Gearfuse

Mortal Kombat creator Ed Boon has been tweeting away about rare nuggets from the Mortal Kombat archives. We thought this admission was particularly interesting. Did you know that at one point there was a proposed Mortal Kombat-themed basketball court for one of Acclaim’s NBA Jam or NBA Hangtime games?

As it turns out, the court was denied because Acclaim didn’t look to kindly upon having human spines used as basketball hoop poles or skinned skulls being used as basketballs in their game.

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In Japan, you apparently can be charged with illegal access of a computer and manipulating electronic data if found guilty of intentionally “killing” someone’s MMO character. Some guy divorced his online wife’s avatar in Maple Story and in her anger she killed his character. Now, she faces a prison sentence of up to five years or a fine of up to $5,000 dollars.

Yowch! I believe a few lessons can be learned here. Firstly, never marry in a video game. Virtual settings and life-long relationships don’t mesh. Secondly, don’t play Maple Story. It sucks.

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Poor, poor YouTube. The courtrooms just can’t get enough of ya’! According to Wired’s Threat Level blog the judge in the Viacom/Google lawsuit has made a ruling which forces Google to turn over “every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses,” to Viacom.

Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users’ privacy, the judge’s ruling described that argument as “speculative” and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives.

So, according to the judge: Viacom being able to monitor what YouTube users are watching is not a violation of the users’ privacy. Did I miss something here? The Consumerist says, “Viacom is arguing that it needs the data to prove that its copyrighted material is more popular than user created videos,” but I can’t help but think Viacom has some other nasty plan involving this data. YouTube users’ – be wary.

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