Category Archives: Tyrants

Xinhua, the People’s Republic of China’s official news agency, has news from the making of the sequel to Learn from Lei Feng Online (now just, regrettably, “Chinese Heroes”):

“We hope the game will teach players about Chinese ethics,” said Kou Xiaowei, an official with China’s General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP), main sponsor of the initiative.

However, gamers being treated in the Beijing Internet Addiction Treatment Center were skeptical about the games, which they said sounded “too simple” and even “comical.”

“The game sounds boring to me, it’s a turn-off,” said Wang Yuhang, a 14-year-old boy in the center. Eighty out of the 100 teenagers at the center are addicted to an American online game called the World of Warcraft (WoW), one of the most popular in China.

According to the company’s financial report, on a typical evening in China there may be anywhere up to 630,000 gamers playing WoW simultaneously online in the country. While the American game reaps huge profits, “Chinese Heroes” remains blocked at the drawing board stage.

“Teenagers seek adventure and fulfillment in dramatic and skill-demanding games like WoW. If hero games do not focus on killing and domination, gamers will definitely not play them,” said Tao Ran, director of the center.

There’s just so many things wrong in so few paragraphs.

All-4-Lebanon – pirate website run by Israel to collect anti-Hezbollah intel.

(Let’s keep the comments conflict-neutral, please; if you want you can read where I frequently go off the deep end commenting about the subject here.)

Ran into this today, of interest to history nuts:

“Operation Unthinkable“: a study by the British government of a possible option in response to Stalin’s imposition of a puppet Polish government. That option being invasion of the USSR.\’c2\~

This study was done in May of 1945, literally days after the fall of Germany, and while Japan was still in the war.

This may well be the greatest game ever made.

Keeping the universe oppressed, but at least free of non-Romanian, green and terrified mongrels.

You know you’re in their world now from the very first sentence.

Romanii In Spatiu, or Romanians In Space (everything is in Romanian, \tab\tab\tab get used to it)

Apparently the bad guys in this game are Hungarians, the bad blood over the Vienna Accord seemingly extending to the far reaches of outer space. So if fighting the godless Magyars is your thing, sign up for the forum – because as we’ve learned from other adventures in Romanian games development, that’ll probably be the most amusing part.

As seen on Terra Nova and Pacific Epoch, if you’re an MMO provider in China, for the love of Mao, don’t ever put up anything in your game that even looks remotely like a Japanese flag.

Evolution of a flash mob, in three easy steps!

Players created protest characters with names like:

Name of player: \’e5\’b9\’b2\’e6\-\’bb4\’e5\’b0\’8f\’e6\emdash\’a5\’e6\’9c\’ac (“Kill the little Japs”)
Name of guild: \’e6\’8a\emdash\’e6\emdash\’a5\’e5\’90\’8c\’e7\’9b\’9f\’e4\’bc\’9a (“The Alliance to Resist Japan”)

Because, as we all know, the best way to protest the conduct of an MMO company is, as Delusion memorably put it,

OMG YOU NERFED DUAL WIELD DARK ELF DUAL CLASS PALADIN ASSASSINS? WTF? I’M GOING TO LOUDLY THREATEN TO CANCEL MY ACCOUNT, AND INSTEAD JUST GO TO THE MAIN CITY AND BITCH FOR A FEW HOURS BEFORE PLAYING NORMALLY!

In a followup, the provider, NetEase, wielded the Serene Banstick of Righteous Fury and sought to appeal to the mob’s sense of reason.

Patriotism is a form of respect, and it is a belief. Patriotism is the soul of our people, it is the soul of our nation. But we sincerely hope that everybody’s patriotic actions are rational . We hope and we believe that everybody can make rational expressions.

If only.