Woman sues Nintendo for death of son

Associated Press

BATON ROUGE, LA. A Louisiana woman is suing Nintendo, alleging her 30-year-old son suffered seizures after playing video games for eight hours a day, six days a week.

The lawsuit filed in federal court says the man died last year after hitting his head and mouth on a table during one of the seizures. It claims the man never had seizures before buying a Nintendo-64 player in 1999.

His mother is seeking unspecified damages for her own medical and funeral expenses, for mental and emotional anguish, and for her son’s lost future earnings.

A spokesman for Nintendo is declining comment on the lawsuit. In court records, the company denies any wrongdoing.

Let’s pick this one apart, shall we?

BATON ROUGE, LA

Why do I have a feeling this is in a trailer park?

her 30-year-old son suffered seizures after playing video games for eight hours a day, six days a week

Although it doesn’t explicitly say it, I’m willing to bet this man lived at home unemployed with his mother in the trailer park – how else could he spend 8 hours a day, 6 days a week playing video games? I’m a video game fanatic with a job and I can’t pull this one off. I wonder what he did on the seventh day?

The lawsuit filed in federal court says the man died last year after hitting his head and mouth on a table during one of the seizures

Evolution at work.

It claims the man never had seizures before buying a Nintendo-64 player in 1999

So let me get this straight – despite the fact that video games manufactured since the late 1980’s have had warnings in the manuals about the fact that they could possibly cause seizures and that if you experience a seizure playing them you should stop this man played them 48 hours a week for three years and his mother is shocked when it finally kills him? That’s like playing Russian Roulette every day for three years and being shocked on the day it kills you.

His mother is seeking unspecified damages… for her son’s lost future earnings.

Well look at the bright side Nintendo, the man couldn’t possibly have made much money since he had no job as we’ve established.

Yeah yeah I know – this lawsuit will never even see the light of a courtroom as it’s obviously some poverty-striken spinster who’s been taken in by some lawyer, but I just figured it would be fun to pick it apart this morning.

There’s conflicting reports as to whether or not MP3 is destroying the music industry. My take is: if MP3 destroys the music industry, the industry deserves it.

Im ny opinion, the single saddest example of how lame the music industry is, and how lame the American Conumer is, is O-Town. O-Town is, of course, the latest (?) boy band to be churned out by the boy band factory that is Lou Perlman. Perlman’s (two) credits include Backstreet Boys and N’Sync. Bad enough that no talent clods are selling millions of albums to mastubatory prepubescent teen girls, but at least the public was saved the trauma of having to watch how heartless and souless the process of manufacturing a music group is. But with O-Town we actually watched the process unfold on a freaking television game show. ABC’s Making the Band was a Survivor-esque reality show that whittled down a crowd of boys to the five members of O-Town. O-Town’s lone claim to fame is that Corporate America placed them on a pedestal and stated “they’re Celebrities because we said so”. The final irony is that there’s a second season of Making the Band, but ABC didn’t pick it up – MTV is airing it. ABC decided enough was enough on airing low rated prerecorded reality shows. They aired every episode of The Mole, which I actually quite liked, despide the fact that it was habitually low rated. They decided to cancel Mole 2 three epsiodes into its run, so no one will ever know who won that one.

To the music industry, I’ll make you a deal: keep coming up with shit like O-Town and I’ll keep stealing music. Deal?

Human nature is weird. Ever notice how we tend to only want to hang around with people like us? When you break it down to that one fact, it’s easy to see why we have things like racism and sexism – it’s not ignorance, it’s kinda like nature. I have black friends, but I don’t invite them to my house. This isn’t because I don’t like black people, I just don’t. There are those who would say this is racist. I talk to women in public, but I don’t invite them over to my house, and people don’t call me sexist. In light of the fact that I am married, people call me “smart”.

But now I’ve found I have an odd problem wherein I don’t socialize with people the way I used to. I was in an organization called the Corps of Cadets, and for a long time I tended to only hang out with a select group of 25 or so individuals, most of which were guys and almost all of which were my age. Now that College is over, we’ve all moved all over the state/world and we don’t hang out, except for when one of us gets married or more than one of us is in town, and that’s only if we know each other’s phone numbers.

So I’m here at work and I look around at the people here. Once again, I’m struck at how much of a natural priss we all are. Most of the people here are disqualified as potential hang outs for the simple reason that they’re old. Not too old, just old. The guy across the room from me is 30 years older than me, more than twice my age. If I knew someone that was 35 I would probably call them “too old”, at 55 you’re just “old”, not even in the running.

Then there are some people here that are my age, or in the general range thereof, but we don’t hang out. Why? Well, I’m married and they’re not. It’s not like High School where you’d call your friend up and hang out – now there’s laundry to do and things to take care of. When you’d hang out at your friend’s place in High School you’d pay no attention to what their parents were busy doing – now that shit is your job.

Then there’s a guy next door I’m friends with who’s just a year older than me – we send each other funny IM’s all day. He once suggested we go see a movie together and one of these days I might take him up on the idea. Besides the fact that he’s kinda hard to make plans around, there’s also the fact that while he is like me and married, he also has kids. Two of them. Younger people who aren’t married don’t want to hang out with me (I assume) because I’m married and therefore have entered a new bracket, but now there are other married people I don’t tend to want to hang out with because they have children and therefore have entered that next bracket. I guess the next bracket is to get “too old” and then “old”, followed by “elderly” and then “dead”. So what I wind up with is a series of “married couple” friends who just happen to be in the same window as me.

My Wife had a “married couple” friend that I didn’t like to hang out with for the simple reason that they were in their 30’s. I guess the main reason I didn’t like to hang out with them was that they were old and not “like us”. Then on the other side of the fence we have an “unmarried couple” friends who are not only younger than us but also an “unhappy couple” to boot, so we tend to not hang out with them either (especially since they’re “still in school” and so we don’t have that much in common anymore). And for an extra added wrinkle, since my Wife and I are a “happy married couple” we have to be careful of our “recently single friends” or “unhappily married couples”, lest we rub their nose in it.

So does this mean that we’re all naturally arrogant to other people?

What a shitty damn week. Last Sunday morning my Wife woke up sick. By that evening she was fine and I was sick. Not sure if we exchanged illnesses or what. So I skipped Monday. This is only like the second time I’ve been out sick from this job, and the last time I was sick I felt incredibly guilty. I did what we probably all do – I felt a little bit ill and decided to stay home. Sure I could have gone to work – but at that point I wasn’t doing anything mission critical. I’ve had tasks here that I figured were mission critical, so I’ve come to work several times when I felt less than 100% in the last few months. Monday, however, I had no problem staying home, since I was sick – no doubt about it.

Tuesday I went to work and when I got home I took a nap – and woke up with 100.5°. I skipped out Wednesday, and went back on Thursday, and came home nearly dead. I had to skip out on Friday. Three non consecutive days off – which is ironic since if I had just stayed home Tuesday I could probably have licked it. The most violent, hacking cough I have had in years, a need to take this horribly bitter Benadryl, an inability to sleep due to the pain of breathing, this bizarre tastebuds trick where everything tastes a little bit like vomit – you name it. This past week sucked.

There’s this guy at work here that I don’t like. Well that’s not entirely true, I do like him – everyone does, to some extent. He’s a real likeable person. Person. Not a worker. He never does any work. I can’t think of a time when I didn’t see him chatting it up or browsing the web. Now, sitting here and making a blog post I figure I’m hardly worker of the year, but this is on occasion for me – this guy does nothing. Then he asks me for help on something he should have had down ages ago. I’ve been here for a year, he’s been here for close to two years, and I know more stuff than him.

It used to really bother me that this guy was still here. There used to be more people working with him but they systematically all went on to bigger/better things. I figured for sure he would get canned as he was “hiding” behind those people, but nope. The part that bothered me was that it seemed to me that if this individual was still here that means that this job doesn’t care what you do – meaning then that it also didn’t notice if you were doing good instead of bad. I’ve recieved enough praise on my performance to let me know that this last little bit isn’t true, but I’m not so sure this job cares about bad performance.

Last August or so everyone got a 4% raise. Everyone but me – as it turns out you had to have been here a year to get it. This means that this person got a raise for no other reason than being in a nice little rut and no one noticing him. It really ticked me off – until the next month everyone got their titles changed and mine carried that 4% raise. Today, however, this person informed me that he has now moved to a better parking lot because – you guessed it – he’s been here long enough. I’m not sure where I stand on that list but it’s just another annoying example of how the system here works – just stick around long enough and you get everything – even if you don’t deserve it.

Perhaps I’ll get that promotion soon. Oh well, it could be worse – at least I don’t have to live in goddamn cubicle land.

Hart’s War – it’s like Chicken Run, only without the Chickens. And there’s a war.

Actually, I’m surprised anyone’s going to make a WWII escape film after CR. Ever notice how no one made a western after Blazing Saddles for like 30 years?

Last year for Valentine’s I figured it would be just fine to buy the flowers on my way home. Suffice it to say it was a Charley Foxtrot at the Albertson’s when I went, with everyone and their dog getting flowers. And by everyone, I mean idiot men like me. All the good arrangements were taken. I was left to come up with an arrangement of the miscellaneous flowers left. I started picking up any flowers that looked like Wendy’s Wedding Bouquet. I had to pay more since they were assorted, but Wendy liked them, so it was all good.

This year I decided to forgo that debacle and buy an arrangement in advance. Of course, flowers are supposed to be kept in a fridge, but if I did that at home she’d find them, so I decided to buy them a day in advance and keep them in a fridge at work. I ran out and got them over my lunch break Wednesday and put them in the fridge, along with a note to the guys working stating “Don’t worry, they’ll be gone Friday”. Thursday 5:00 rolled around and I went to the fridge to discover they were frozen. Shit!

So I took them down to my car and tried to take off some of the ice chunks (which took some flowers with them) and figured my best bet was to turn on the car’s heater and turn all the vents towards the bouquet, full blast. I don’t know about where you are but here in College Station, it was turning into a hot day anyway, so here I am hanging my head out the window like a dog while my car turns into a sauna. To make things worse, there’s so much construction on the A&M campus I had to take a long damn route to Chili’s, where I was picking up our romantic dinner of hamburgers.

By the time I got home most of the incidental ice had thawed, so I quickly threw the tablechloth on the dinner table, pulled out the placemats and two napkins, and lit every candle I could find with the aim-n-flame.

Everything else went fine. Wendy loved the Kiss Kiss bears (the ones with the magnet lips) and the Practical Magic DVD I got her, and the flowers turned out fine (minus a few casualties).

Coming soon from A&M: designer cat clones!

Oh and a new DreamSNES was released, and this time it’s hella fast! Life is good.

Talk about a total abuse of power.

Back to the Future Trilogy coming soon to DVD. Ph34r!

Assuming all goes as planned, today is the day that the game NHL 2K2 is released for the Sega Dreamcast. The reason this is significant, besides the fact that it’s the first hockey game for the Dreamcast in two years and the first attempt by seasoned sports developer Visual Concepts, is the last game to be released for the Dreamcast, officially signifying the end of this console’s life, as well as the last game Sega will make for one of their own systems. At just under 2.5 years, I’m not sure if the Dreamcast outlasted the Sega Saturn, the previous Sega console (which also met with a shortened life span).

Sega was one of a handful of companies to dare to enter the console market in the late 1980’s to go head to head with Nintendo, the then 900 lb. Gorilla of the industry. Despite being technologically superior to the NES, the Sega Master System ultimately stood no chance to the market leader, mostly a result of Nintendo’s then Draconian licensing policies (developers signed to Nintendo were not allowed to develop for other consoles). The fact that Sega was able to survive to try again based on their own properties is a testament to how strong a first party developer they were – people still clamor for a proper sequel to Phantasy Star, a game which started on the SMS.

Sega decided the way to get a leg up on the market was to be the technological front runner. To this end they developed the Sega Genesis, a 16-bit console (the NES and SMS were 8-bit) and brought it to market over a full year before Nintendo’s entry. Though the term “Genesis” implied it was first to market, it wasn’t – NEC’s Turbo Graphix 16 beat it to market. The Genesis beat out the TG16 due in no small part to the strength of their game Sonic the Hedgehog, featuring a signature character to rival Nintendo’s Mario. The real strength of the Genesis, however, was its sports titles. Electronic Arts’ EA Sports label cut its teeth on the Genesis and to this day people revel in their hockey titles.

Genesis held its own with the Super Nintendo (Nintendo’s 16-bit console), maintaining between 60 and 70 percent of the market until 1993 when Nintendo unveiled the show stopping Donkey Kong Country. At the end of the day, Nintendo had 53% of the 16-bit market, with the SNES selling like hotcakes after DKC‘s release. However it is arguable whether or not they “won” the race, since at the end of the 8-bit race they owned over 90% of the market. To some the fact that Sega was able to make such a dent in the market was victory enough.

Part of the reason the Genesis started to falter was due to what would become known as the cardinal sin in the console market place – they segmented the user base through critical perhiperials. As an example, when a light gun is released for a console, any game written to use that gun exclusively as a controller is limited to the number of people who have the gun, and not all of those people will buy it. Therefore developers are reluctant to make any gun games, since they may meet with low sales, and consumers don’t want to buy the light gun, since few games are written for it – a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Sega released an add-on called the SegaCD, to add CD-ROM capabilites to the Genesis. Most of the games on it were merely ports of their cartridge cousins, with redbook audio music tracks. Full motion video was limited to the 32 colors the Genesis could push, so any live action video looked like someone spilled coffee on it, and since it was at the dawn of CD technology, its 1X speed led to unacceptable load times. Then Sega decided to release the 32X, a device which would allow for 32-bit games. It saw a flurry of titles, but ultimately suffered due to developer tenacity on what was on the horizon.

The horizon saw the dawn on 32-bit dedicated consoles from Sega and Nintendo. Nintendo decided to spin the same card that Sega had pulled on them and upgrade the specs of their system to 64-bits (a fire which was hosed a bit by the annoucement of the 64-bit Atari Jaguar). Word came down the pipeline that consumer electronics company Sony was readying their own 32-bit console, but since NEC was also a consumer electronics company, this announcement brought about more doom proclimations than worry.

In early 1995 Sega, Sony and Nintendo were all slated to unveil new consoles in September. Sega got nervous and decided to unveil their console in May instead. With the exception of skeptical journalists and four major retailers, the system’s unveiling was a surprise to everyone, including developers. Since the technology was so new the system debuted at $400+, putting it out of the reach of most. Many didn’t have the motivation to buy it – it’s not like today when people save for months to buy an XBox, no one knew the Saturn was coming so soon. Also, since the developers were not let in on the secret, few games were available at launch, with the ones coming over the summer being buggy rush jobs.

By September Sega had sold 70,000 units. However by that point Nintendo had delayed the Nintendo 64 to April (later September) and unveiled the Virtual Boy instead. Consequently when Sony unveiled their PlayStation it sold 100,000 units in the first weekend. The Saturn never recovered. In late 1997 Sega called it quits on the Saturn in the U.S., with the last trickle of titles happening in the following year, though it did continue until 1999 in Japan.

Sega instantly started spinning Dural, the code name for their Saturn follow-up. It was named the Katana and Sega started to hype it. Later they announced a partnership with Microsoft. Microsoft would port Windows CE, a version of Windows to run on non-x86 platforms, to the system, now named Dreamcast. This instantly caused a stir, since there was a fear now that the system would become the butt of shovelware Windows ports, something which Sega insisted would not be the case. Sega was attempting to replicate the strategy which worked for the Genesis but failed with the Saturn – to beat the others to market. They had the advantages of a strong and large launch library and a $199 launch price. However, more ominous concerns in the form of the forthcoming PlayStation 2 and the future consoles from Nintendo and former partner Microsoft were on the horizon.

They were able to sign every major developer to develop for the Dreamcast, with two exceptions – Electronic Arts and Square. Square was under exclusive contract to Sony (they had been exclusive to Nintendo prior to the Nintendo 64) and their Final Fantasy series of games had become something of a religion in Japan. More upsetting was EA. Debate continues on whether the Genesis made EA who they were or whether EA made the Genesis what it was, but in any event by this point in time EA’s EA Sports line was wildly popular, to the point where it was believed that a console could not survive without them. Whether EA was on the take from Sony to stay off of Dreamcast or whether EA decided developing for too many consoles (and therefore running a constant risk of having unsold product) was not a viable plan, EA decided to not develop for the Dreamcast, though they commmited to the then-unnamed consoles from Microsoft and Nintendo and even continued to release Nintendo 64 titles. EA’s president went on to state that without them Dreamcast was doomed.

Sega sold 400,000 Dreamcast units on the launch date, and went on to sell 1.5 million units faster than they expected. One of the titles on launch was NFL 2K, which in the opinion of many was hands down the best football game ever made in terms of graphics and gameplay. It was developed by second party developer Visual Concepts, who went on to make the NBA 2K series and though they did not make NHK 2K they are the ones responsible for NHL 2K2, the aforementioned last game for the Dreamcast. EA went on to hold out for the release of the PlayStation 2, but when production problems limited that console’s run to 500,000 units during the Christmas 2000 season, EA posted a huge loss.

One of the advantages of the Dreamcast was its use of a media called GD-ROM, Gigabyte discs. Unreadable and uncopyable by CD-ROM drives, they afforded the developer more space than a CD-ROM, less space than a DVD, and a guarantee that it was uncopyable, and it was – until someone copied one. Sega also developed a format called MIL-CD so that makers of music CD’s could add enhanced Dreamcast content if they wanted to. However, once reverse engineered and coupled with the knowledge on how to download the contents of a GD-ROM to a PC, it opened up the door for piracy. Unlike other consoles, which needed hardware changes to make copied games work, Dreamcast piracy was open to anyone with a fast Internet connection and a CD-burner. A later Dreamcast revision removed the MIL-CD format but it was too late.

Not too long after the 1.5 million mark was hit, sales leveled off and game sales slumped. Many people held off on buying a Dreamcast to get a PlayStation 2. Developers started to cancel projects or move them to other consoles. Sega looked at the dire prospects of having three major competitors and decided that they could either go out of business trying to compete or leave the hardware market early and become a developer. Much to the chagrin of the Dreamcast supporters, they decided in early 2001 to pull the plug on the Dreamcast. They announced support for another year, but several developers decided to cancel any remaining projects they had left. Sega themselves decided to place the RPG Sequel Shenmue II on the XBox in the U.S. The last trickle of titles was scheduled for March 2002, but this month’s NHL 2K2 will be the end.

Ironically, Sega looks to go from the underdog in the hardware war to the top 3rd party software developer, ousting current leader EA. EA issued a statement downplaying the shift, but their attempts to kill off Sega largely backfired, resulting in a strong competitor. Today Sega is developing for all major consoles, including the PlayStation 2, GameCube, XBox and Game Boy Advance.

Though it is sad that Sega couldn’t hang in the console market today, and that there is now a huge barrier to a largely commercial market, it’s better to not lose Sega as a developer.