From the Weird File...
Despite M-rated titles like Call of Duty 2, Quake 4 and Condemned: Criminal Origins, all of the Xbox 360-related violence isn't generated by the console itself. WBAL-11 reports that Baltimore County (MD) police made one arrest following a pre-dawn scuffle outside a Best Buy in White Marsh.
More than 500 people were waiting in line for a chance to purchase a 360. Unfortunately the store had only 48 to sell. One man was charged with disorderly conduct after cutting in line. More than two dozen police officers were called to the scene, where they deployed K-9's and threatened the use of pepper spray.
GP: Smart move by Microsoft - not - in diverting 360 supplies to Japan where the system is not selling well at all.
After blog sites worked the story over last week, the NY Times has picked up on the music-pirating antics of one K.K. Slider, an RIAA-tweaking inhabitant of Animal Crossing: Wild World for the Nintendo DS. In the popular game, K.K. performs and gives players a copy of a song.
"Those industry fat cats try to put a price on my music, but it wants to be free," he says in text bubble.
The NYT notes that in Japan, "K.K." is comparable to "Inc." here in the U.S., adding a bit of irony - perhaps intentional - to the situation. GP's favorite Nintendo VP, Perrin Kaplan, told the Times that "no real social commentary was intended. People can read a lot into a little, but musician K.K. Slider - a guitar-playing cartoon dog - is saying only that he's a free spirit who cannot be bought and sold for any amount of money... as a dog, it's understandable that he would not want to deal with any 'fat cats.'"
GP: Pssst... K.K. - want to trade for some bootleg Dead concert tapes?
That crazy cannibalism non-issue raised by the Annual Video Game Report Card from the National Institute on Media and the Family (NIMF) keeps surfacing. We were tracking it a while back and found it repeated over three-dozen times in mainstream media outlets. Following a bit of a lull, GP stumbled across the cannibal angle in an ABC News report on Friday. An Illinois local TV news program, WHBF-4 also has the oft-repeated silliness.
GP: I did an extensive interview with Dr. Dave Walsh on NIMF last Friday which will air as a podcast later this week. Rest assured, the cannibalism issue was raised.
From Seattle comes this awful story of a woman - we can't bring ourselves to call her a mother - charged with neglect in the death of her 18-month-old daughter. After finding the baby dead the woman played video games and went out to a Thanksgiving dinner. Sometime later her husband, a sailor, came home on leave and found the baby in a box. The couple then had dinner and sex (pray they used contraception). The sailor finally got around to reporting the death the following day.
GP: No word on which games the woman favored, but we're willing to bet they don't have them in whatever prison she's destined for.