Do these 3 video games trigger the Connecticut Massacre?

Many media outlets have said that Adam Laza was an avid video gamer, several posters of video games were found in his room, nevertheless the question remains open do video games really trigger all the violence they are being held responsible for? Let’s review the evidence we have, these were 3 video games that in some way shape or form have been related to the shooter:

 

a)      Call Of Duty: The English paper The Sun ran an article called “Killers Call Of Duty Obsession”, in this article the newspaper describes how the massacre perpetrator Adam Laza was a big fan of this video game, that he even had “military posters hanging all over the walls”, it seems paradoxical that the newspaper itself ran several stories about the launch of the video game, we can clearly see how in this story the newspaper is covering the launch of the game and they even use phrases such as: “Graphically, the game is sublime, something the series’ reputation is built on” and “It’s pure, unadulterated warfare” and that is not the only story they ran digging on the video game properties, we have this story where they are evaluating each one of the different maps in the game and they rate it “10 out of 10”, this other article where they are saying that one copy of the video game is sold every second and that makes it the fastest selling entertainment release of history selling more than 1 billion dollars in just 15 days, giving just a superficial review of the material we have collected here you can see there are several things wrong, number one (even we all know that the Sun is not one of the most ethical and respected diaries), if they are convinced that video games are a problem and one of the causes of this disgrace, why do they accept money for their advertising, rated so highly and spoke so well about it? If it is the biggest entertainment released in history shouldn’t we have more people going on killing spreads? After all this is the cause and it is the best seller in history isn’t it?

b)      Dinasty Warriors: Another English diary, the Dialy Express blames the Dynasty Warrior video game as one of the causes of this massacre, nevertheless  whoever has played the game has seen that the enemies don’t even “die”, there are no fire weapons, just a bunch of wood weapons and that the action revolves around the story of several kingdoms in China, so I don’t really see how this video game can be related to the massacre.

c)      Mass Effect 3: this has been another video game that has been tossed around as one of the video games that have influenced the perpetrator to commit his crime, what many people don’t know is that actually the way the media arrived to this conclusion was when they confused his brother with the killer and the brother “Liked” the page of this video game and it appeared in his wall as one of the things he liked.

After the media had portrayed the video games as evil, let’s think a little further about the video games, let’s suppose that the murder was a real fan of these 3 video games, that he actually played them furiously, does this mean that the video games influenced him to commit such a heinous crime? Adam Laza was wearing clothes the day of the murder and I have not heard anybody saying that the clothes were the cause of his rage, to me this is a battle that has been cooking for a long time, between the old media and the new media, if you can see the newspapers are part of big entertainment conglomerates that are watching their power diminish for video games, internet videos and basically any type of entertainment on demand, nowadays the younger generation entertain with the video games they want to play, they watch the videos they want to see and they basically decide what to see and what not to see, the old media is angry because they are losing the attention of the new generation, they are losing their advertisers, their ways to make money and the only way they have found to monetize is by creating fear, distrust and misinformation.

 

5 Urban Legends Around Video Games (That Were All True)

Urban Legends of every era always seem to reflect whatever teenagers are doing at the time: Forty years ago, they told stories about serial killers attacking kids making out in cars and escaped criminals hiding in someone’s backseat, because they didn't have jetpacks yet. Today, most young people seem to spend their time sitting or standing in front of video game screens, so it makes sense that we should get legends like ...

#5. The Girl Is an Atomic Bomb - Braid 

On the surface, the critically acclaimed indie hit Braid is a straightforward platformer like so many 8- and 16-bit era games. You play Tim, a dude who can reverse time and uses his powers to find a missing princess, Mario-style. But the simplistic gameplay is deceptive; the symbolic and ambiguous ending hints at a larger, stranger story (SPOILER: The "princess" you're trying to rescue isn't exactly happy to see you). And beyond that, Braid has a creepy secret that you couldn't possibly find unless you're psychic. Or someone just tells you about it. Whichever.

Hidden throughout the game's five worlds are seven secret stars. The game doesn't give you any acknowledgment that they're even there -- no achievements, no hints, no clues, nothing. You can get through the whole game without even knowing they exist, and even if you know what you're after, they're exceptionally difficult to find and obtain. One star requires waiting in a screen for two hours just to get to it and another can’t be acquired if you’ve already completed the second world.  

So what happens after you gather the seven stars? Nothing, at first. If you return to the game's final level, however, there's a slight difference. As we mentioned, the level is pretty trippy to begin with: At first it looks like you're helping the princess escape from a bad guy, but then it turns out you're watching the situation in reverse and she's actually escaping from you. But play it after you have the hidden stars, and the level is subtly changed in such a way that you can actually catch up to the princess and touch her ... at which point she begins flashing freakishly and you hear the sound of a nuclear bomb detonating.  

So that game with cute enemies, pretty environments and an innocent quest to rescue a princess is apparently all a metaphor for the creation of the atomic bomb:  or, more specifically, how its creators possibly wished they could turn back time and undo all the damage. Of course, that's so far removed from this colorful run-and-jump game that it really proves how out-there some of these conspiracy nuts are. Oh, wait, did we mention that the game's epilogue features a quote from Kenneth Bainbridge, the head of the Trinity atomic bomb tests?

""Now we are all sons-of-bitches" after the detoation of the first atomic bomb.

#4. Hidden Dungeons and Possessed Children? yes in  World of Warcraft  

In some ways, the virtual world of an MMORPG is just like the real world; where the real world has creepy abandoned hospitals and prisons that no one would dare spend the night in, games like World of Warcraft have hidden areas that were closed off and abandoned by game makers but still exist if you know how to sneak in. And they're equally creepy.

For example take the unused dungeon just outside a game area called Karazhan (sometimes referred to by players to as "Lower Karazhan"). It's a dungeon that was apparently scrapped partway through development, and in front of the entrance is an impassable gate. But just as with that old abandoned mine outside of town, you can sneak in (in this case, you can get around the gate by way of various glitches. And inside, you find this:

Among the typical WoW dungeon maze of tunnels,  you find The Upside-Down Sinners. It's exactly what it sounds like: an underwater room chock full of handless, eyeless people, chained upside-down and left to drown. 

Popular speculation is that Blizzard backed down from using the dungeon because they were afraid that it might bump the game's rating to M, but there's no real way to know.

But that's not all the creepiness WoW has to offer. The first town you encounter after the human starting area is a place called Goldshire, and it has its own dark secret.

A house on the edge of Crystal Lake, which is just east of town, is normally empty. At 7 a.m. on the game's server clock, however, you can sometimes catch six little kids in the room, standing in a strange formation.

Some players have heard strange noises, like banshee screams or the voice of C'Thun, a former high-end boss ripped straight out of the Cthulhu Mythos, saying, “You will die.”  You can even follow them from Stormwind City, the human capital, all the way to the house, and they never break their cute little pentagram formation the whole way. 

Creepiest of all, though, is the music that plays when you enter the room.

It's completely custom music, found nowhere else in the game, and if there's one thing Blizzard likes even more than re-using art, it's re-using music. (If you don't believe us, go to any inn in the game.) That means it wasn't some lone weirdo who programmed these kids' behavior. They had to get the music department to construct an all-new piece to go along with them.

#3. GLaDOS Bound and Gagged - Portal  

There are only two characters in Portal -- the one you control and a deranged A.I. called GLaDOS. You spend the entire game jumping through GLaDOS' hoops, solving the teleportation-based puzzles she leaves for you (on the promise of cake) and slowly piecing together that something's fucked up here.

Finally, at the end of the game, you meet the real GLaDOS, a huge, robotic entity. You fight her and you win and everything's great (albeit in an "... or is it?" sort of way).

But have you ever taken a close look at GLaDOS? 

At first she looks like a mess of machinery and cables, but if you look closely, she actually resembles a human figure hanging upside-down. That's not a coincidence: If you play through the game with the commentary track on, Jeremy Bennett, the game's art director, says, "Eventually, we settled on a huge mechanical device with a delicate robotic figure dangling out of it, which successfully conveys both GLaDOS' raw power and her feminity." 

Originally, according to Bennett, she resembled an upside-down version of Botticelli's "Rise of Venus":

But her final model doesn't really look like that at all. The posture is all wrong. In fact, the people at game-ism.com  think she looks more like a woman who has been bound and gagged:

So what does that mean? According to the folks at that site, all GLaDOS wanted was to be free (a goal you help her achieve when you kill her). As for how she got like that in the first place, sometimes it’s better not to know.  

#2. The Shadow People of Hell Valley - Super Mario Galaxy 2  

In a game like Mario, you're usually too focused on not falling off the crumbling catwalk into the lava below to ever really stop and look around. Especially in Mario Galaxy, where you are zipped across space from one world to the next, the vastness of the game world just whipping by you in a blur.

But if you ever do get the chance to stop and stare into the distance, you'll find some extremely creepy stuff. Specifically, in one level of Super Mario Galaxy 2, if you switch to first-person view and look in a certain direction, you can see shadowy figures standing at the edge of the galaxy.

Anywhere you go on that level, if you look up and to the left, they'll always be there. You can't come any closer. You never meet those "people," and nobody in the game ever mentions them.

So this is basically a video game version of the Slender Man urban legend. Fans have already started seeing them in other levels, writing fan fiction stories about them and speculating on what they could be: Local villagers  (that is to say, aliens) watching Mario from afar? Those weird-looking giants  from Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask? 

But couldn't they just be, we don't know, trees or something? Well, somebody got curious and started sifting through the actual files of the game. And this is where things get really messed up.

Turns out the sky pattern for that area is called "BeyondHellValley." "Hell Valley" isn't the name of that level, or any level in Mario Galaxy. It doesn't even sound like something you'd find in a Mario game. As for the shapes themselves? They're called "HellValleySkyTree." Ah, see! They're just trees. Now let's pull out the image file itself ...

 So what the hell, Nintendo? Some claim "Hell Valley" is the Japanese name for that level (which wouldn't be surprising, actually), or the name of a beta level that was abandoned ... but none of that comes anywhere near explaining why those dudes are there and what we did to make them look at us that way.

 

#1. Luigi Is Dead and Daisy Is Deformed - Mario Universe 

So Mario games are full of creepy stuff apparently. Knowing that, we're not so shocked to find out that Mario fans are always looking for hidden conspiracies in those games. We are, however, a little disturbed by what they've actually found.

Take Luigi's Mansion for GameCube, which is about Mario's taller, greener brother hunting ghosts in an old mansion. According to an urban legend  that keeps popping up in the always-reliable gaming message boards, if you go to a certain room, stand in a specific spot and wait for lightning to strike, you can see what looks like Luigi’s shadow hanging from the ceiling  As if he had just committed suicide.

But that's ridiculous, of course. We'll even go ahead and disprove this rumor by taking a look at that part of Luigi's Mansion and ...

That does look remarkably like someone's shadow hanging from the ceiling, in a game about haunted mansions and ghosts.

There's some debates  about what it actually is: Some say it’s a glitch  while others claim the game was originally meant to be much darker  and this is one of the many leftover from the beta version ... but they're all ignoring the simplest answer: Luigi has been a ghost all along.

And then there's Luigi's girlfriend, Princess Daisy, possibly the most fucked-up character in Mario history. If you don't believe us, do a YouTube search for “Hi, I’m Daisy!” Apparently, when they included her in Mario Kart: Double Dash for GameCube, they only gave her a single spoken phrase ("Hi, I'm Daisy!"), causing her to repeat the same thing over and over and over like a murderous psychopath.

But in case you don't think that's disturbing enough, how about the fact that she has a third eye in the back of her head? If you win Daisy's trophy in Super Smash Bros. Melee, go to the trophy gallery and zoom in until the camera clips underneath her hair. You can see something that clearly should not be there.

This could be a modeling error, but what's odd is that it doesn't look exactly like Daisy's regular eyes: It's all misshapen and gross-looking.

This is so well-known that Daisy's third eye was later incorporated into her character in M.U.G.E.N., a freeware fighting game that takes random characters from different franchises. Oh, and it shoots lasers.

6 Video Game Hoaxes That Were Once Urban Legends

Once upon a time the Internet used to be filled with a huge amount of nerds. Much of the earliest traffic on the Internet was in fact dedicated to these nerds' favorite pastimes, one of the most popular being "video games" and "fucking with other nerds." And when these two passions inevitably combined, a spectacular amount of disinformation was soon spread about video games around the Internet: fantastic hoaxes, artfully constructed of lies, built on a foundation of doctored screenshots.

Here are some of the most famous examples.

6. Pokemon Red/Blues’s - Mew

Mew was the 151st Pokemon in the original Pokemon Red/Blue games, and was by design always going to be the hardest to get. The legal way to get Mew was to attend a real-world Nintendo event, where a Nintendo employee with a tired smile would plug your Game Boy into his and upload Mew. This was the only way to actually get Mew in the game, so for anyone with the sense to stay far, far away from other Pokemon players, the 151st Pokemon was completely inaccessible.

Telling a group of players that they can't collect something, after relentlessly badgering them about the importance of collecting everything, is one of the biggest moronic moves in all of video gaming, and as you can expect, it broke many young players' brains. The Internet soon filled with rumors of how to get Mew, the most famous of which can be summarized thusly: Mew is under the truck.

The truck in question was in a normally inaccessible area of the game, but by following a fairly easy series of steps, the player could get there and wander around. Most discovered that the area was inaccessible for a reason; there was basically nothing there at all. Except for a truck. A purely decorative, not remarkable in any way truck.

But because of some dink on the Internet who claimed that the secretest of all Pokemon was hidden under the truck, players would spend hours pushing, pulling and pleading with it. All for nothing.

There was little shame in trying this once and failing. It wasn't too dissimilar a technique from those used for finding other Pokemon, and it was certainly easy enough to do. What made this so insidious was the relatively young age of Pokemon players and the correspondingly high levels of gullibility, which meant that once they'd tried and failed, they kept trying. Again and again and again, convinced that they'd done something wrong, ruining their Gameboys with salty tears, pleading for the 151st Pokemon to arrive, the one that would surely become their real friend.

5. Super Mario 64’s – Clothed Luigi

As you'd expect from its name, Super Mario 64 was a game that featured a character called Mario who was pretty awesome, and was the 64th entry in the Mario franchise. Nowhere in the name does it contain the word "Bros." or "And Friends" or, critically, "Luigi." Luigi is not in this game (not the Nintendo 64 version, anyways).

Do you think that stopped people from hunting for him until their thumbs bled?
 

Many people were convinced that Luigi existed within the game, and with absolutely no evidence to back that up, they were forced to make up some of their own. One of the key points in the” Luigi exists”  theory was a particular statue in the castle, which, as you can see, had a blurry inscription:

Now, if you're not having this website read to you by your great-grandchild, you'll probably figure out pretty quickly what's happened here. The artists decided that the statue they were making would look better with an inscription plate, even though the game's engine wouldn't be able to render a texture that printed anything legible. So they put in a gibberish texture. This decision, which probably took about 10 seconds to make, managed to waste countless days of countless idiots' lives. You see, for people who've suffered the unlikely but unfortunate fate of being brained by falling space debris, this illegible nonsense clearly read: "L is real 2401"

Which was proof enough that Luigi could be found within the game, and that "2401" was an important number. They'd later decide that that was the number of coins in the game, because that sounded pretty smart, and that you needed to collect all of them to unlock Luigi, because that sounded like a kind of stupid thing to do.

Almost impossibly gullible. That was complete gibberish, interpreted by madmen, advocating spending dozens more hours in a game you'd probably already beaten several times over from a company that has never been so jerkish toward its players.

 

4.  Street Fighter Two’s  – Sheng Long

In the game Street Fighter II, after your character wins a fight, you get to deliver a short speech to your bloodied opponent in which you reflect on the causes for his failure and just generally act like a jerk. In the original Japanese game, the character Ryu delivered a particularly jerkish wisdom-nugget that would eventually set up this hoax: "If you cannot overcome the Rising Dragon Punch, you cannot win!" This is of course a reference to Ryu's Rising Dragon Punch, a really impractical-looking leaping uppercut that everyone who watches UFC is secretly hoping to actually witness one day.

But when translating this into English, the developers decided to first translate it into Chinese, because that's evidently closer, and by the time the quote reached Western arcades, it read: "You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance."

"Well then who the heck is Sheng Long?" a chorus of 11-year-old voices shrieked, only to be answered when the SNES version of the game came out. Its instruction manual claimed that Sheng Long -- which, I cannot stress enough, at that point was a mistranslated gibberish name that came out of nowhere -- was Ryu's formal martial arts master.

Into this cluster of miscommunication stepped Electronic Gaming Monthly, a video games magazine best known for its mastery of clustered miscommunication. In their April 1992 issue, EGM printed a claim that the player could fight Sheng Long by undertaking a ridiculously difficult sequence of events,  essentially using Ryu for half a day without taking any damage. It was later revealed that this was an April Fool's joke (which EGM cleverly disguised by publishing in mid-February), but that didn't stop other magazines from reprinting the trick. Without checking it, because obviously this is just video games journalism we're talking about. Before long, there wasn't a Street Fighter player in the world who wasn't convinced that you could fight Sheng Long if you only tried hard enough.

 As mentioned, "Sheng Long" had been hinted at in both the arcade and SNES versions of the game. And there was no reason to distrust the video games magazines; in this era, to an 11-year-old, they had about the same authority as the Bible. And because the steps were so difficult to do they could never be verified, and there was no way to definitively prove the hoax wrong, this one drove kids mad for a long, long time.

3. The legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time – Finding the Triforce

The Triforce is a kind of powerful triangle thing in the Legend of Zelda games. It's never been explained very clearly what the hell it is, but getting your hands on it is usually a Pretty Big Deal. So when players completed the Ocarina of Time, the Nintendo 64 installment of the franchise, and found no Triforce at all, they got a little concerned. A Zelda game with no sign of the Triforce?

Well, almost no sign of it.

That right there is one of the inventory screens in the game, and right there in the middle is an indentation in the exact shape of the Triforce. It could just be decorative, and in fact it was completely decorative. BUT WHAT IF IT WASN'T?????

Then there was the screenshot that showed Link standing before the Triforce, getting ready to grab it. Even in an age when Photoshopped images were becoming common, this was pretty convincing-looking. And indeed it was real, although pulled from a preview video Nintendo released before the game came to market. The Triforce was removed from the game after the video was released ...

Naturally, a slew of Internet trolls claimed that yes, there was a way to get the triforce, and for people who really liked triangle things, that was all they needed.

A little gullible, but not overly so. By the time this one came around, the concept of video game hoaxes had been pretty well-established -- the Sheng Long incident being the most famous. So anyone who proposed a solution that involved completing dozens of awkward, time consuming steps  should have been looked at pretty skeptically.

Still, that sure looked like a place for a Triforce to hang out in your inventory, didn't it? And it's not like hanging around in Hyrule wasn't fun. This game was freaking rad. Playing through that a dozen times looking for something that wasn't there was hardly punishment.

<!--[if !supportLists]-->2.       <!--[endif]-->Final Fantasy VII – Aeris Lives

Aeris was a major character in Final Fantasy VII, and one of the romantic interests for the disinterested, spiky-haired protagonist. About halfway through the game, during a confrontation with the main villain, she's killed (spoilers), a legitimately surprising turn of events for most players, and a shock to our spiky-haired protagonist, ultimately making him marginally less disinterested.

 

But it turns out that a game that involves butchering thousands of monsters isn't a very fun place to think about death, and players around the world freaked out, convinced that there was some way to save Aeris. Over the next few months and years, message boards and forums filled with ridiculously lengthy and complicated methods of getting Aeris back.

Keep in mind that we are talking about trying to restore a character whose death is completely central to every remaining plot point and character development in the game. Aeris is as fundamentally and completely dead as the narrative can make her.

And when you consider the sheer effort required to investigate any of the 11 possible techniques cited here, almost all of which require either a dedicated play through to reach the halfway point of the game (20+ hours) or some ridiculous hunt for ultra rare items after the fact, you realize that we're dealing with epic levels of gullibility. Anyone who tried to do all of these things must have a pretty big gap on their resume. Explaining "Played Final Fantasy for Nine Months Because the Internet Tricked Me" to a potential employer isn't going to make you look very employable, and if you happen to find yourself in that circumstance, I'd suggest coming up with an alternate explanation.

1. Tomb Raider’s Naked Lara Croft

Tomb Raider's heroine, Lara Croft, is an acrobatic, duel-wielding, tomb-raiding ass kicker. She also happens to be comically hot, with breasts so large that they look like they'd interfere with some pretty basic activities.

If you're familiar with video game players or the Internet in general, you should not be surprised that it took about five seconds after this game was released before rumors spread of a "nude code" that could remove Lara's clothes. Even though the in-game graphics engine limited her to looking like this ...

... that was still something people needed to see naked.

Pretty gullible for sure. By this time, people were getting used to the idea that the Internet was a cesspool of treachery. And when you consider the legal hell a publisher would catch for publishing pornography in a children's game, it becomes even less plausible. Finally, the fact that it plays so blatantly on a horny kid's deep need to see boobies should have been another clue that it was gullibility bait.

Interestingly enough, some impossibly lonely hacker did eventually create a "nude patch" for the game, replacing the textures used to display Lara with naked textures. For the boob-hungry reader willing to download sketchy binaries from sketchy websites, their dream of seeing pointy, pixelated boobs was finally at hand.