This is the face of one community’s anguish.
Horrific New England Shooting: Football, Autism, Skateboarding to Blame
Tragedy has struck the township of Newtown, Connecticut this week, when twenty year old Adam Lanza shot dead his mother, before taking several of her guns to the local school [Sandy Hook Elementary School], where he savagely murdered a class of children. In all, twenty-eight people have senselessly perished; twenty children [ranging between six and seven years of age], six non-related adults, Lanza’s mother, Nancy, and Lanza himself, in his final craven bid to escape the repercussions of his actions.
Adam Lanza, a reticent and solitary young man, was a known sufferer of Autism, a mild form of high-functioning retardation, also known as Dr. Hans Asperger’s Down Syndrome. He was said to be heavily influenced by the violent culture of European football, and deeply immersed in urban skateboarding “thuglyfe”, a pursuit which was said to have been a keen interest of his. Lanza was also said to have enjoyed playing video games, a hobby which is not believed to have played a part in his recent hijinks.
When asked about the reason for the recent spike in American school-shootings, Fox News expert, Dr. Keith Ablow, stated: “I fear that our level of empathy just as a culture, as a society, is being diminished by things like European football and professional skateboarding that seem to take people to a kind of fictional realm. I guess you could add thuglyfe to that, gangster-banger thuglyfe. Now people feel less for one another, they can think of them almost as opposing players, or rival skaters, and for the people among us who are vulnerable to acts of violence who are violently ill, if you will, that means they consider others even less than ever before.”
While one is loathe to say “I told you so”, it is nevertheless the case that the ill-advised legitimisation of violent football hooliganism was always going to have wide-ranging and tragic consequences for our communities. From Newtown, Connecticut to London circa 2011, the malignant hand of football hooliganism is far-reaching indeed. Meanwhile, the troubling sub-culture that has grown up around skateboarding has fared little better. The “in-your-face” attitude of skateboarding is inherently anti-community and anti-family by design, which almost certainly played a role in Lanza’s craven decision to brutally murder his own mother. Furthermore, in recent years the world of skateboarding has been infiltrated by the violent ethnic philosophy of “thuglyfe”, which has recently seen gangster-banger wrappers like “Little Wayne” announce their retirement from “music” in order to fully devote themselves to corrupting skateboard culture.
It is all very well to claim that such malign and insidious forms of entertainment should be protected on the basis that adults possess the faculties to discern the fantasy of the football field from the reality of hum-drum everyday life, yet such blithe rationality does not account for adults of diminished personal agency. The sufferers of Asperger’s Down Syndrome evidently do not possess the faculties to function as adults in this regard, which makes the arbitrary nature of adult consent somewhat problematic. Such people can best be [figuratively] likened to an empty cup, easily filled by such over-stimulating sensory experiences as the flagrant destruction of football rioting and the “in-your-face” attitude and swarthy demeanor of ethnic “thuglyfe” skatesters; they are thus led to act out violently, much like their dubious idols of subcultural decline. At any rate, in the absence of any tenable solutions, it is the view of this publication that the football and skateboarding entertainment mediums should be curbed wherever possible until a more equitable response can be found to the problems they pose.
The industry would [arguably] be in a better place if id would have just patented and trolled the mechanics of first-person shooters.
Sega Resort to Patent Trolling For Profit
A cash-strapped and irrelevant Sega has this week launched legal proceedings against Level-5, seeking damages of £6.8 million [no USD conversion available] for breaches of copyright pertaining to their long-running Football Manager franchise, along with the cessation of sale for all eight of Level-5’s Inazuma Eleven games. It is the contention of Sega that Level-5 have infringed upon their patented touch controls by allowing gamers to directly control players with a DS stylus in their football-themed JRPG series, Inazuma Eleven.
Sega’s opportunistic money-grab might be understandable if it made any kind of sense, yet it quite simply does not. If Sega fancies themselves to hold the patent to touch-based character movement, then surely they would be suing Square Enix for The World Ends With You, along with countless other DS properties. Moreover, the original Inazuma Eleven game had a Japanese release of August 2008, while the first installment of Football Manager to make use of touch input was the iOS port of Football Manager 2010, which was not released until October of 2009.
Essentially, it should be Level-5 suing the opportunistic Sega for copying their football based touch-controls, yet to do so would be obviously silly. Any just outcome to this nonsense would see Sega paying damages to Level-5 for their frivolous and disingenuous legal action, yet sadly the case will probably just result in an out of court settlement, which is what Sega is [literally] banking on. Level-5 for their part, in response to Sega’s outrageous allegations, have pointed out the deleterious and chilling effect that game-mechanic patents have on the industry, as the subsequent patent trolling only serves to stifle innovation in gaming: “While Inazuma Eleven does not violate Sega’s patent, we do recognize that Sega’s lawsuit could restrict choices in gaming from here on out as well as hindering the growth of the game industry.”
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or power Wii U with our GameCube dead.
The Wiikly Wii U Dishonour Roll
Lusipurr.com is sure that readers have grown tired by now of reading about the defects of Nintendo’s Wii U, just as Lusipurr.com staff have become tired of writing about them. Sadly however, Nintendo insists on monopolising the news headlines with ever-greater helpings of dire tidings. Thus, it is once again Lusipurr.com’s thankless task to recount Nintendo’s latest epic failures of the Wiik.
This week the hackers responsible for the creation and maintenance of the Wii homebrew channel have succeeded in getting their homebrew channel up and running on the Wii U. Currently the channel is only functional while in the Wii U’s Wii compatibility mode, yet the hackers responsible view this development as a very useful foot-in-the-door, which will potentially act as a staging ground for further incursions into Nintendo’s “new” hardware. Nintendo views the installation of the homebrew channel as unauthorised software, and maintains that its use will void customer warranties.
In other news, it has been shockingly revealed that Nintendo’s Wii U has fallen just a tad short of Iwata’s predicted attach rate of five games per system. It turns out that the Wii U has an attach rate of just 1.2 games per system, so if one assumes [as seems to be the case] that the majority of systems were purchased as Nintendo Land bundles, then that would mean that [approximately] just one in five customers have seen their way fit to purchase additional software. But then, who knows? There is still a couple of months until the deadline of Iwata’s scrying, so perhaps Oprah will buy a copy of New Super Mario Bros. U for every child in Africa, or something.
Finally, for weeks now Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry team has been analysing Wii U multiplatform games and comparing them unfavourably to their original releases on the PS3 and Xbox 360, yet this week the Wii U finally tasted success in one of Digital Foundry’s console face-offs. Digital Foundry writer, Richard Leadbetter, could no doubt scarcely stifle his laughter when penning the headline: “Wii U blitzes PS3 and 360 as the “greenest” console”. The Wii U when under full-load draws just thirty-two Watts of power, which makes it leagues more environmentally-friendly than even the newest model of PS3 Slim, which draws up to seventy Watts of power. This diminutive environmental footprint is something of an engineering marvel in the world of modern console manufacture, yet the fact that the Wii U is scarcely capable of matching seven year old consoles in terms of performance, makes this something of a dubious distinction.
