The preferred technology of lonely perverts.
Company for Ken McCollough
From the moment Oculus VR was announced there was a nagging uncertainty at the back of one’s mind that something was wrong, yet this author was unable to quite put his finger on it. This uncertainly only increased upon Facebook’s several billion dollar purchase of the company, where much was said yet the silence was deafening if one were to read between the lines. This week it all suddenly made sense as one was abruptly made to realise that not a single person from Oculus VR has ever gone on record to disavow pedophilia. Nobody has ever denied that Oculus VR is a haven for rock spiders with child sex fetishes, and no one has ever confirmed that Oculus VR has an anti-pedophilia policy as part of their hiring policy and employment guidelines. Most importantly the head of the Oculus computing division, a mister Dov Katz, has never gone on record to confirm that he is not a sexfiend with the taste for underage girls.
It is for good reason that none of these assurances have ever been made, as this week Israeli citizen, Dov Katz 38, was arrested for attempting to solicit sex from a police officer who was posing as a fifteen year old girl. The two had a lengthy exchange wherein Katz agreed to pay her $350, and made it very clear that the five condoms she said she had would not be enough. Needless to say Katz did not get his money’s worth. He was arrested upon arrival at the girl’s hotel room, whereupon he claimed that he was only there to save her and to call the police. The police then informed him that it would have been better to have called them before arriving at the girl’s hotel room, and then proceeded to remove $600 from his person.
“After giving Katz directions to the room Katz arrived in front of the room and the arrest team took Katz into custody without incident.
Search incident to arrest, $600.00 was recovered from Katz along with his cell phone. When I arrived in the room I identified myself and told Katz that he was under arrest for Commercial sexual abuse of a minor. Immediately Katz stated that he was there to rescue her and call the police. I told Katz he should’ve called the police first.”
It is perhaps a good thing that the typically leftist backers of the Oculus Rift are so ardently pro-pedophile, as, far from being a point of disgust for them, the arrest of Katz will likely be a cause for them to rally behind. Meanwhile Oculus VR and Facebook, for their part, still have not disavowed the practice of pedophilia. One can only assume…
Super Mario Run didn’t do so well.
Super Mario Run: a Profitable Flop
In a follow-up to Lusipurr.com’s ongoing coverage of Super Mario Run‘s underperformance, we can this week confirm that as of January the game has been downloaded by 90,000,000 users. This figure might sound impressive, but it appears less so once one takes into account that just 3,000,000 people paid the $10 required to unlock the full game. That means that 87,000,000 people downloaded the game, tried it out, and then concluded that it was not worth spending $10 on acquiring the full experience. 3,000,000 might still sound like a lot, but then these are not full price console sales.
To put the price disparity into context, 3,000,000 people buying a $10 game would be like 600,000 people buying a $50 Wii U game. The good news for Nintendo is that this still nets them $30,000,000 – though of course that is before Apple takes a 30% slice of the pie. Regardless, Super Mario Run is styled after the New Super Mario Bros. games, which must be very cheap for Nintendo to produce by now given the volume of recycled assets and music. In fact Super Mario Run‘s levels could likely be substantially recreated through the use of Super Mario Maker alone. All this means that unless Nintendo were exceptionally incompetent when creating the game, Super Mario Jump was likely a decently profitable venture for Nintendo, so mission accomplished, right? Well no, not if one takes into account investor expectations, as they all expected to make out like bandits. The game was profitable, but its meager profit may not have been worth the opportunity cost to investors who could have put their money elsewhere. That said, Nintendo’s investors would do well to use their money a little more wisely, as this outcome was not exactly hard to foresee.
[PICTURED]: A popular retro console that cartridge games can be made for.
Gibe Shekels Plox
Some people simply cannot help themselves. Lusipurr.com readers may have first heard the name Mike Kennedy in conjunction with the ill-fated Retro VGS console. Kennedy had previously bought the molds used to produce the plastic casing for Atari’s Jaguar console, which led to the idiotic idea of his to create a new cartridge-based home console. Kennedy ignored common sense, which should have suggested that retro style games can easily be produced for modern high powered consoles, and that retro cartridge-based games can still be produced for an existing audience of NES, SNES, and Genesis enthusiasts. Instead Mike wanted to launch his own console, which he would have been categorically incapable of supporting. By the time that Kennedy took the Retro VGS to crowdfunding the price was so horribly overblown that it rivaled the relatively new PS4 and Xbone platforms, making Retro VGS a laughing stock. After Retro VGS fell through it was not long before Mike Kennedy returned with the aptly named Coleco Chameleon, which was essentially a rebadged Retro VGS that could do everything the previous machine could do, only the price had mysteriously halved. That particular crowdfunding attempt fell through when Mike Attempted to fake a system prototype; not once, but twice!
While all this was happening Mike was also ‘running’ Retro Gamer, which was actually the fruit of his very first crowdfunding attempt, and a success at that. This endeavour began well enough at first, with quality issues delivered punctually, and often penned by known individuals such as Youtubers and video game magazine writers from the 90s. This of course immediately began to unravel, as most everything that Mike Kennedy touches always does. Mike began to mistreat his writing talent, which resulted in most content eventually being created by nobodies. Following this Mike would occasionally shrug off the retro theme of the magazine in order to focus an issue on modern titles such as Mortal Kombat X, and then issues started arriving increasingly late, with the final issue arriving a full year after it was supposed to. Many people credit this dip in punctuality and quality to Mike’s obsession with launching his own console. This initial run lasted for two seasons, with a total of twenty-four magazines produced, and now that he has exhausted the initial funding, Mike is back with cap in hand asking people for more money as though nothing had happened in the interim. This time around Mike Kenedy has opened a Patreon, seeing as he has burned his bridges with Kickstarter and Indiegogo. He says he will start producing the third season of Retro Magazine if people will pledge $9000 per issue, but, like the Retro VGS and Coleco Chameleon, this thing is never getting funded.