Jefferson Parish (the greater New Orleans, Louisiana) authorities are searching for two men who held a Woodmere resident at gunpoint and stole that person's debit and credit cards. The two young men (pictured, left) were later captured on surveillance cameras trying to buy games at a local video game store, according to authorities.
On October 3rd Gearbox Software CEO Randy Pitchford sent out a series of tweets - with photos - showing that someone called in a bomb threat to the company's headquarters in Dallas, Texas. While the call turned out to be a hoax, the Dallas police made sure that the areas was clear and safe before letting employees get back into the building or to their nearby vehicles.
The police department has not released details on where the call might have emanated from.
Below are Pitchford's tweets:
One transaction gone horribly wrong leads to four people having their lives ruined - with one of those lives coming to a tragic end over a video game system. That's what happened in Roswell, Georgia when two people who answered a Craigslist ad looking to sell a PlayStation 4. The owner of the PS4, 28-year-old Daniel John Zeitz put an ad on Craigslist looking to sell it.
Wesley "wolvereness" Wolfe is the latest to become victimized by a swatting prank. According to Chron, the 25-year-old programmer best known for Craftbukkit for Minecraft, was the victim of someone sending a swat team to his house, claiming that he had shot and killed his parents and was going to kill more people.
In July we reported on MineORama, a Minecraft fan gathering in New York City that was canceled at the last minute. While organizers insisted that the event was not a scam and that it would be rescheduled, organizers are showing their true colors by shutting down their Twitter account and their official website at www.mineorama.com. And while their Facebook page is still live, organizers have not made an update since early July.
Former Silicon Knights director and Precursor Games co-founder Kenneth McCulloch has been sentenced to "time served" by the Ontario Court of Justice on a 2013 charge for "making child pornography available," according to this Polygon report - citing a report from the Welland Tribune.
Two Kansas City, Missouri residents have been charged with first-degree robbery and armed criminal action after police arrested them for stealing a video game system at gunpoint. The victim, an unidentified 40-year-old man placed an ad on Craigslist in the Kansas City area looking to sell a Playstation 3 console, two controllers and three games. He was looking to get $205.
Earlier this week we reported on CCP's efforts to catch the individuals that vandalized a real-world monument dedicated to its game EVE Online in Reykjavik, Iceland.
EVE Online makers CCP Games say that it is pursuing legal measures after discovering its recently erected Eve Online monument had been vandalized and defaced by unknown persons. The 16ft tall 'Worlds Within a World' monument was unveiled last Wednesday in Reykjavik, Iceland, to commemorate the eleven-year anniversary of the sci-fi space exploration MMO.
According to this Huffington Post report, a sore (and unidentified) loser who lost a game of Call of Duty match sent a police SWAT team to his opponent's house. According to the report, which is based on reporting from the New York Post, a police SWAT team was dispatched to a Long Island, N.Y.
A Homosass, Florida man has been arrested for murdering his 16-month-old son early Thursday morning. Citrus County police arrested 24-year-old Cody Wygant and charged him with third degree murder and willful child neglect.
At around 8:20 a.m. on April 17 paramedics arrived at the suspect's home to find his 16-month old son Daymeon not breathing. The baby was pronounced dead at the hospital later that morning.
A Chicago man is being held on $1,000 bond after being arrested for allegedly continuing to play a video game for more than two hours while his two-year-old stepson suffered with a broken leg. According to the Chicago Tribune, 19-year-old Luis Matienzo would not stop playing Grand Theft Auto V - even as his stepson sat crying in a playpen because he was suffering from a broken leg.
As is usually the case with new, popular, and multiplayer-focused games, cheating is a problem that has to be dealt with as swiftly as possible, and that is just what Respawn is doing with Titanfall. Respawn said that it is keeping track of those players who are cheating and will root them all out shortly. Titanfall launched on Xbox One and PC on Tuesday.
The developer announced via Twitter that it was keeping track of anyone using aimbots to boost their kill counts and has plans to ban them soon.
On this week's show hosts Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight talk about why Flappy Bird was pulled from various App Stores, Candy Swipe v. King, Norwegian killer Anders Brevik asking for a better class of video games in prison, and EA's denial that SimCity and Battlefield 4 had crappy launches. Download Episode 88 now: SuperPAC Episode 88 (1 hour, 7 minutes) 76.9 MB.
Anders Behring Brevik, the Norwegian man convicted of killing 77 people in Oslo, Norway in 2011 is calling himself a human rights activists in letters complaining to the prison about the quality of video games he gets to play while he is serving his sentence. You may recall that Brevik wrote in his rambling manifesto that he trained himself to kill using Call of Duty and enjoyed playing World of Warcraft.
Well apparently, he's upset that he can't get a more mature class of video games to play like other prisoners.
Starbound developer Chucklefish said today that development of their open world space building game has been delayed slightly as it deals with someone it calls a "sexual predator" in its community (as reported on by The Escapist).
A Tulsa, Oklahoma man and his wife have been arrested by police after a maintenance man found their four year-old daughter locked in a closet. The man, 26-year-old Darren Nashburn, said that he locked his daughter in the closet because she was throwing things and because he didn't want to be distracted while playing video games.
A rare Nintendo World Championship cartridge (only 116 of them exist in the world) recently sold in a high profile eBay auction, but it turns out that the seller was punk'd when the buyer said he didn't have the $99,902 - the winning bid - to pay for it. The rules on eBay are very buyer-friendly, so someone can drive up a bid on something and then simply say "oops" or "I made a mistake." Meanwhile, a seller who finds themselves in such a situation has little to no recourse to do anything and the item cannot be relisted for another 30 days.
According to a report in the San Francisco Gate, a former video game executive has been sentenced to two years in prison and a fine of $5,000 for secretly copying and selling games for his own profit.
The 48-year-old man named David Foley pled guilty in January 2012 to conspiracy to defraud the company, Global VR of San Jose, and a bank.
A Japanese man has been arrested for allegedly forcing his young stepson to play Grand Theft Auto while his mother was not at home. The Kyoto, Japan resident, a 28 year-old male nurse named Maasa Kawabata forced his nine year-old son to play Grand Theft Auto IV for two-to-three weeks, with each gaming session lasting about two or three hours a day. All of this occurred while his mother was outside the home. He also apparently told the boy that he was "stupid," a "moron," and that he should "die" whenever his mother was not around.
According to a report in Blackburn News, London Police have arrested a man who shared sexually explicit material with a Tennessee teen - and he did it while playing an unnamed game with him.
Oakland, California news station KTVU has a bizarre story about a 16-year-old who set another passenger on fire while he slept on a public bus. Investigators are still trying to figure out why the unnamed teen intentionally set an 18-year-old on fire on AC Transit bus Monday.
AT&T Inc. apparently has filed a patent on a system designed to prevent "illegal and criminal activities" on gaming networks by stopping what they describe as "predatory users" from being able to come into contact with others who are considered minors, according to IPWatchdog.
The Florida Supreme Court has rejected the appeal of Deltona, Florida mass murderer Troy Victorino. While the court said that there were problems with the case, those issues did not rise to the level that would overturn Victorino's conviction. In September 2006, Victorino and another killer were sentenced to death for the brutal 2004 slaying of six people and a dog using baseball bats and knives. The crime has been described as one of the most gruesome mass killings in the state's history.
A 17-year-old father is accused of beating his 4-month-old to death, according to the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun Time. After allegedly beating his crying 4-month-old boy to death in a West Englewood bedroom, 17-year-old Willie Brown played video games, Cook County prosecutors said today.
A 22-year-old Tennessee mother has been charged with abuse and neglect in connection with the March 2013 death of her three-year-old daughter, according to an Associated Press report republished on The Times Free Press.
A Van Buren County grand jury indicted Samantha Brymer-Armstrong on Tuesday related to the March death of her daughter, Kayleigh Armstrong, who was found unresponsive in a swimming pool at their home in Spencer, Tennessee. She died the next day.
If you do something really stupid in life, you might try rolling the dice by blaming your favorite video games in the hopes that some foolish judge might buy into the theory. That's what we think 20-year-old college student Zachary Burgess is hoping for, but we're not sure. According to a report on WVTM-TV 13, officers were called to the Tigerland-area (a neighborhood in the city of Baton Rouge) to investigate reports of an erratic driver and a possibly stolen vehicle on September 21, 2013 at around 2:30am.