Earlier this week the Alamogordo City Council (Alamogordo, New Mexico) voted 7-0 to sell the 800 Atari games excavated as part of the Xbox Entertainment Studios documentary on Atari's video game graveyard earlier this year.

The City Council plans to auction off at least half of the 800 Atari games on eBay and on the council's web site. The games are currently under the watch of the Tularosa Basin Historical Society and being stored at the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo.

Update: The New York Daily News claims that "Local media" are reporting that the teen was a "home schooled teen [who] wasn’t allowed to play video games, and that his family never let him watch violent shows on television." We're not sure of the validity of that part of the NYDN story because it's a third-hand account. Thanks Andrew Eisen for passing that bit along.

Thirty students from the University of New Mexico have created a video game to benefit a charity for children with diabetes. The students developed Alloy, a video game that lets players create robots out of scrap metal in a barren wasteland. The created bots are then used to find power crystals that power other robots. The crystals are wanted by others, so the robots have to engage in come "capture the flag" style gameplay in order to secure the crystals.

During the run up to yesterday’s mid-term election, we profiled a few politicians that used web-based games or videogame-related images in order to either slam their opponent, or drum up interest in their own campaign. In some cases the games were even created by third parties not affiliated with either side in a race. Let’s check-in and see how these candidates did in yesterday’s elections.

An Albuquerque, New Mexico man purchased a laptop for $100 at a garage sale and, after booting it up, was surprised to find an unpublished, underground political game from the 1990s, which took jabs at then Governor Gary Johnson.

The side-scrolling game, which depicts Governor Johnson as a “floating head of death,” was found on a PC purchased by New Mexico resident Alex Ortega. Local ABC affiliate KOAT tracked down the as-of-yet-unnamed creator of the game, who was so angered by government leaders in the 1990s that he created two video games, and even drafted a friend to drop copies of the games in the capitol mailboxes of certain lawmakers.

The laptop seemed to have once belonged to ex-New Mexico State Senator Manny Aragon, who pleaded guilty in 2008 to “three felony counts of conspiracy and mail fraud for his role in a scheme in which he and four others allegedly bilked the state out of $4.2 million during the construction of the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Courthouse,” and is in the midst of serving a 67-month sentence.

The New Mexico attorney who defended teenage killer Cody Posey during his murder trial doesn't think much of Jack Thompson's latest video game lawsuit.

Gary Mitchell's skillful defense efforts kept Posey out of the adult prison system for killing his abusive father and stepmother as well as his stepsister in 2004. The lawyer told the Albuquerque Journal that anti-game activist Thompson had contacted him "numerous times" before the criminal trial, urging Mitchell to employ a Grand Theft Auto defense.

"I just didn't find it had any merit whatsoever," Mitchell said. The attorney is seen in the photo at left, conferring with Cody Posey.

According to the newspaper report, Thompson was encouraged to pursue a lawsuit against the video game industry by prosecutor Sandra Grisham.

That seems a bit odd on a couple of scores. First, during the trial, Grisham downplayed any mitigation of the crime based on the horrible physical and sexual abuse that Cody Posey suffered at the hands of his father and stepmother. In fact, Grisham's tough-as-nails approach sparked a fair amount of outrage in certain quarters. If she wouldn't agree that such egregious child abuse might be a causal factor, why would she think that video games might be?

Check out this video from KRQE-13 in Albuquerque.

It's from today's Jack Thompson press coverage announcing the new lawsuit against Sony, Take-Two and Rockstar.

It makes everything perfectly clear - except for what role video games may have played. That's not so clear, other than Thompson's contention that they are "murder simulators".

We're all going to have to learn to spell "Albuquerque."

That's because we're going to be hearing a lot about the New Mexico city, since Jack Thompson's promised video game violence lawsuit is going to land there today. As reported by the Albuquerque Journal Thompson and a local attorney, Steven Sanders, will file a wrongful death suit based on the July, 2004 murders committed by Cody Posey on a ranch owned by ABC newsman Sam Donaldson.

Posey, 15 at the time of the killings, was found guilty early this year of murdering his father, stepmother and stepsister. Sentenced as a juvenile, he will be held until he turns 21. The defense maintained that Posey was severely abused by his father.

The video game connection is not yet clear. However, according to Cody Posey's Wikipedia entry, "prior to the murder, Cody was burnt with a welding rod and instructed by his father to have sex with (his stepmother)." His father had previously beaten the boy with a board, and had been reported to child protection authorities by Cody's biological mother.