People who have beeen following the drama unfolding at GamePolitics are undoubtedly familiar with a fellow by the name of Jack Thompson, a lawyer with nothing to lose and hell-bent to destroy every "pixelante" on Earth. I'm probably not alone in my opinion if I say that even if JT is "certified" sane, that should be somewhat re-evaluated.

Let me do a little bit of digging.

Now, GP doesn't allow anonymous users to post anymore, thanks to Thompson's interesting antics. I have a LiveJournal account, so that doesn't touch me, but it probably annoyed a lot of other people. Strike one: If your comments are bad enough to inspire a policy change, that should be a good time to reconsider what the heck is going on.

Secondly, Thompson posts a lot. Really, really a lot. And obviously, not even remotely related to whatever the heck GP is posting - well, sometimes it is related, generally to show off his great trigger-finger itching and overreacting ability.

Thirdly... well... Bear with me, here's some rambling from a random user:

Back somewhat over ten years ago, when I started to use the Internet really seriously, the place to be was the Usenet. In the Usenet, all you had for authentication was really your name. You could identify other users by their name and email address, and that was that. And everyone engaged in civil discussion; even if there were clueless newbies, even they got clue eventually. If you didn't like to see some discussion threads, or comments from some people, you just added that to killfile - which is a brutal way of saying "list of people whose comments you don't want to see.

Now, there was always some kind of group of people for which none of that applied. They had no civility and pushed their own gibberish wherever they went, no matter how inappropriate it was, no matter how annoyed it made people. If people started ignoring them with killfiles, they started morphing, changing their name or email or even ISP to get around those.

They were called trolls.

Now trolls are very common even to this day, they have just spread frigging everywhere.

Some might draw attention to the fact that Jack Thompson is a certified lawyer. Okay, so he is an educated troll. They're the worst.

One thing I don't get is this: Since the anon policy came about, Jack Thompson got an user account. He's been repeatedly banned. I mean repeatedly. Apparently free LiveJournal accounts can now be got without invite codes, otherwise I might have labelled him as a rich troll too. Now I'm just labelling him as a troll who also wastes perfectly good space in the database. Yay.

People are calling for a ban, and I would too. Thompson's stuff was first interesting, then it got just annoying, reminding me of the dark, uncivilised bits from the Usenet's otherwise fun history.

Jack Thompson's case is getting continually weirder and weirder and weirder. I guess the next logical step would be a crusade against Wikipedia. Shame I won't probably be reporting more on this guy; I don't want this blog to turn into a (shiver) Political Blog™.

This is kind of old news. Jack Thompson wanted people to make a game about a father who has lost a son due to a someone influenced by violent video games going to a murder spree. So, people made the game. Two of them, in fact.

One is called I'm O.K. - which I hadn't seen, because it's Windows only and Wine doesn't really run it. Game Politics tipped that there's now a video of the game. I like speedrun videos already, this was quite interesting!

I just find it odd that (according to Wikipedia) Jack Thompson didn't think it was even possible that such games were published, due to game companies not wanting to depict violence toward themselves. Umm... hate to break it to you, but there's many games already that depict violence toward game companies, often specifically toward themselves. A very early example of this is in the above image from Mechwarrior 2, where we can find the Activision headquarters in one of the levels - conveniently targeted by this big war machine in the picture. I've heard there's such funny feature in Command & Conquer series too, if I remember correctly - though these days, you can't blow up Westwood anymore.

Seriously, the only reason Rockstar/Take2 is holding that back is that they're, well, a big company, and game like this doesn't sell.

From Wikipedia article on Natural Selection:

Its innovative concept is a mixture of the first-person shooter (FPS) and real-time strategy (RTS) game genres.

From Wikipedia article on Savage: The Battle for Newerth:

The producers of the game, S2Games have coined their new genre as a 'Real Time Strategy Shooter', or 'RTSS'.

Um... In latter game's case, I think it's safe to say that combining first-person shooters and real-time strategy in 2003 was hardly groundbreaking.

Natural Selection came earlier, in 2002, but surprise surprise - that wasn't really the most super-innovative thing either!

Just what I said earlier - people were so awed by Battlezone that they can't remember the damn thing ever existed. Had Golgotha ever been released, that might have been just the same thing.

When will we see the first really popular FPS/RTS hybrid so that people can stop thinking this is new?

Here's a bug report I filed a while ago. It looks like the game developers are acting on it. I sure hope things do get improved.

But I'm getting cynical on the topic.

Game music doesn't get enough attention.

Sure, you always hear how Nobuo Uematsu's stuff sells like popcorn. But now, I'm talking about slightly less known music.

And especially music very close of its native format.

The bug report above is for Battle for Wesnoth, one of the coolest strategy games I've played, and also one with some amazing music. (Check out Zhay Music - some really cool music that has been used in some other open source games too, like Adonthell and such.) It's a great game, yep. But when you load up the .ogg files from the music directory to the music player - whoops, you see the exact same mind-numbing problem you see with commercial games.

Stated plainly: the tagging sucks. It sucks in free games, it sucks in commercial games, it's pretty damn awful in some really high-budget games.

Now, I think Nobuo Uematsu makes pretty good music (not the best game music ever, but definitely from the better half). But I really how the big gears behind Square's music soundtrack machinery crank out what I, as a game music consumer, really like: Distinct tags. Identified songs. And most important of all, distinct song names.

Whereas here, I'm looking at a bunch of files pulled out of Warcraft III. The game had a couple of different composers. The good news: Songs have distinct names. The bad news: Not all tracks have artist names. So here I was: "Ho-hum, this bloody well sounds like Glenn Stafford to me, say, 75% probability. Damn, it does sound like Warcraft II, at least!"

And now, here, I was with Wesnoth. Currently, 12 music tracks. Few have really good tags.

Title: battle for wesnoth - strategic plot
Artist: http://zhaymusic.com/

This is not what your mother would want you to send to AudioScrobbler. This would, however:

Title: Strategic plot
Artist: Joseph G. Toscano
Album: Battle for Wesnoth

Why do I care? Well, primarily thanks to me using AudioScrobbler now. I just heard how some people have noticed how people start paying attention to what they watch on TV when TiVo builds a profile of them. The same with AudioScrobbler: I don't want crappily tagged music appearing on my Last.fm profile. Before, it was just a little bit of internal crying and whining in silence when I couldn't even find the damn artist for the track, let alone figure out a good name for the track; Nowadays, it's a frigging public issue. I want to show the world that yes, I listen to this particular game's music, I like the composer of this track, blah blah blah. I can't. The music isn't identifiable.

We just need the game music tracks to be properly identified. All I ask is for some distinct names. If I see yet another track titled "Title screen" I'm going to explode, or just get annoyed anyway. And if you have six composers on the project, tell us who did what. Grr.

Now, it'd be cool if I could find out who the hell composed the title music of Deus Ex...

End of rant.

Update: Scary how some things get uncovered if I try hard enough. Deus Ex musicians are unmasked. =)