This one's a little strange, but it seems that a former associate of Osama bin Laden would rather stay in a Canadian prison than live under house arrest restrictions which include the removal of his family's Nintendo Wii console.

As reported by the Globe and Mail, Mohamed Zeki Mahjoub (left), an Egyptian, asked a Canadian federal judge to send him back to the Ottawa jail referred to as Guantanamo North.

This is a man who once worked for Osama bin Laden's agricultural company, managing 4,000 employees and one million acres of land in Sudan. Guilt by association? Well, yes. That company was named in the United States indictment against Mr. bin Laden as a financial support for al-Qaeda...

[After 6.5 years in jail] bail came with a set of conditions. He was essentially housebound... He couldn't use the Internet (hence the confiscation of the Wii, which had an Internet connection). His mail was photocopied by the state.

Via: Kotaku

GameCulture reports on the strange case of an Indiana mother who has complained that her 8-year-old daughter's Baby Pals game for the Nintendo DS speaks the phrase "Islam is the light."

Readers may recall that a remarkably similar controversy last fall centered around Fisher-Price's Little Mommy Cuddle and Coo doll. And, in fact, the mother in this case, Rachel Jones, was also one of those who complained about her child's Cuddle and Coo doll.

In regard to the doll controversy, Mattel issued a statement in October which said that the only scripted word was "mama" and other baby talk sounds were gibberish.

Urban Legends reports that an audio expert experimented with the Cuddle and Coo doll and found that the phrase most closely sounded like "It's not near the light."

In fairness, the sound uttered by the DS game sounds exactly like the one that caused so much controversy in regard to the doll. We're wondering if Crave, publisher of Baby Pals, somehow licensed the same digitized audio file.

GP: So, is this a case of anti-Islamic paranoia or subtle indoctrination of America's youth? What do you think, GP readers?

Cabin fever has taken its toll on Bob's Game, apparently.

Robert Pelloni, the indie DS developer who promised to barricade himself in a locked room for 100 days unless Nintendo agreed to sell him its official DS software development kit, has ended his protest after just 30 days.

A post on his Bob's Game site indicates that his self-imposed isolation became too much to bear. He has ended his vigil with a lengthy anti-Nintendo screed. A photo from his webcam (left) seems to indicate that his workspace has been trashed:

It was foolish of me to think Nintendo would hear my pleas. They're just another heartless corporation... The core gamers don't matter anymore. It's not about the games or the fans, it's about spreading out and getting casual gamers to buy Wii Fit.

The golden days of video games are long gone...

I've had enough. I'm ending the protest. I give up on getting the SDK. I really tried my best. Show's over. It's just not going to work. Sorry, everyone. I just can't stay in here. My head won't stop pounding. I feel like I'm losing my mind. It's like I'm splitting in half. I keep seeing these posts that I apparently wrote, but I can't remember writing them. I'm afraid I'm becoming someone else entirely.

Nobody even takes me seriously anymore- how is Nintendo supposed to? Everyone thinks it's some kind of viral ad. It's obviously not. I'm one guy that can't get a break. Don't you think that maybe I might get a little angry being locked in here for a month with no response? ...I know I lost. I've been completely disgraced and humiliated... My head hurts, so I'm ending this post. Sorry, everybody. Whatever. Why does this HURT so much?!

GP: Pelloni's comments are somewhat disturbing. We wish him well.

A report in the Beijing Morning Post describes the plight of Xiao Cai, a 23-year-old man whose alleged addiction to online games caused him to attempt suicide four times.

At least one of those tries involved swallowing steel blades (in-game sword imagery?)

Chinese media site Danwei translates:

Xiao Cai was so addicted to the Internet that his mental well-being was affected. He wanted to kill himself, so he ingested saw blades... Currently his condition is stable...

 

After his mother finished feeding him, Xiao Cai became a little restless and started to fidget... He was mouthing phrases from online games, and would occasionally laugh...

Xiao Cai began playing online games in junior high school. A while after this a female netizen betrayed him, and he was so hurt that he put the majority of his time into playing online games. Xiao Cai became more and more addicted to the Internet, even to the point of being affected mentally... Before he ingested saw blades, he had also ingested sleeping pills and pesticides...

It's not exactly a video game story, but...

Multiple reports are coming in that every 30GB Zune (Microsoft's mp3 player) failed this morning at 2 a.m.

College OTR has this:

Microsoft is just squeezing in under the wire to claim the rights to “weirdest tech story of the year.”Last night at approximately 2 AM, every 30GB Zune model on the planet crashed... The Zunes reset, powered up, then froze on the loading bar screen, and no conventional method of resetting them appears to work.

This is brought to you courtesy of Microsoft, who has been selling a video game console with a nearly 100% fail rate for three years. The Zune situation is all the more disasterous however seeing as all of them failed at the exact same moment, which people have taken to calling 2K9.

From Gizmodo:

Right, so this is a weird one: we're getting tons of reports—tons—about failing Zune 30s. Apparently, the players began freezing at about midnight last night, becoming totally unresponsive and practically useless.

The crisis has been dubbed by Zune users 'Y2K9', due to the apparently synchronized faceplantings across the country... This report is consistently corroborated by literally hundreds of others across the various Zune support and fan forums.

GP: Zune users, jump to comments and tell us what is happening with your player...

A well-known British scientist told an Australian audience that video games and the Internet are slowing emotional development among heavy users.

ABC.net reports that Baroness Susan Greenfield, also a member of Great Britain's House of Lords, is currently on a speaking tour. She told her audience in Adelaide:

What I suggest is that the screen technologies are luring people more into more time spent abrogating their sense of self. So what we may be doing is infantilising people's brains, that is to say, keeping them in the booming buzzing confusion of the small child.

GP: What's very odd about her comments is that in 2007 Baroness Greenfield endorsed a computer game called MindFit. 

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition... least of all in game format.

But Vintage.VideoSift located the bizarre game at Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum in Farmington Hills, Michigan. The estimated date of manufacture is 1920-1930.

With tongue firmly in cheek, Vintage.VideoSift notes:

This game was the root cause of all the societal violence of its time.

And may we add:

NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency....

 

Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope....

 

Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again...

Full script here....

He may have lost out on the Republican party's vice presidential nod, but Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty recently had a memorable ride in an Xbox-equipped van inadvertently stolen from the band Everclear.

As GamePolitics has previously reported, Gov. Pawlenty signed Minnesota's 2006 "fine the buyer" video game law into effect. The measure was later deemed unconstitutional by a pair of federal courts.

As reported by TwinCities.com:

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty spent Sunday riding around Pennsylvania in a stolen van. The theft was inadvertent; his Keystone State driver was told to pick up the keys to the vehicle in which he was to shepherd the governor at the Holiday Inn in Allentown, Pa.

 

"He did exactly what he was told, except it was the wrong Holiday Inn and the wrong van," said Pawlenty... The van the driver picked up was a tricked-out touring vehicle, complete with an LCD video screen, an Xbox and video games and an iPod-ready, six-speaker stereo system.

The van retrieved by Pawlenty's driver was full of beer cans and had been used to to transport Everclear to their hotel. Ironically, the band was enroute to the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

When the driver mistakenly showed up at Everclear's hotel, he was given the keys to the van by front desk personnel. Later, when the van turned up missing, owner Sharky Laguana reported it to local police as stolen. When the mystery was finally solved, Laguana said:

I've had a lot of crazy things happen in our vans. I don't know that this is even the craziest thing that's happened in our vans. ... This is the funnest thing...

GP: Actually, the funniest thing would have been for the police to spot the "stolen" van and perform a takedown on its occupants.