Posted by Devin de Gruyl on Nov 16th, 2006
A group of Japanese gamers from 2chan has banded together to stop the online resale of PS3s by sabotaging Chinese and Korean auctions, driving bids on the scalped consoles up into the billions and even trillions of yen. Why? The stated goal is to discourage resellers of PS3s from undercutting Japanese retailers, but evidently the real rationale behind it sounds closer to “because they can.”
My reaction: Wow. 4chan’s /v/ only wishes they could be this nucking futs.
The sad part is, that actually sounds tame compared to what’s going on in the US regarding Friday’s release of the $600 PS3. In Lexington, KY, a TV puff-piece setup regarding people camped out in front of a local Best Buy turned into a crime scene when four people, including the TV reporter, were shot in a drive-by… with a BB gun.
Story here. The TV station’s story, with video, here.
Expect the Anti-Gaming Gestapo to mobilize in full force after this stunt. Jack Thompson must be rubbing his hands with glee a la Montgomery Burns right now. Meanwhile… the sane gamers of the world just shake our heads and sigh sadly at the whole spectacle.
Does anyone else remember when video gaming was fun?
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zaknafein
November 24, 2006 at 12:34 am
Good God. What is to be said about society when a console causes all of this? Er, lemme rephrase that, as an inanimate object, in and of itself, cannot directly cause such retardedness. What is to be said about society willing to do what we’ve seen on the news, over a console?
To quote so many other shocked people, why would I go through all of this for a 1st gen console that is already allegedly having hardware issues, is overpriced, and will eventually drop in price, especially when I have a perfectly good PS2, for which perefectly good games are still being made?
At times such as these, I would almost be willing to trade graphics and processing power for pure, simple fun, when consoles were less mainstream. Hell, from what I can tell, Nintendo seems to have gotten that right with the Wii. Mario’s still the man, and Samus Aran rocked.
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