Sony threw a party with a dead goat, you may have heard. Anyways, as the source of the ALARM was the less-than-credible Daily Mail (or to be precise it’s Sunday edition the “Mail on Sunday”), we figured it was best to get both sides of the story before beheading Sony’s PR and feasting on their insides. SCEE just got back to us, and (in summary) had this to say:

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It looks like Sam is going fugitive once more. GamersReports uncovered some details on Splinter Cell: Conviction in magazine Magaza Pelaaja:

The game takes place in broad daylight this time, but don’t worry, it is still a stealth action game. At the beginning of the game, Sam learns that Anna Grimsdottir (Anna is the person in charge of intelligence gathering for Third Echelon, and an old friend of Sam’s) is in danger so Sam joins up with Third Echelon once more in order to help. Unfortunately, 3E is not what it used to be, and Sam frequently gets incomplete and bad intel, as well as the wrong equipment. All this, and the 3E bosses are in the middle of a political squabble for control. Sam eventually finds out that the threat is actually coming from inside Third Echelon itself, so he leaves and basically becomes a fuigitive. Looks like Sam is on the wrong side of the law once more, this time for real.

Via Kotaku.com

Enough and more has been said about Jack Thompson and how he is wangling his way onto public television by giving people fodder on videogames and how they’re supposedly to blame for all the violence that happens in the world. But still, when you are an attorney, you don’t really expect that someone would go on television without any facts backing him up and blabber anything and everything that pops into his head.

Yet, that’s exactly what’s happened. Jerkwad Jack went on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews to talk about how the VATech massacre is all the fault of Counter-Strike, but one thing he wasn’t expecting was getting his ass kicked all over the place and being made a complete idiot on national TV! While Jack claims over 80% of the male population at VATech plays computer games, Chris refutes him by saying how the students are actually into healthy sports like basketball and that there’s no evidence of a violent videogame subculture on campus. However, when Jack drags Counter-Strike into the mix and how it helps prepare mass murderers for their massacre by “training” them to keep them heartrate down and stay calm, he gets more than he bargained for, which was a couple of soundbites that he could paste all over his website. Chris, armed with real evidence, brains and a sharp tongue takes the “School Shooting Expert” to task, claiming instead that Cho was actually working on his English essays instead of playing the “murder simulator” on his PC and how Jack was making stuff up and forcing his theories on the masses without proof. Basically, Jack goes down the toilet the moment he opens his mouth, continuously blithering on about the FBI, the Secret Service and about “hyper-reality situations in virtual reality”, whatever that means.

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It took the police almost a full 24 hours to ID the Virginia Tech shooter, but all it took was a couple of hours for “School Shooting Expert” and crackpot ambulance chaser-cum-attorney Jack Thompson to get himself an audience with the nation on Fox, citing videogames as a cause for such violent events. As if post-9/11 terrorism and and radical fundamentalism wasn’t getting enough attention in the ratings-hungry world of modern day media, such comments on major news channels just serve to add fuel to the fire, with one news channel’s opinion being paraded around as hard facts on another.

With the unholy politico-legal-media complex driving American society in general, it is not unusual for major news channels and obviously biased TV anchors to run with the story, callously ignoring the sentiments and the anguish of the people who had suffered the real loss in such a tragedy in return for some snappy soundbites. So who cares if the story is cooked up by an attention whore? No one cares about the ethics of journalism and how the media actually has to serve a purpose beyond furthering its monetary interests. How is it that we let people like Jack Thompson and Dr. Phil McGraw get away by touting opinion as fact whereas I can’t walk into a crowded theater and yell “There’s a bomb in here!” How is it different? In both cases, isn’t a lie being perpetuated by people who have absolutely no right to do what they are doing? But no, they praise such people and call them “experts” despite the fact that the lawyers and psychotherapists have little to no real world experience on the things they claim to be experts on, even as they desperately try to make people believe that breast implants and cellphones cause cancer or in this case, how videogames turn people violent. Hit up the jump to read more on this…

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If there’s one thing that the Metal Gear Solid games have taught me, it’s how even master spies have to debase themselves to hiding under cardboard boxes to get the job done. It might look rip-roaringly hilarious to watch Solid Snake duck under a cardboard box and move around comically, but we don’t see the dead guys laughing about it now, do we? But who cares about those jerks anyway? They got what’s coming to them.

And if you want what’s coming to you, then take a gander at this. Kotaku has picked up on one of the funniest papercrafts ever seen - you guessed it, Solid Snake sneaking under a “The Orange” cardboard box. (As if you couldn’t tell from the picture) If you’ve always wanted something cool to put on top of your PC or your favorite gaming console, then this might just be it. Extremely simple to put together, all you need to do is download and extract the files, print them out, cut them and glue them together like the instructions tell you to do and you’re all set to have Solidus Snakius take on your Wobble Bobble Hulk! Yes, they do come alive when you sleep and start fighting with each other, in case you were still wondering.

via [Kotaku]
Download the Papercraft files >>

What is it with the Japanese and big boobs? With sexual habits that involve older women, lots of physical abuse and tons of mucho-weird tentacles, it is not unusual that almost every notable female figure from almost every media gets a ginormous boob job and is forced to participate in wanton acts of carnality.

And, of course, considering the Japanese near-mania state of obsession with the Fainaru Fantajī games, it’s inevitable that all the hot and cute (and seemingly underage, I might add) would undergo this sexual morphism as well, just to cater to the perverts in all of us. And it looks like the latest Final Fantasy girl to sit down and polish someone’s blade is none other than FF VII, umm, heart-throb, Tifa Lockheart.

Akibablog, in all their sexed-up wanderings, spotted this nice hentai comic of Tifa where she drops her entire inventory to take on two students(?) in what is described to be a teacher-rape fantasy experiment that goes on for all of 52 pages! Obviously, thousands of sex-starved otakus are probably lining up to take this home to their hump-pillows and not see the light of day for the next three weeks. Wonder what Square Enix has to say about all of this. Just as long as their own employees don’t take this to work or worse, design their own hentai based on the ultra-gorgeous CG Tifa from Advent Children. We wonder if we’d find any reasonably cute Tifa cosplayer here…

Read the Akibablog article on the comic >>
(Warning! EXPLICIT IMAGES! Not suitable for work!)

Edit: It looks like the guys at Kotaku actually understood all that Japanese and got through to what the article really was. Check out their impressions here.

I’m not a lucky man. Me and Lady Luck have never been on speaking terms ever since I discovered that the best prize I could grab for free is a couple of birth control pills. I’ve struck out everywhere there was something cool being given away, watching the materialistic object of my fantasies get whisked away by someone who couldn’t even figure out the packaging if it didn’t have a huge “THIS SIDE UP” printed on it. And what’s worse is the amount of time, money and I’ve wasted at arcade prize-grabbing games, you know, the one where you try to grab freebies with a crane or hit the button at the right time to stop something moving fast so you can get some goodies? It obviously doesn’t help your chances of getting some if you spend 200 bucks on one of these games and can’t even win the hopelessly patient girlfriend standing next to you a little plush toy.

Understandably, I’ve been ripping mad ever since a couple of guys started YouTubing about the kind of things they win from these frustratingly rigged contraptazoinks. And if that wasn’t enough, there are sites like Kotaku that give away custom laser-etched PS3s and tons of next-generation schwag to people who have to do little more than scour their community rants for answers to silly little questions. Jeez, and I had to PAY $778 to get my Xbox 360, whereas some gangly teen with a pocketful of change and virtually no life walks away with cool loot that will probably end up on eBay the very same night. Why doesn’t someone have mercy on poor souls like me and toss a couple of bones this old dog’s way? At this point, I just feel like Amy Wong at the Moon Amusement Park’s UFO Catcher machine - azhennihaodasene! Q@^%#$*