Michael Jackson Themed MMO In the Works 180
norton123 writes "SEE has announced plans to published a Michael Jackson themed MMO. From the article: 'Planet Michael is described by SEE as "a massive social gaming experience" with "collaborative in-game activities," set in "an immersive virtual space themed after iconic visuals drawn from Michael's music, his life and the global issues that concerned him."'"
It's a shame (Score:4, Funny)
Too bad about the COPPA Act. The intended target audience is impossible unless the chatlines and names were narrow pre-determined choices ala Toontown.
Captcha: upward.
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WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because there are people who want to recreate the fun of diddling little boys? /ducks
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Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Funny)
Say, does anyone want to buy some of these beautiful, gilded "Diana: Princess of Hearts" commemorative dinner plates?
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Some memories are too profitable to die...
Star trek?
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Why? Just... why? Let his memory die already, please.
It did. Then it respawned.
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No; structured analysis and design is here to stay as are the great beers of the world!
Let me guess (Score:5, Funny)
You can only play male gnomes and dwarves.
Re:Let me guess (Score:5, Funny)
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OMG! Eddie, are you ok?
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Annie? Annie doesn't have a hard "d" in the middle of it!?
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Huh. Relistening, I -still- hear Eddie. But this isn't the first time I've heard lyrics get murdered in pronunciation for the sake of the sound :P
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I can see the daily quests now... (Score:5, Funny)
1) change your skin color
2) adjust your facial features
3) buy a monkey
I don't want to even THINK about the achievements.
Re:I can see the daily quests now... (Score:5, Funny)
Don't forget about trying to buy the skeleton of the elephant man.
Re:I can see the daily quests now... (Score:4, Funny)
1) change your skin color.
It's not a daily quest; the longer you play, the lighter your skin becomes.
Re:I can see the daily quests now... (Score:5, Funny)
Does the game end when my nose falls off or do I just respawn at my plastic surgeons with my last face and pigmentation settings?
Re:I can see the daily quests now... (Score:5, Insightful)
Make fun of him all you want for #2 and #3, and please disparage him for either being a child molester or at the very least being socially retarded as to not know how creepy he was.
But #1 never happened. His autopsy confirmed that he had never bleached his skin, that he in fact suffered from an extreme case of vitiligo [wikipedia.org]. In fact, all the evidence points to him being very uncomfortable with his loss of pigmentation; supposedly the reason that he started wearing the single glove was to hide the start of it on his hand, and he never brought it up in any of the interviews he did. It just seems harsh to me to make fun of someone after their death for having a disease that they were so obviously ashamed of.
Re:I can see the daily quests now... (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, come off it. Micheal Jackson obviously had a huge complex where he wanted to be white. Look at the photos of him when he was young - he was a handsome African-American man with a wide nose. He could have done quite well with the ladies, had that been his objective. Obviously, it was not. As time goes on, he gets whiter and whiter, and his nose gets narrower and narrower until it became disfigured by too many surgeries. So he likes kids? Great! Get hitched and shit out a litter of his own pups. Then nobody will quest for inconvenient truths like why he sleeps in the same bed with children. If he honestly had a platonic idea of love with young'uns, then he wouldn't have needed his Jesus Juice, eh? The whole thing stinks of a tragic man, isolated from society by his wealth and his enabling entourage. Have you listened to "Thriller" in the past few years? Give it a fresh listen, it is an outstanding work. I cordially hated MJ during his popularity period in the 80s, mostly due to his endorsemanship of Pepsi (Coke or Dr. Pepper or DIE!)
However, his music before "Bad" was outstanding, even I cannot deny this. When "Bad" was released, it was obvious to everyone that he had jumped the shark (even though this term was not in common usage at the time). When he started molesting little boys, that was it. He crossed the line. America is endlessly forgiving of popular celebrities...just look at how many of them are reprehensible in one way or another. All you have to do is go to rehab, don the sackcloth and ashes of the repentant, and claim you have seen the light and will sin no more. Look at Robert Downey, Jr...the man got high and broke in to his neighbor's house. He got the Emmy when he was released from prison! A personage no less than Mel Gibson himself took the financial risk to get him back making movies again, and just look at the Ironman franchise these days.
But the whole "adopting white kids" thing took him really over the edge. There are millions of colored children who would love to be adopted by rich celebrities...just look at Madonna or Brangelina. It's fashionable! Micheal Jackson was a man with serious issues. If he wasn't the son of Joe Jackson, he would just be another 50 year old child molester serving a long sentence in a California prison.
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You know, the whole plastic surgery thing could have been him trying to hide from the disease.
Which stands out more: Micheal Jackson as we knew him, or someone who as all the normal physical traits of a race but a completely different skin tone? If you were ashamed/bothered by it, you might well go to what others appear as as extremes because of it. Welcome to psychology.
I'm not going to comment either way about the whole kid thing etc. That all has no bearing on the above.
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It doesn't have to be rational... come on. You know how people can get fucked up self-views quite easily and then go do stupid shit because of it.
Re:I can see the daily quests now... (Score:4, Insightful)
That is the most common symptome, but it isn't always like that. Vitiligo comes in different forms and the more severe cases can very rapidly remove pigmentation in huge areas of the skin. Theres even a name for it "vitiligo universalis". As it happens, it isn't actually possible to bleach your skin the way people thought Michael Jackson did. For peopel that have vitiligo you can sometimes get a more even skin tone through the use of bleaching, but there is no reliable way to turn a healthy black person white.
It doesn't. However as somebody who've had some severe issues with body image, I can tell you from personal experience that this kind of irrational responses to body changes is not at all rare. In my case it was rather mild, but MJ allegedly suffered from Vitiligo, Lupus , Anorexia Nevrosa, had problems with drug abuse and was abused as a kid. Now add in to that the stress from being the focus from tabloids, having everybody speculate about why your appearance is changing... Heck the anorexia nevrosa alone can kill people from self-starvation. Imagine throwing in the rest of that cocktail of issues he was dealing with ( and there is little doubt he had a lot of issues ) and it's surprising the guy was even able to perform on a regular basis.
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The thing with his nose was a complex that came from his father constantly deriding him as a kid over having a big nose. Such verbal abuse throughout one's childhood tends to lead people to do such things.
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My personal opinion why my generation never developed a mashed potato or a time warp or much of anything other than standing around in a mosh pit and bouncing up and down is because Micheal Jackson killed dance. Killed it dead. The 2 or 3 people at the highschool dance who could do the moonwalk without looking like crap couldn't manage any of his other moves, so we all just gave up.
After that, MTV kept dance from rising from the grave by making sure the 2 music videos they showed had nothing but scantily
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Anyone who voluntarily drinks Dr Pepper more than once has forfeited the right to be taken seriously in any question of taste in food or drink.
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I kinda doubt it (Score:3, Interesting)
I kinda doubt that that was the _whole_ story though. All the photos I've seen of the disease, and someone with that kind of depigmentation I actually knew IRL, were cases of it happening in patches, rather than just becoming gradually uniformly whiter. The guy I knew was nicknamed "the dalmatian" because, really, that's what he looked like because of it.
It also tends to be disproportionally more pronounced around the eyes, nostrils and mouth, and often asymmetrically so.
Michael Jackson's face never showed
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But #1 never happened. His autopsy confirmed that he had never bleached his skin...
[Citation needed]
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Re:I can see the daily quests now... (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not sure what you think Michael Jackson owned, but read and understand this: http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/jackson.asp [snopes.com]
He owned particular _rights_ to the music, but was not "in control" of the Beatles music.
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Remember where you are.
Character selection screen (Score:5, Funny)
The character selection screen will have two choices. Micheal Jackson and a Little White boy.
Re:Character selection screen (Score:5, Funny)
I thought you said two choices? What's the other one besides Michael Jackson the Little White Boy?
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How about Dr. Feelgood?
Re:Character selection screen (Score:5, Funny)
Ding! You've leveled up! You can now change your class to "White MJ"! You've learned the skill "Dodge Lawsuit"! You've gained 3,000 MP (Molestation Points)!
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Achievement unlocked: Pervert
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Personally I believe the accusations. One does not pay an alleged victim's family to keep quiet if there is nothing to say.
Because no one ever gets wrongfully convicted of things or has a jury wrongfully to award spurious civil judgments against others, right?
Funny? Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
Assuming the accusations were true, it was tragic, not funny.
Assuming they were false ( as we should seeing he was never convicted in a court of law ) the joke is even more tasteless.
Seriously, considering how often people here point out how society tends to fucking lose its mind once children are involved, it is a bit tragic to see people repeat this tasteless joke and get moderated funny for it.
Re:Funny? Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
His body guards came out and gave interviews. You know the guys in the best position to dish out dirt and make a buck off him.
They all said he wasn't a child molester, he was shy but did date adult women. He just had a hard time acting like an adult. The bodyguards liked working for him, they had fun with the boss, doing stuff like letting him drive when they went through drive throughs just to freak out the people working.
While I did believe some of the hype about him in the 1990s, when I read what the body guards said, I figured if anyone knew he was doing bad things, it was them.
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A court of law != reality. Being found guilty or not guilty has nothing to do with whether or not you actually committed the crime.
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The character selection screen will have two choices. Micheal Jackson and a Little White boy.
So what they're saying is that you can't win?
I thought the standard game for teaching someone the only way to win was not to play [wikipedia.org] was tic tac toe. I guess you could call the Jackson character Dr Falken or the little boy Joshua, but it's just not the same:you don't get an attractive young Ally Sheedy in the bargain.
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LOL (Score:2)
Does anyone want to start a deadpool on this with me? I give it 5 months after release to implode.
Re:LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm fairly certain this will never see the light of day. I'm doubt it will even get beyond the concept art phase.
Michael Jackson's musical talent aside, who in their right mind would care enough to play a game like this? The kind of people who might actually care that much about him are unlikely to ever touch an MMO. Unless it's developed as a Facebook game perhaps.
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Unless it's developed as a Facebook game perhaps.
It's being developed to run on Cry Engine2 so that's probably highly unlikely.
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Re:LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand, observe the gradual accretion of "casual" features(ie. screensaver-eque autoplay modes that basically make the game function as an MP3 player with visuals) in the Guitar Hero/Rhythm game genre, along with the move toward online digital distribution/marketplace models and the ability to aggregate songs from multiple games...
As a game in the more or less classic sense, the project seems as doomed as it is stupid. As a game-esque mixture of themed social networking and micropayment nickel an diming for Jackson themed digital "merchandise" I can imagine it at least breaking even.
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As a game proper, this sucker is toast, unless Jackson fans are more rabid than they appear.
Michael Jackson fans are more more rabid they appear. My pedo joke (one of many that are showing up) got Flamebaited. Normally that would be appropriate, but in this case it's actually relevant to the subject at hand. The man was a pedophile.
Ah well. Once again, "flamebait" is used as the "your voice will not be heard" button.
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The man was a pedophile.
You need evidence. You need evidence because one day someone will accuse you of something like that and you will be desperately trying to convince everyone that it isn't true, and that evidence is not the plural of rumour.
As a young man I hung out in a social group which didn't care much for standard social etiquette. Sometimes we would all fall asleep under the covers of the same bed or floor together, male and female, single and partnered. It wasn't an orgy (honest, officer), nor a drunken heap (I still d
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First question on signup (Score:5, Funny)
To catch a predator... (Score:2, Funny)
Ok, on to the jokes.
1) Children under 13 need to ditch their parents in order to enter.
2) The MJMMO, the only place where you're payed to play!
3) Blue young hottie needs Jesus juice badly...
At level 40 milliion$, you can buy your 1st mount! (Score:5, Funny)
Well it is not so much buying, as paying off his parents.
They Are also introducing an SciFi themed Michael Jackson FPS called Alien vs Child Predator.
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Will this [funnyjunk.com] be the epic mount?
this aint right (Score:5, Insightful)
mod parent up (Score:2)
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A MMO based on abusing drugs, molesting little kids and buying white babies to claim they are your own? Just doesn't seen right.
Drinking potions to gain temporary stat bonuses, hunting down little people for fun, and hiring minions to go forth into dangerous situations? Seems like every other MMO to me...
Is this really just... (Score:3, Interesting)
If it isn't then this will make a great "Really?" segment on SNL's Weekend Update.
Re:Is this really just... (Score:5, Funny)
How come you're such a fussy young man?
Complaining 'bout the jokes if people come to play?
You better settle down, or be modded as a troll, so
quit it, just quit it.
Is there a reason you don't wanna behave?
Expecting stupid parodies or tech news you crave?
Just remember samzenpus is editor today, so
quit it, just quit it.
Quit it! Quit it! Don't you make me submit it!
Have an Insightful, have a +5,
if you don't like it then post some dumb flame, and
quit it (quit it, quit it)
Truly sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that he's dead the owners of his 'brand' will sell, sell, sell his image until it becomes a mere parody of someone famous.
I imagine he would have wanted better. Respect, for example.
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That was the case well before he was dead, and he did it himself. The rest of this is latent greed, just like all the inevitable "Michael Jackson Xth Anniversary Greatest Hits" album to be released every 5 years from here on out.
Re:Truly sad (Score:4, Insightful)
That was the case well before he was dead, and he did it himself. The rest of this is latent greed, just like all the inevitable "Michael Jackson Xth Anniversary Greatest Hits" album to be released every 5 years from here on out.
Eh, maybe, but I see this as distinct. They're making an MMO. This doesn't appear to be a product that would appeal to Michael fans NOR to MMO fans. It appears to be a blatant cash grab, with little-to-no actual reason for it to exist.
At least with the every-5-year CD's you're getting music on a disc that you might actually enjoy.
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I imagine he would have wanted better. Respect, for example.
Respect, yes... And a chimp
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He was a parody, king of of pedophiles. He was a good musician, but respect is not something he deserved.
I'm not arguing, per se, but there was an opportunity to 'change' that perception towards his legacy at least. Squandered it though, didn't they?
Ding! (Score:2)
<bangs head on table> (Score:2)
Catholic Priests will love this MMO (Score:2)
I'm holding out (Score:2)
The MJ MMO may be fun and all, but I'm holding out for the Ike and Tina MMO.
Kid Tested (Score:2)
Pedobear approved.
Would be a good idea with the right star... (Score:2)
Meanwhile, MMO is all about fantasy. Who in the world wants to be Michael Jackson? How is that fun?
Now David Bowie world - that would be off the hook! Everyone starts with a gun/sex toy and you can change your name, race or gender at any time. In fact, I am amazed Bowie doesn't already have a MMORPG.
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Who in the world wants to be Michael Jackson?
Pedophiles the world 'round?
MJ marketing will never die (Score:2)
I just can't wait! (Score:4, Funny)
I assume... (Score:2)
All kidding aside... (Score:2, Informative)
FPS version: Escape from Neverland (Score:3, Funny)
It's a first person shooter.
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I'd go for the father. He's pretty scary. Just scale him up a bit. With cannons of his shoulders.
Enough With The Trial By Media, Already (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet not one of those people bother to point out that there was never a criminal conviction on those charges. Instead they keep bashing him over what can't be taken to be anything more than accusations.
And if you think he did do what he was accused of, the person you should really be directing your anger at is the parents of the child who was victimized. Those parents would be roughly the fourth or fifth worst parents in the world; not only for allowing their young child to spend the night with a weirdo but then for dropping the charges in exchange for money. No decent parent, regardless of their financial situation, should ever be willing to compromise on matters of the law in exchange for money. Ever.
Re:Enough With The Trial By Media, Already (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet not one of those people bother to point out that there was never a criminal conviction on those charges.
There was also never a criminal conviction of Orenthal James Simpson. He was acquitted of murder but found liable for wrongful death months later.
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hmmmm lets see, I can set my kid up for life, paying his college fund and getting him a decent start in life, no this certainly doesn't make up for any molestation but it is certainly better than the alternative of get nothing and hope the legal system finds him guilty
The two did not need to be mutually exclusive. Had the accusations been deemed valid and a guilty verdict handed down as a result, the parents could have then sued him after that. Instead they dropped the charges - an almost unquantifiably selfish and greedy choice - and took the money.
Nothing can ever compensate for molestation but I would hardly call anyone bad parents that uses such a disgraceful act to help their child in life.
Who says that they actually helped their children with the money? They could have blown it on crack for all we know.
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The two did not need to be mutually exclusive. Had the accusations been deemed valid and a guilty verdict handed down as a result, the parents could have then sued him after that.
and had they found him innocent through insufficient evidence or simply him having better paid lawyers they would get nothing.
Instead they dropped the charges - an almost unquantifiably selfish and greedy choice - and took the money.
how the F@#$@# is it a greedy act to take what is on offer over a gamble of getting a conviction.
Who says that they actually helped their children with the money? They could have blown it on crack for all we know.
who says they blew it all on crack, they could have used it to save a thousand homeless children for all we know. wtf is your point here, assuming the worst of people just because you can?
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The two did not need to be mutually exclusive. Had the accusations been deemed valid and a guilty verdict handed down as a result, the parents could have then sued him after that.
and had they found him innocent through insufficient evidence or simply him having better paid lawyers they would get nothing.
The OJ Simpson case tells us that is simply not true.
Instead they dropped the charges - an almost unquantifiably selfish and greedy choice - and took the money.
how the F@#$@# is it a greedy act to take what is on offer over a gamble of getting a conviction.
It's greedy because if the offense alleged actually happened they owe it to other children to see it prosecuted and tried to the fullest extent of the law. If the offense actually occurred, and they neglected to pursue it, it likely happened again to other victims and the parents who neglected to pursue charges share the blame for those offenses.
Who says that they actually helped their children with the money? They could have blown it on crack for all we know.
who says they blew it all on crack,
Nobody. It is one of many options they could have pursued with the money.
they could have used it to save a thousand homeless children for all we know
We can speculate any of a great n
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but then for dropping the charges in exchange for money. No decent parent, regardless of their financial situation, should ever be willing to compromise on matters of the law in exchange for money. Ever.
The criminal justice system exists for the benefit of society (at best)
Which is precisely why a parent needs to see that a perpetrator who hurt their child is properly handled by the criminal justice system. If someone commits a crime against your child, you owe it to all the other children to see that the crime does not go unpunished. Otherwise the criminal will very likely commit a similar offense with another child later, and that offense will be your responsibility because you chose not to prevent it.
Indeed, any interaction between the criminal justice system and children is always an epic fail.
Not necessarily. What is an epic failure, however, is when the media
2004 called (Score:2, Funny)
They should have him in prison and have the beat (Score:2)
They should have him in prison and have him get beat up by all the other prisoners!
Previous Michael Jackson game (Score:3, Informative)
While not a MMO, there already was a Michael Jackson game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson's_Moonwalker [wikipedia.org]
Congrats to MJ! (Score:2)
It's nice to see all of this recent publicity for Michael, he's had it pretty rough for the last decade or so. Hopefully he'll be able to capitalize on all of this newfound attention and turn the corner on his financial woes given this huge surge in popularity.
What's that you say? Oh. Sorry to hear that.
Forget this (Score:2)
Babies (Score:2)
It's pitch black. (Score:2)
You are likely to be molested by a grue.
I predict (Score:2)
I predict michaelville to be home of the trolls.
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I think you have it backwards. You're character is a little boy and Michael rides YOU!!
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