Answer this question honestly – do you read the small print when you buy games on the internet?
High Street retailing giant GameStation decided to put this to the test and inserted a new clause into their terms and conditions earlier this month that granted them legal rights to the immortal souls of thousands of their online customers. Here, in darkest legalese, is how they got away with such a heinous act: "By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamestation.co.uk or one of its duly authorised minions."
GameStation’s fiendish clause specified that they might serve such notice in “six foot-high letters of fire” too, but also offered customers an option to opt out, rewarding them with a £5 money-off voucher if they did so. Alas, hardly anyone noticed the clause, let alone the substantial bonus for spotting the gag. More to the point, the fact that it passed more or less unnoticed raises an important issue – too few people actually read the small print when they make online purchases.
According to GameStation, around 7,500 customers carelessly signed their souls away on the day. Were you one of them...?
Finally got to play RE5 this week. My mate Stuey brought his shiny PS3 around, and we played this lastest version of my favourite game for 3 days until we finished lol
And what a game!! It looks AMAZING in High Def on my nice 42" HD TV lol, and is as scary as it always was.
Not much more to say other than *in creepy deep voice* "YOU DIED"
This weeks edition of Strange World is from our friends in Japan.
A Japanese woman has been arrested after she allegedly killed her virtual husband in an online game.
The 43 year old was apparently furious at finding herself suddenly divorced in the game Maplestory, reports the BBC.
Police say she illegally accessed login details of the man playing her virtual husband, and killed off his character.
The woman, a piano teacher, is in jail in Sapporo waiting to learn if she faces charges of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating data.
She was taken to Sapporo - where her "husband", a 33-year-old office worker lives - from her home in Miyazaki 620 miles away. If charged with the offences, and convicted, she faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $5,000.
A Sapporo police official said the woman had used the man's ID and password to log into the game last May to carry out the virtual murder.
"I was suddenly divorced, without a word of warning. That made me so angry," she was quoted by the official as telling investigators.
I am actually a HUGE fan of RE the video game. It was genre breaking when it first appeared in the mid 90's, and I spent many an hour scaring myself witless playing it with my mate Stu. It spawned a series of movies, which although aren't classic, have a B-movie charm that I enjoy, as I am a sucker for Zombie movies.
Some clever soul has made 3 minute condensed version of the plots. Its a scream! lol
You may remember the famous X-Box advert where a baby was born, flies through the air while aging, then crashes into a grave as an old man. Life's too short, play more!
I came across a couple of others that I hadn't seen before on Youtube. The first one was banned apparently. I can see why they banned it, but it just made me laugh.
Pretty clever anyway, but possibly not for the easily offended! lol
I don't play many computer games. I did once, though. We forget that the computer game industry is now in its 2nd generation. There are people in their 40's who played computer games. Their children play computer games. My mothers assertions that only children play games is totally wrong now. Sucessful, professional people come home from the City and switch on their X Box for a few hours. Its now a normal pass time.
I played many games in the 80's as a kid. Down the local arcades playing PacMan, Street Fighter, Mortal Combat, Bubble Bobble, and of course, the legend that is Mario Brothers! I could get further than nearly anyone on Mario, and was the un-disputed champion of Bubble Bobble. I had minor celebrity down the local arcades for a time. :)
In the 80's when you qualified for a top score you were only given three letters. I got bored with my initials MWW. Other people were known by their playing "handles" and I wanted one of my own. So I shortened my surname Walker to WAK and thus my nickname was born. In the end I ended up being only known as WAK by everyone, and those people who ended up my close friends had to be trained to call me Martin again! I occasionally run into people I knew from back then, and I cringe when they call me WAK. I started going back to my real name when a friends Dad shouted up to us "Tell WAK to move his car!". When your friends parents only know you by a nickname its time to start using your real name again! But yet, Ive gone back to using a version of it (Its my fantasy football team name Team Wak!) for my internet peronae. Maybe they'll have to put it on my tombstone, in case nobody knows whose buried there, lol.
I still have a Playstation 2 that I bought years after its launch (just like my PS1), and I play only two games on it; Resident Evil and Tomb Raider. I played both games in 1997 when the PS1 come out and I was blown away by them both. Resident Evil had a sense of terror about it that is palpable. I had never known anything like it before, and Tomb Raider was a full realised 3D world. For anyone who had grown up on 2D games this was a revolution like the invention electricity. TR cast a spell on me that has last 10 years. I have consistantly bought every new version of each game and played them to death.
Tomb Raider for their 10th anniversary had the fantastic and novel idea of revisiting the world of the first game in 1997 and re-doing them with the new techologys of 10 years later. We sometime forget how powerful micro processors have become in 10 years. The quality of the graphics and gameplay has increased expotentially in ten years. Tomb Raider:Anniversary is just beautiful to behold. Its like a painting come to life, and total immersement that the game brings has been hightened even more. I bloody love it!
I took the opportunity to dig out the original TR game to compare graphics. :) That was what this post was to be about. Two paragraphs and a couple of pics. Somehow it turned into the History of Gaming and Everything! How did that happen?
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam." - Carl Sagan, 11th February 1996
