorly executed RPG heavyweights Bethesda, makers of games like The Elder Scrolls: Still Haven't Fixed The Combat Engine and Fallout 3: We're Not Fooling Anybody, It's Just Re-Skinned Elder Scrolls, lost it's mind and started stomping on indie developers like they were fire ants. Fire ants that could release games that could be designed and released quickly and cheaply and weren't sub par experiments in poor Quality Assurance.
Seriously, how the fuck do you miss this?
One person was surprised, however. And that person was "Notch" Persson. For anyone that doesn't know who that is, Markus "Notch" Persson may just be the next Shigeru Miyamoto. For anyone that still doesn't know who that is, Shigeru Miyamoto invented, like, every video game ever made.
Bethesda's legal department sent a cease and desist letter to Mojang Specifications, the indie game development studio founded by Persson for their upcoming adventure/strategy game "Scrolls." The letter claimed that 'Scrolls' is a Bethesda trade mark, because, y'know, the Elder Scrolls series, and threatened to sue if Mojang proceeds under the name "Scrolls."
Anyone that has ever watched daytime public access television will recognize this lawsuit from The People's Court. Only in an odd twist, instead of the plaintiff being a deadbeat alcoholic parolee trying to hustle his former employer or landlord, it's an award winning, ground breaking AAA video game studio trying to hustle the Minecraft guy by claiming that every word in their trade mark can never be used in another trade mark.
Following Bethesda's flawgic we would all be living in a world where we were treated to previews of the action blockbuster "l;ajkscv888976" during the smash sitcom OIe/oY$DN9023hd8*k's commercial break.
The thing is, Notch, even though he's Swedish, is the American Dream. He had an idea for a game, sat down and designed and coded and tested and marketed and released it, and he won the goddamn lottery. Judging from the figures you, reader, either have Minecraft open in another window or are a liar. Bethesda, on the other hand, are a huge company owned by an even more huger company that makes even more more huger games that take dozens of employees and probably thousands of man-hours, and recently those games have invariably been game of the year or even game of the decade.
I don't believe that Bethesda believes that people could possibly mistake the almost impossibly mild-mannered Notch's harmless little clicky games with Bethesda's gargantuan sword and sorcery epics. I also don't think that anyone at Bethesda could possibly expect anyone to take this lawsuit seriously, including Bethesda. So I'm quickly running out of sane reasons why they would do this. The only real explanation left is that Bethesda is just trying to slow down the development of "Scrolls" so that it's release has minimal impact on the release of Elder Scrolls 5: Your Character Still Handles Like A Mannequin Possessed By A Drunk Ghost.
Since that's the only possible explanation left, that means Bethesda, like a true 'Merican, instead of calling up Persson and saying "Hey, our games are slated to come out at the same time and both have "Scrolls" in the title. You want to work something out so we both benefit?" you know, like a fucking reasonable human being, they decided to take the classy route and surprise Persson and the eight other employees of Mojang with a lame duck lawsuit designed to do nothing beyond pushing Mojang's development cycle back and wasting everybody's goddamn time reporting about it in their dumbass blog.
Now that that's all settled, I'm off to go trademark the name "Mothmantis," so that I can sue the shit out of anyone that tries to trademark something with the letter "M" in it and never have to work again.
Bethesda's legal department sent a cease and desist letter to Mojang Specifications, the indie game development studio founded by Persson for their upcoming adventure/strategy game "Scrolls." The letter claimed that 'Scrolls' is a Bethesda trade mark, because, y'know, the Elder Scrolls series, and threatened to sue if Mojang proceeds under the name "Scrolls."
Anyone that has ever watched daytime public access television will recognize this lawsuit from The People's Court. Only in an odd twist, instead of the plaintiff being a deadbeat alcoholic parolee trying to hustle his former employer or landlord, it's an award winning, ground breaking AAA video game studio trying to hustle the Minecraft guy by claiming that every word in their trade mark can never be used in another trade mark.
Following Bethesda's flawgic we would all be living in a world where we were treated to previews of the action blockbuster "l;ajkscv888976" during the smash sitcom OIe/oY$DN9023hd8*k's commercial break.
The thing is, Notch, even though he's Swedish, is the American Dream. He had an idea for a game, sat down and designed and coded and tested and marketed and released it, and he won the goddamn lottery. Judging from the figures you, reader, either have Minecraft open in another window or are a liar. Bethesda, on the other hand, are a huge company owned by an even more huger company that makes even more more huger games that take dozens of employees and probably thousands of man-hours, and recently those games have invariably been game of the year or even game of the decade.
I don't believe that Bethesda believes that people could possibly mistake the almost impossibly mild-mannered Notch's harmless little clicky games with Bethesda's gargantuan sword and sorcery epics. I also don't think that anyone at Bethesda could possibly expect anyone to take this lawsuit seriously, including Bethesda. So I'm quickly running out of sane reasons why they would do this. The only real explanation left is that Bethesda is just trying to slow down the development of "Scrolls" so that it's release has minimal impact on the release of Elder Scrolls 5: Your Character Still Handles Like A Mannequin Possessed By A Drunk Ghost.
Since that's the only possible explanation left, that means Bethesda, like a true 'Merican, instead of calling up Persson and saying "Hey, our games are slated to come out at the same time and both have "Scrolls" in the title. You want to work something out so we both benefit?" you know, like a fucking reasonable human being, they decided to take the classy route and surprise Persson and the eight other employees of Mojang with a lame duck lawsuit designed to do nothing beyond pushing Mojang's development cycle back and wasting everybody's goddamn time reporting about it in their dumbass blog.
Now that that's all settled, I'm off to go trademark the name "Mothmantis," so that I can sue the shit out of anyone that tries to trademark something with the letter "M" in it and never have to work again.
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