When Marios Attack! (part 2)

Last time on When Marios Attack, Alicia revealed that Alex was secretly her brother the whole time, and not her son as everyone suspected. Governor Flamberge announced his retirement from illegal pit fighting, and Crystal was caught using Kristal's razor, to the delight and "OH NO SHE DI-INT!!!" of all involved. This week...

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.

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.

When Marios Attack! (part 1)

I really, really, really love video games. I want to make that clear. I beat Dragon Warrior on the NES before I could tie my shoelaces. I've read Splatterhouse fan-fiction on purpose. I played Evil Dead: Hail to the King until my eyes wouldn't work, and that game was legally classified as a hate crime against nerds. I neglected to pay my electric bill so I could buy X-Men: Legends II: The Rise of Apocalypse on release day. I was one of the guys spamming Namco-Bandai for years for not localizing more "Tales of" games as well as Square-Enix for not making another Chrono game and I don't even really like the Chrono games!

The point of me outing myself as a comical nerd stereotype is to make this point: video game fanatics and video game companies have a very unhealthy dynamic. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, it's just something that developed when a demographic composed mostly of socially backward and entitled man-children become dependent on distant, inhuman corporations that specialize in ninja simulators.

I say there's nothing wrong with this, and there isn't, until the faceless corporations decide to engage in role reversal therapy without telling the hapless man-children. That is the point where the dynamic becomes what I like to call Fucking Lunacy.  See, the giant software companies that make video games have things like lawyers and PR departments and checking accounts and working knowledge of copyright laws and ties that don't clip on and other things that Average Joe Gimme FFVII Remake just doesn't have access to. When these companies turn the tables on the customer it's like watching Cujo attack a Yorkie.

Playstation Sues Goofy White Kid


If anyone doesn't know about the Playstation 3/Geohot/failoverflow jailbreak fiasco, allow me to give a brief summary. Sony is one of the largest and most powerful electronics/software companies on the planet, and they did it even though they repeatedly treat their customer base as an unwelcome burden. Despite a history of being shitheads about property rights, when a customer tinkered with a product they sold to him, they had no qualms about attacking him with their lawyers.

The thing about hackers is that they enjoy hacking. It's like a drug to them. Bragging about having great security, for hackers, is like offering an alcoholic single malt scotch. Or whatever classy drinkers like. Probably not Steel Reserve and mouthwash. My point is, is that Sony is not nearly as good at computers as they think they are. Even if they were, it's a universal law that no matter how good you are at something, there will always, always, always be someone better at it. So when a hacker called GeoHot (hackers are required by Space Law to have terrible nicknames,) cracked the Playstation 3's security Sony flipped the fuck out and threw every weapon they had at him. And the important thing to remember about GeoHot is that he isn't some maniacal evil scientist hiding in an evil computer lair in Siberia. He's a white kid, probably from the suburbs, that makes terrible rap videos while sitting at his computer. GeoHot is this guy:

Fucking this guy!

  That guy is every goddamn kid in America. Now, I'm not pro-piracy or pro-jailbreaking (assuming you mean actual pirates and jails and not just bullshit buzzwords that have nothing to do with high seas adventures or daring escapes from incarceration,) but I goddamn definitely am pro-not-criminalizing-your-target-demographic and pro-property-rights.


The result of this abuse of the American Justice System is that at best, it stopped a few pirates from playing copied games (even though they'll just look elsewhere to enjoy their booty or make engineers walk the plank or fire their cannons at electronics stores, or whatever fake pirates do,) while Sony looks like a towering, black skyscraper made out of dick and pettiness that sues its own customers, and at worst, this case is the beginning of an assault on customers' privacy and ownership rights that, having been exploited once, will now be the go-to for every corporation looking to squeeze a few more pennies out of their customers spleens.

World of Warcraft Sues Autopilot 

I've already spent many hours explaining my distaste for MMO games, and, honestly, making jokes about WoW nerds is like going for the low-hanging fruit at this point. It's less hard than joking about Charlie Sheen's hilarious death-spiral or Nickleback's lack of musical ability.


So I don't really know what WoW is beyond some kind of elf-themed fantasy fulfillment for lonely nerds with disposable income and maybe Blizzard is a righteous bastion of righteousness for suing MDY Industries for releasing Glider. By the way, Glider, as near as I can tell, is an autopilot for Warcraft characters, allowing them to autolevel, which breaks some kind of taboo in the World of Warcraft.


Here's why suing the company that developed the program is a fucking retarded idea. 1. WoW costs money to play. That's the reason Blizzard executives all drive platinum coated SUVs made entirely out of panda. 2. Paying a company for time, and giving the time to a robot to use for you is a fucking stupid-ass waste of time, money and robot. 3. Auto-power-leveling can only be used for (I imagine,) a couple of things, either to skip the early BS levels for someone on their 4th playthrough, to beat up on low level players, or some third thing I'm unaware of because I don't play shit like World of Warcraft.


If someone just wants to level up to the point where they can breeze through the early game it really doesn't effect anyone but the player doing it. Yeah, Blizzard may lose a few payments when players burn out marginally quicker, but c'mon, WoW is a relic. The sooner people stop paying for it the sooner Blizzard will start on making a sequel.  

If players are using Glider as a bullying-enabler then there's only so much that can be done about that. For most people that kind of behavior would lose it's charm after about twice. If someone makes a second career out of it then banning them from the servers for using a bot would only hasten their transition into the inevitable headline "Cheetoh Encrusted Cubicle Worker Shoots Fucking Everybody!" Since every minute that person spends in an imaginary world as an imaginary barbarian beating up on weaker imaginary barbarians and imagining the imaginary tears he's causing at the other end of an internet connection is one minute closer to the moment someone notices that something is seriously fucking wrong with this person, calls the police and averts the rampage.  Do you want that on your conscience, Blizzard?


Finally, the thing about these kinds of programs is that they're like crackhouses. Close one down and another one pops up across the street. There are a fucking lot of people that like modding games, and even more that like playing modded games. If you want an exact figure, it's (C2)H3/.5S, where C=the number of crackheads in America, H=the number of crackhouses and S=the current supply of crack. I'm not sure where prostitution or trafficking or crooked cops figures into the equation. Gamestop, somehow, probably. I'm going to abandon this analogy now. 

Modders love modding. And if someone is willing to do it for money, then it's only a matter of time before someone else does it for free. If Blizzard does take down the paid plugin there will probably be a freeware version available before they even have time to pop the corks on their champagne bottles, proving once again how absolutely and totally futile it is to try to legislate things like thought, information and nerds' desire to do nerd shit like build plugins for games they love, despite the company that produces those games hating their customers.


(Next Time: Dr. Chalmers has a secret that will take your breath away! Is Kate really who she appears to be? These and more questions answered!)