An Australian video game designer has caused a major uproar Down Under with his creation of a game based on the Virginia Tech massacre.

Called V-Tech Rampage, the game has several levels of "stealth and murder," reports The Sydney Morning Herald.

But what really is causing the kerfuffle--as if the game itself wasn't in bad enough taste--is that its designer, Ryan Lambourn, says he will take the game down from his Web site only if the public comes up with a $2,000 payoff.

For another grand, he'll apologize...

-- Game designer causes uproar with Virginia Tech game (Tech News Blog)

I really need to add a "WTF" category to this blog.  I had heard about this peripherally and figured it was just an urban legend, but it's not.  In the last few days Sony released its new adult-oriented video game God of War II for the PlayStation console.  Recently they had a big "European launch party" in Greece for members of the press who write about video game news.  They tried to theme the party to match the nature of the game, so the party featured an actor dressed up as the hero from the game (okay, you might expect this), games involving throwing knives and pulling live snakes from pits (?), topless women who hand fed grapes to the guests (WTF?), and as a centerpiece, the decapitated carcass of a freshly slaughtered goat (WTF!!?).

Now it's not the first time Sony has done something amazingly stupid to promote their wares, but, as you can imagine not everyone was cool with a slaughtered animal being used as a "prop" at a party.  Guests were invited to reach into the goat's lacerated body, pull out entrails, and eat them.  The entrails had in fact been replaced with some sort of Greek dish that resembled intestines.  Yum.

If a goat had been killed and served as a dish which guests could eat, that probably would have been fine... I mean anyone who eats meat is eating a killed animal.  But to morbidly lay out a dead animal at your dinner party with its head hanging off as a lurid decoration?  That's just disgusting, cruel, morbid, and a waste of an animal.  According to Sony the goat carcass was purchased from a loal butcher and then returned to the butcher after the party.

Apparently it has finally occurred to Sony that this whole party really wasn't such a great idea.  Mostly because of the backlash from animal rights groups, Sony has issued an apology.

From Sony Apologizes For Decapitated Goat In 'God Of War' Launch (InformationWeek via Yahoo! News):
..."On this occasion we recognize that we fell short of our normal high standards of conduct and apologize for any offense caused," Sony said in a statement. "We are conducting an internal inquiry into the circumstances of the event in order to learn from the occurrence and put in place measures to ensure that this does not happen again."...

The article goes on and quotes animal rights activists decrying the use of the goat's carcass, and a professor of marketing who calls the party centerpiece "stupid".

Which is all expected of course, but what I find intriguing is that nobody quoted seems to have any complaints about topless women feeding grapes to the partygoers.  Okay, of course they are performers, and they were paid to perform this service, but it hardly seems appropriate for a video game launch party.  The use of "pretty girls" at product launches or other types of retail expositions is not a new thing, and includes some sort of compensation, typically money, but not always.  But this goes beyond anything I've heard of before.  I would expect something like this at say a strip joint* or something like that, but a video game launch party for the press?  WTF were they thinking?

Here's an article from 1Up.com recapping the event and including a picture which is probably NSFW.

That's effed up, yo.

*: Which is not to say I've ever been to a strip joint.  For the curious, no I haven't.  I have no interest in watching ecdysiasts perform live.  That would be way too embarrassing for me.