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Top 6 Bizarre Online Gaming Incidents

December 4, 2007 by Admin 96 Comments

People stabbing each other (in real life) for magic swords (inside an online game); men kidnapping a top player to steal his game password; a girl that dies after playing her favorite multiplayer game for several days in a row….

It is a crazy (virtual) world, what can I say! Below you will find the 6 most bizarre online gaming incidents in history:

1. Lengend of Mir 3 player stabs fellow gamer to death

legendofmir3.jpg Back in 2005 Qiu Chengwei, a 41 years-old Shanghai resident, stabbed fellow gamer Zhu Caoyuan repeatedly in the chest, causing his death. The reason? Zhu sold the “dragon sabre,” a weapon that they won jointly in the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game).

According to the China Daily, Qiu Chengwei went to the police first, but after being told that virtual items were not protected by law, he decided to make “justice” with his own hands.

Qiu Chengwei received a life sentence.

2. Brazilian gang kidnap top GunBound player

gunboundplayerkidnap.jpgEarlier this year four Brazilian men, with ages between 19 and 28, developed a plan to steal the game password of a GunBound (an online multiplayer game) top player. The objective was to sell the game account on the Internet for $8,000.

The first step was to get the girlfriend of Igor, head of the gang, in contact with the GunBound player. They accomplished that via Google’s social networking site Orkut, which is extremely popular in Brazil. After exchanging messages for a couple of days, the girl asked the boy to meet her at a shopping center.

He went, but instead of the girl he found Igor waiting for him, armed with a gun. They took the GunBound player away, and here comes the bizarre part. After five hours of interrogation at gun point, the boy was still determined to not reveal his password, so the four men released him.

The boy went to the police, who arrested all the gang members.


3. Girl dies playing World of Warcraft

girldiesplayingworldofwarcraft.jpgBack in 2005 a Chinese girl nicknamed “Snowly” died of exhaustion after playing the MMORPG World of Warcraft for three days in a row. She was preparing to kill the Black Dragon Prince, other players explained, hence why she had no time to rest between the game sessions.

Interestingly enough, her fellow game players held a virtual funeral inside the game, as reported by Yahoo News China.

4. Teenager arrested for stealing virtual furniture

habbohotelarrested.jpgA couple of weeks ago a seventeen year-old boy stole almost $6000 worth of virtual furniture in the online game Habbo Hotel. Habbo is a virtual world where people can create houses and other scenarios, but the items need to be purchased with real money.

The company alleged that the boy, with the help of some friends, created a website to lure other players into revealing their passwords. After that it was just a matter of logging into the game and transferring the furniture into his own room.

It would be a perfect crime, except that the police (the real one) was called and the boy was arrested.

5. Belgian Police decides to patrol Second Life after virtual rape case

secondliferape.jpgThe details about the case were not revealed, but two Belgian newspapers reported early this year that the Belgian Police would setup an in-game patrol unit to investigate virtual rape incidents.

Absurd as it sounds, the event spurred a myriad of discussions around the web, from sexologists arguing that even virtual rape can be a traumatic experience to online gamers that wondered the technical details that enabled a virtual rape to occur in the first place (in fact it is hard to conceive how someone would not be able to simply turn the computer off…).

6. A plague ravages World of Warcraft

worldofwarcraftplague.jpg In the middle of 2005 Blizzard introduced a new area to its popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft. The boss of the area was able to cast a spell called Corrupted Blood, which was supposed to infect and cause damage to all the players nearby.

Contrary to what Blizzard planned, however, the players remained infected even when they returned to their towns, contaminating pretty much everyone around them. The plague spread through the game servers and thousands of players died.

Blizzard manage to create quarantine zones within the game, and shortly afterwards it introduced a “cure” for the infection. Despite the remedies the event created a lot of buzz in online forums and community websites.

In one word: bizarre!

Filed Under: Internet Tagged With: 5, bizarre, gaming, incidents, online, top

Top 10 Places to Get Movie, Music and Game Reviews Online

November 26, 2007 by Skellie 12 Comments

We’ve all done it: paid hard-earned money for something in the hope it would be good, only to find out that it wasn’t worth the risk. Think of all the shopper’s remorse we could avoid if we read a few reviews before we bought something!

Thankfully, web users are spoiled for choice when it comes to quality music, movie and game reviews online.

This post is an introduction to the top 10 online review websites, each striking a delicate balance between quality and respect in the field.

All-purpose

metacriticlogo.jpg1. Metacritic.com is the one-stop shop for many, providing scores out of 100 for newly released games, movies, DVDs and TV shows. Rather than providing unique reviews, Metacritic aggregates all available reviews for a particular product and produces a score averaged across all critics. It’s a quick way to get an overview of how the critical community as a whole has received a certain product, particularly if you’re concerned about the biases of individual critics. Highly recommended.

Movies

rottentomatoslogo.jpg2. Rotten Tomatoes is perhaps the best known source of online movie reviews from critics. It aggregates reviews from the critical community and calculates a total score for the film, deeming it either ‘fresh’ or ‘rotten’. The home page for each movie features quotes from each critic, summing up the general tone of their review. It’s a useful way get an idea of how good/bad a movie is while also using the quotes to gauge what aspects of the film stood out.

imbdlogo1.jpg3. IMDb is a movie information and reviews site for those who’re more interested than the opinion of the masses than the opinions of paid critics. The emphasis is on votes rather than reviews, but the sheer amount of users who participate — in the tens of thousands — leads to a very democratic result.

Music

pitchforklogo.jpg4. Pitchfork Media is the hipster’s music review site of choice (you can tell by the banner ads for American Apparel). The emphasis here is on less mainstream music, but the reviews are well-written and generally well-respected in the online community.

rollingstonelogo.jpg5. Rolling Stone the magazine publishes its CD reviews online. The focus is on popular music and widely known alternative acts. In other words, those searching for the obscure should look elsewhere. Despite this, the reviews tend to be well-written. After all, if Rolling Stone can’t find any decent music journalists, who can?

spinlogo.jpg6. SPIN is Rolling Stone’s slightly trendier, slightly less mainstream counterpart. The online reviews are also plucked straight out of the magazine. Each review is short and to the point, though the editorial standard is hampered by an annoying tendency to give almost everything three and a half stars.

nmelogo.jpg7. NME is the UK’s premiere music mag. Often a taste-maker, the magazine has frequently been criticized by ‘serious’ music aficionados for its tendency to give names to things that didn’t previously exist (the New Rave genre, for example). Still, the reviews are meatier than other alternatives. NME also has a disturbing tendency to pick out the UK’s ‘next big thing’ — often going on to become the ‘next big thing’ everywhere else, as well.

drownedinsoundlogo.jpg8. Drowned in Sound threatens to topple Pitchfork Media from its mantle of ‘hippest music review site’. For every band you’ve heard of there’s bound to be one you haven’t. Pretentious, maybe, but you’re almost guaranteed to happen upon some undiscovered gems you’d never have heard about otherwise.

Games

gamerrankingslogo.jpg9. Game Rankings is a review aggregating site build especially for gamers. The home page for each game links out to a number of critics reviews while also aggregating a total average score for the game. The site is also highly interactive, awarding points based on user contributions to the community.

gamespotlogo.jpg10. GameSpot is one of the oldest and most well-known video game sites. While the competition is fierce between the major players (IGN, 1UP and GameSpy), GameSpot is arguably at the fore when it comes to the quality of the reviews it publishes. Each review comes with a neat summary of pros and cons to help you quickly decide if a game is worth laying down cash for.

What’s your favorite place to get reviews online?

Crowd-funded gadgets, tech, games and other awesome Kickstarter products at the Forevergeek Kickstarter Store

Filed Under: Internet Tagged With: Games, movies, mucis, online, places, reviews, top 10

Top 10 Ubuntu Linux Games

November 24, 2007 by Admin 2 Comments

Many Windows users are reluctant to switch to Linux because they like to play games once in a while. While this theory holds true to hardcore gamers (the Windows platform does have some exclusive and popular titles), the same cannot be said about casual gamers.

The open source community has being busy developing a myriad of games for the Linux platform, and most of them are as fun as their PC counterparts. Recently I came across an article titled “Top Ubuntu Linux Games,” which listed the most popular ones. Here they are:

  1. Tremulous
  2. Grid Wars
  3. VDrift
  4. World of Padman
  5. Nexuiz
  6. Scorched 3D
  7. Glest
  8. Battle for Wesnoth
  9. Urban Terror
  10. BZFlag

Filed Under: General Tagged With: 10, Games, linux, top, ubuntu

Free Linux eBooks

November 13, 2007 by Admin 2 Comments

A couple of months ago I made the switch from Windows to Linux, and I doubt I will ever look back. Sure, sometimes business endeavors force you to use Windows applications, but other than that Linux gets the job perfectly done.

If you are considering to migrate to Linux as well, or if you have already been using it for a while but want to improve your knowledge, you might want to check the free Linux eBooks library on Homelinux.org.

You will find pretty much everything you need, from tuning the performance to shell scripts and kernel programming. Below you will find my favorite ones:

  • Easiest Linux Guide Ever
  • Linux in a Windows World
  • Migration Guide
  • Practical Linux
  • Ubuntu Hacks, Tips and Tools

Filed Under: General Tagged With: ebooks, free, homelinux, linux, ubuntu, windows

Welcome to Daily Bits

November 12, 2007 by Admin 1 Comment

Back in 2004 Google carried out its initial public offering of shares, for a price of $85 a piece. A couple of weeks ago these same shares broke the $650 mark, shooting Google’s market capitalization to over $150 billion.

That is more than three times the value of General Motors and Ford combined. Even more interesting is the fact that Google does not sell products. It does not produce anything you can touch. It simply collects and organizes information. All the information.

What can we learn from this? Many things, but perhaps the most important one is the fact that the Internet is revolutionizing the way we communicate, live and work.

Mind you that Google is not an isolated case. Think about Facebook, Digg, Youtube. Better yet, think about how many people are starting to make a living with personal websites. Blogs that are competing head to head with mainstream media.

That is what Daily Bits is about. From software to Web 2.0, from online marketing to social networks. In simple words, your daily dose of Internet and technology.

Filed Under: General

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