Jason Helton pens an F-U letter to the guy who hijacked his Xbox Live account (and credit card) and decided to buy a bunch of crap on Xbox Live. The lover letter can be found over at Joystick Division, and might be funny until you consider what this poor guy had to do stop this interloper. For one, he probably had to cancel his credit card and try to dispute any purchases the guy made, and then he decided to simply wipe his Xbox Live account to avoid any further agitation.

This morning Eurogamer ran a report on a number of users complaining that their Xbox 360 Achievements and Gamerscores were mysteriously being wiped. As you can imagine users were emailing them and other outlets franticly detailing their losses and how they had contacted Xbox Live support.

It's pretty sad when people have a better chance of staying married in a virtual world than in real life, but that is apparently the case, if you compare the divorce rates in the MMO MapleStory with real-world divorce rates. VentureBeat recently talked to marriage expert Athena Carrillo Lee of Mind Body Spirit Therapy in Los Angeles about MapleStory marriages and why people get involved in them.

A story by the UK's Daily Mail newspaper and the BBC that tapped an expert claiming that games were turning children who played them in to the wee hours of the night in to zombies has been debunked. The expert cited in the story says that the quotes attributed to him were completely fabricated.

The Daily Mail and BBC reports quoted Robert Hart-Fletcher of charity Kids and Media. According to the reports he said:

Update: Here we go again... Edge is reporting that the company still needs funding for the game, according to GSC spokesperson Oleg Yavorsky:

"We are still in the process of seeking funding to back up the project," GSC spokesperson Oleg Yavorsky told Edge. "We are hopeful things turn out well eventually. The team really wants to see STALKER continue."

I will be the first to say that I don't want to write another story about Ocean Marketing’s sole employee Paul Christoforo, but recent events warrant that we will write one last story on this guy who has spent the last 48 hours being punished for some pretty reprehensive behavior. The latest chapter in this internet drama relates to Christoforo holding the e-mail and social media accounts for the N-Control game controller hostage, demanding extra compensation, and a contract - the details of which are pretty vague.

While lawmakers are arguing over SOPA and Protect IP - two bills that could change the way the Internet works in order to fight piracy - it seems that many staffers on Capitol Hill are spending a lot of time downloading movies, TV shows, music, games and books via BitTorrent. According to a report from TorrentFreak over 800 IP's that originate from Capitol Hill are at the BitTorrent trough, even as they write laws against illegal downloading and file-sharing.

Microsoft has released its My Xbox Live App on Apple's App Store. The free app lets Xbox Live users access their profiles on the go much like the Xbox Live hub on Microsoft's Windows Phone 7. The app features the Metro UI style that Microsoft has deployed across all its current products, including the recent Xbox Live dashboard update and Windows Phone 7. The app also links to a browser-based demo of the Windows Phone 7 OS.

How can you tell when it’s getting closer to Black Friday - the #1 retail shopping day of the year? When people start camping out in front of stores to get their hands on some outrageous deals. But maybe some people do get a little carried away with it - like the people of St. Petersburg, Florida who have already been camping out in front of Best Buy since Monday, November 14, according to CBS Tampa.

Two UK tabloids - The Sun and The Daily Mail - are highlighting comments from a neuroscientist who claims that video games can cause dementia in children. Neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield told a gathering at the science centre (part of the Sherbourne Girls' School) in Dorset this week that online gaming and activities such as Facebook can "disable connections in the brain" - and in extreme circumstances - cause dementia in children. She also said that, on average, children spend around 2,000 hours a year either playing games or doing other things online.

A fake Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game for iOS has managed to piss off a lot of consumers and many are wondering how Apple allowed a game that has been in the App Store system for nearly six weeks to get past its approval process. The bogus game app claims to be an official Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game and is the work of a Vietnamese developer known as Dang Van Phuong. The license for the popular franchise is currently held by Nickelodeon, who are working on a brand new animated property to be released in 2013.

It turns out (not to anyone's surprise) that the "Slavery - The Game" promo video that made the rounds earlier in the week wasn't really for a game at all. What is surprising is that it is a promotional video for a Documentary about slavery that will air beginning September 18 on Dutch television.

One of the film's makers, researcher Lyangelo Vasquez tells Dutch gaming site Gamekings that his intention with the video was to attract a younger crowd. That's all well and good but it's a classic bait-and-switch and questionable marketing.

Dead Island developer Techland is having more trouble this week on Steam as a file inside the game reveals an anti-feminist slur. On Tuesday a Steam user was digging through the files for the game when he came across a hidden skill called "Feminist Whore."

The studio issued an immediate apology to the public via Eurogamer:

It takes a unique kind of person to create a video promoting an obviously fake video game about slavery, a sad part of our history that the majority of Americans do not find much humor in. Nonetheless, we live in an age where the Internet allows for all kinds of free speech - even the kind we do not agree with, find offensive, or find to be outright disgusting. Still, sometimes you have to look straight into the abyss to see the foolishness of humanity. Perhaps this is one of those moments, so we present the promotional video for "Slavery - The Game."

London's theater world is apparently about to get a taste of video game culture thanks to Sony, Resistance 3 and London theater group Punchdrunk. Running September 1, through Sunday, Punchdrunk performs "…And Darkness Descended," an "interactive theater experience based on the game Resistance 3, where participants must survive, by cooperating against alien invaders (or not cooperating, as the case may be). Punchdrunk is keen on performing in a way that encourages lots of audience participation and this particular performance should be no exception.

According to a study that will be printed in the September issue of Psychological Science, breast-feeding moms are more aggressive than moms who use formula. You may be wondering why a study about breast feeding moms might matter to you, and the reason it does is because of what researchers used to test these aggression levels. The researchers' hypothesis was that mothers display a higher level of aggressiveness while breast feeding.

If you were hoping to drive a Porsche in Forza 4, you can forget about it, according to developer Turn 10. The developer of the popular racing series published by Microsoft says that the fancy car brand couldn't be included because of a licensing deal Electronic Arts already has with the company. While Turn 10 or Microsoft could have sub-licensed Porsche from EA, Turn 10 decided against it. In a post on the official Forza 4 site, Turn 10 community manager Brian Ekberg explained the absence:

At a Sony-sponsored event last night in conjunction with Gamescom, veteran game consultant Mark Cerny predicted that single-player gaming will be dead in three years. That's certainly the kind of prediction we will have to hold Cerny to three years from now because it's an astonishing claim.

According to Southern Chinese news agency Sanxiang City News a couple sold off their three children to fund their obsession with playing online games at Internet Cafes. The couple met in 2007 and quickly bonded because of their hobby. A year later their gaming was already getting in the way of being parents. In that year the couple had their first child - a son. Days later they left the young child home alone while they went to play online games at an Internet cafe 30 km away.

A year later the bad parenting escalated to unimaginable levels. In 2009 the 21-year-old couple had a baby girl. It was at that point they came up the idea to sell her for $500 USD. When that worked for them the couple sold their first child for $4,600 USD. Finally the couple has a third child, which they sold for another $4600 USD. Keep in mind that the couple did all this to fund their Internet cafe activities.

Here's an odd story for you. There is some insane talk of remaking The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, the popular documentary on Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe's epic battle to hold the world record score in Donkey Kong. Apparently director Seth Gordon wants to remake the film as a mockumentary. Say what now? Whether we like it or not, according to an interview with The Playlist Gordon is trying to finalize plans to remake the 2007 documentary.

"Instead of doing a traditional narrative feature script, what if we did the remake in the doc style," he said in an interview with Playlist.

As Joystick Division (where I found this silly story) points out - he already did this with the first film.

It's kind of a funny story, though it might be more folklore than fact; Computer & Video Games has a report about a personal assistant to Activision CEO Bobby Kotick trying to get him in to see Battlefield 3 behind closed doors. As you can imagine, EA said no to the request.

According to the C&VG report (citing "a senior informant who witnessed the exchange first-hand") Bobby Kotick's personal assistant discussed the chances of a hands-on trial of the game with EA reps at the door of the publisher's private meeting room. The female assistant jumped to the front of the line on Wednesday morning to request a personal showing of the game for Kotick. After mulling it over inside the private meeting room, an EA representative declined the request, saying that "it would not be possible."

The PA put up a small fight in front of those waiting to get in and then left in a huff, according to the witness.

Oops! A slightly shocking revelation came out of a recent Game Trailers interview with Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime: the Wii U third-party game footage wasn't actually authentic. More to the point, the footage came from Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the games shown. For example - THQ's Darksiders 2 footage..

Fils-Aime said that, while the footage was from other versions of games, he is confident that the Wii U versions will look just as stunning. The Wii U will be capable of 1080p graphics according to an interview Fils-Aime gave after its E3 press conference on G4TV earlier today.

"There has been some fantastic content that has not come to our platform," said Fils-Aime. "Third party publishers have told us that the reason they couldn’t bring it to our platform was based on the horsepower of the machine. That excuse is gone. So now all of the best content can come to the machine."

A 17-year old boy, identified only by the surname Zheng from the Anhui Province of eastern China reportedly sold one of his kidneys to finance the purchase of an iPad 2 tablet. Zheng scoured the internet looking for a way to make money and found a buyer who offered to pay him 22,000 yuan ($3000) for his organ.

"I wanted to buy an iPad 2 but could not afford it," Zheng said. "A broker contacted me on the Internet and said he could help me sell one kidney for 20,000 yuan."

The operation took place in late April without his parents' knowledge or consent. His mother became suspicious when Zheng came home with a new iPad 2 and an iPhone. When she questioned her son he finally told the truth about where he came up with the funds to buy the Apple hardware. She immediately contacted police. An investigation is underway but police say they have yet to locate the broker.

GRIN, who you may know best as the creator of Capcom's Bionic Commando action game, claims that it went bankrupt due to an insane relationship with Square Enix. The company had been working on a "Nordic themed" Final Fantasy spin-off which never came to fruition. The company spoke out (to Swedish publication Aftonbladet) about its relationship with Square Enix, and the picture it paints isn't a pretty one.

The spin-off codenamed "Fortress" never had a chance, according to GRIN founders Ulf and Bo Andersson, because Square Enix was erratic, unreasonable, and contrary in its dealing with GRIN. GRIN says that Square Enix didn't pay any of the $20 million contract it had with the studio to develop the game, even though it met every milestone it was supposed to right up until it went bankrupt in August 2009.

According to several sources, Nintendo of Europe will not be distributing Dead or Alive Dimensions in Sweden and possibly Norway and Denmark.

Why?  Well, there’s no official word but rumor has it that the distributor is afraid the game may break a Swedish child pornography law.

“But wait!”, I hear you say.  “How could the game be child porn when there’s no children or porn?”

That’s a very good question.  There is a mode in the game that allows players to take pictures of the characters in canned poses.  According to a post on NeoGAF, “the law says that if someone is picturing a girl under the age of eighteen, fictional or not, in a pornographic situation, that accounts for being child pornography.”

Saline Police say that they have issued an arrest warrant for a 20-year-old Saline, Michigan man for allegedly soliciting young girls via Xbox Live. The 20-year-old man, Robert Lynch, is expected to surrender to police for an arraignment on three counts of attempting to accost children for immoral purposes. The charges have the potential to put Lynch behind bars for up to 4 years. The exact time and date of the arraignment was not clear at the time of this writing.

According to police, Lynch allegedly used the chat or messaging functions of Xbox Live to communicate with Saline Middle School girls he met online between Jan. 8 and Feb. 8. Besides making sexual suggestions to the young girls, Lynch also allegedly mailed some of them condoms. Police also allege that in one instance Lynch took several girls to a local strip club. While they didn't go inside, Lunch went in to purchase sex toys for the girls.

A Lancashire, UK-based therapist named Steve Pope has jumped the shark as far as ludicrous statements go related to video games. Speaking to BBC Radio 5Live in an interview last night, Pope said that "spending two hours on a game station is equivalent to taking a line of cocaine in the high it produces in the brain."

What?! Oh, there's more:

"We're now onto second generation game station players who have always grown up with it," he continued. "Computer game addiction can also spiral into violence as after playing violent games, they may turn their fantasy games into reality."

It's a shame that Pope has no scientific data to back up his ludicrous claims that games are like cocaine and that gamers act out the violence they experience in their games in real life.

The Facebook version of the online strategy game Evony - that game with all the ads that involve cleavage, even though there's no actual cleavage in the game - may have saved a man's life. 51-year old Robert Chambers, who suffers from muscular dystrophy, says that a fire started by a toaster began to fill his house with smoke.

Because of his disability, Chambers was unable to directly call police on the phone, so he turned to the Evony chat room. He asked people in the chat to call the fire department. Ten minutes later they arrived and took him out of the house.

While there was no serious fire (only a toaster was lost), Chambers credits the game and its players for getting him help quickly. His wife, who openly hates the game, says she cannot complain about it anymore because it may have saved her husband's life.

Don't worry Mrs. Chambers, the entire Internet will take up the extra slack for you.

In a test run of a special battle between an IBM supercomputer named "Watson" and two of the best Jeopardy! players in the world, the computer dominates. The test of the computer is a preview of a televised battle to take place in January pitting two men against one machine. Score so far: Men 0, Computer 1.

IBM claims that Watson is a major advance in artificial intelligence, and if this test run is any indication, the company is speaking the gospel. Watson managed to beat former Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Thursday in its first public test, a short practice round ahead of a million-dollar tournament that will be televised next month in a special series of shows.

Jennings is no lightweight: he won a record 74 consecutive "Jeopardy!" games in 2004 and 2005. Rutter won a record of nearly $3.3 million in prize money on the show.

The creators of the x-rated game BoneTown, are setting their sights on a sci-fi fantasy world game called "BoneCraft." Announced at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo (AEE) this week, BoneTown developer D-Dub Software takes aim at the fantasy MMO market with a risqué game involving humans, elves, orcs, "BoneTown-style fighting," and of course - sex..

BoneCraft is described by its developers as a "fantasy/sci-fi parody game that will appeal to both the adult gamers who have always loved BoneTown and to the legions of fans of the fantasy/sci-fi genre." Players will "be able to experience what has never been possible in other games of the genre— taking the action all the way to the bedroom." The game plays off the popularity of Blizzard's World of Warcraft and StarCraft games.

Saucy, naughty and NSFW. The CEO of D-Dub does his best to explain what the game is all about: