Talk about whistling past the graveyard.
An Australian video game designer has caused a major uproar Down Under with his creation of a game based on the Virginia Tech massacre.
Called V-Tech Rampage, the game has several levels of "stealth and murder," reports The Sydney Morning Herald.
But what really is causing the kerfuffle--as if the game itself wasn't in bad enough taste--is that its designer, Ryan Lambourn, says he will take the game down from his Web site only if the public comes up with a $2,000 payoff.
For another grand, he'll apologize.
"I've done offensive things before, but they're not usually this popular," the Morning Herald quoted Lambourn as saying.
He also said that friends encouraged him to put up the cash payment demand.
"Attention angry people," Lambourn wrote on his site. "I will take this game down from Newgrounds (where the game is hosted) if the donation amount reaches $1,000. I'll take it down from (Lambourn's Web site) if it reaches $2,000 and I will apologize if it reaches $3,000."
It's hard to know how to respond to that. So I won't.
GamePolitics.com is reporting that U.S. District Judge Paul Huck has dismissed anti-video game crusader Jack Thompson's lawsuit against Gawker Media, the publisher of game blog Kotaku. Thompson had claimed that Kotaku and Gawker Media had failed to honor his requests to remove "threatening" comments from several of their blog posts that were critical of his eagerness to blame video games for the tragic Virginia Tech shootings earlier this month.
On Wednesday, Thompson had added the blog-publishing company, which also operates other popular blogs like Gizmodo, Wonkette, and Valleywag, to a list of defendants in a suit he was filing against the Florida Bar and state Supreme Court. Judge Huck threw out the case because it appears that Thompson had failed to follow the proper procedure for amending a complaint to add new defendants.
Thompson himself is an attorney based in Miami. Nevertheless, in response to the judge's dismissal of the case, he pleaded ignorance.
And they further note that these potentially malicious sites have been registered at a quicker clip than those for Hurricane Katrina.
In sizing up the Virginia Tech domain names, which deal with the shooting massacre at the sprawling campus, security researcher SANS Institute noted: "Some of them are used for benevolent purposes. However, a good share of them are parked for auction and even used for fraudulent donations."
SANS, with the aid of outside security researchers, culled through approximately 551 Virginia Tech-related domain names and found only two belonging to a charity and 57 deemed as "innocent" sites. The majority of the VA Tech-related sites, 381, were found to be "parked," with another 42 sites up for sale and 35 as having "questionable" status. Six of the sites were characterized as "fraud."
A dark day for the nation is posed to become darker yet for some.
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