GamePolitics is reporting the Florida Supreme Court ruled this morning that attorney Jack Thompson, controversial anti-video-game-violence activist and frequent critic of Take-Two Interactive, can no longer submit documents to the Court. He must now hire a lawyer of his own to submit documents to the Court on his behalf.

This ruling comes after Thompson “submitted over fifty filings directly with [the] Court, all of which [were] forwarded to the referee, dismissed, or denied.” The Florida Supreme court found many of the documents Thompson submitted to be “inappropriate and pornographic,” in particular a “children’s picture book for adults” Thompson used to visually express his position to the Court with images of

swastikas, kangaroos in court, a reproduced dollar bill, cartoon squirrels, Paul Simon, Paul Newman, Ray Charles, a handprint with the word “SLAP!” written under it, Bar Governor Benedict P. Kuehne, a baby, Ed Bradley, Jack Nicholson, Justice Clarence Thomas, Julius Caesar, monkeys, and a house of cards.

Wait, seriously? In that case, these sanctions should come as no surprise to anyone, including Jack Thompson himself.

You can read the order issued by the Court (PDF) over at GamePolitics in its entirety. It’s short, shockingly light on legalese, and more entertaining than it has any right to be. In fact, at this point I think we can safely classify Jack Thompson as the most entertaining lawyer outside of Law & Order.

It should be noted that this ruling has nothing to do with Thompson’s ongoing Florida bar trial.

I’ve been downloading every MMORPG I can get my hands on for a top secret project that’ll hopefully go live some time this week. These days, “PC gaming” is more or less synonymous with “publishers drooling over World of Warcraft’s profits,” as every major company pushes to get their WoW-killer out the door, stretching the limited MMORPG playerbase over more and more virtual worlds. And why not? MMORPGs are licenses to print money, even the bad ones—and let’s be honest here, 94.34% of them are insufferable garbage. MMORPGs are virtually piracy-proof, require monthly fees to play, and their server and bandwidth costs aren’t nearly as high as publishers hope you believe. If you can make a living selling virtual currency, or even farming that virtual currency, you can make a God’s honest killing on even a barely successful MMO.

Yet, despite the genre’s transition to the mainstream of gaming and its position as the poster child for PC gaming, little has changed since EverQuest, Ultima Online, and the MUDs before that. These are games designed to feature a lot of content that takes a lot of time. It’s funny, then, that the free MMORPG trial, the frayed end of the rope publishers use to string new customers through several thousand hours of life-destroying addiction, matches the content of their games so perfectly. Funny in that “how and why do people stand for this” sort of way.

My hard drive is no doubt a fragmented mess at this point, having been on the receiving end of over a dozen MMORPG installations and uninstallations over the last several days. Every MMORPG follows that same installation process: (1) download 2 GB file, in either .exe or .zip flavors; (2) extract 3 GB of install files from initial download; (3) install 4 GB game; (4) spend upwards of an hour downloading years of patches. It seems to me like there’s more than a few ways to optimize this procedure, like oh, I don’t know, including those 500 MBs of patches with the original client for starters. But MMORPG players are gluttons for punishment. This is a genre that until recently featured interfaces so unusably terrible, players defended the acrobatic keystrokes and developer-mind-reading telepathy required to use them for baring those unable to decipher them at the virtual gates. The only MMORPG that offers a free trial experience that functions as something other than a metaphor for rape is, unsurprisingly, World of Warcraft, whose small client streams content as you need it, and doesn’t require a single patch. It’s no wonder they have ten times the subscribers as their closest competition.

However, not all MMORPGs offer free trials. Typically, when you buy a PC game you own it now and forever; if you really want to play SimCity Societies a decade from now, you’re more than welcome to. But when you purchase an MMORPG, you’re merely paying for the right to log on and pay your monthly dues. If you don’t like the game, you’re left with a very expensive (and very ineffectual) coaster. Surprisingly, many of the MMORPGs that don’t offer free trials are the ones that need them most: City of Heroes with its unique, comic book setting; The Matrix Online with its love of tradition and its upholding of the crappy Matrix video game legacy; and Vanguard, if only to prove that it’s not quite as unplayable as everyone claims. Truthfully, there’s a lot of sense in not offering a free trial in the first few months of an MMO’s life, as the influx of tourists degrade the experience for early adopters. Still, when your entire business model is built around trapping unknowing players in a deep pit of addiction and then extorting a regular fee from them so they can continue to enjoy their drug of choice, it only makes sense to give them the chance to get hooked in the first place.

Basically, what I’m saying is this: Spending four hours just to extract a single sound file from an MMORPG is unnecessarily painful. If I was actually interested in playing any of these, I’d have lost whatever whim inspired me to download them in the first place between the time I finished extracting install files for twenty minutes to save someone a few bucks on their bandwidth bill and confirming my e-mail address.

Oh, well. At least my trek through the poo-colored hills of MMORPGland allowed me to rediscover Guild Wars, which, it turns out, is excellent. Shame I was too busy wishing it was World of Warcraft back in 2005.

There’s a reason most people get up and leave during a movie’s closing credits: They’re boring, and no five second Easter egg is going to change that fact. Video game credit sequences aren’t any more interesting. White text scrolls across a black background, and if we’re really lucky, we get a few pieces of concept art or recycled FMVs to hold our interest. Unfortunately, we can’t just get up and leave; we’re already home. And besides, someone has to be around to save our data and unlock that New Game+ feature.

Thankfully, some developers realize that 99% of their players don’t care who they are or what they did for the game, gladly giving us one final piece of entertainment as we wait for our last unlockable prize. The entertaining video game credit sequence is a relatively recent phenomenon, however, as the transition to optical media (ten years ago) finally gave developers enough space to waste on such frivolousness. Early on, many publishers demanded that their developers use pseudonyms to avoid being sniped away by the competition. There’s little incentive to make a credit sequence interesting when you can’t even put your own damn name in it. As such, this is new territory with precious few video examples online. In fact, GamesRadar appears to be the only site on the Internet to ever put together a similar feature, displaying no misgivings about posting a 30-minute speed run someone else uploaded just for the 2-minute credit sequence at the end. If it’s good enough for GamesRadar, it’s good enough for The DORK Club. Actually, no, scratch that. We’re better than that, and the last four hours I spent editing videos proves it.

But enough talk! Below you’ll find the top ten video game credit sequences… OF ALL TIME lovingly arranged in descending order from least to most top. Whether they’re interactive wonders that are just as fun as the games that precede them or delightfully comical reminders that video games are not, in fact, serious business, these are the most creative and entertaining credit sequences the medium has ever produced.

It should go without saying, but WARNING: There be spoilers in them thar hills!

10. Typing of the Dead

After spending a rigorous half an hour murdering zombies with a Dreamcast keyboard and improving your typing skills, spending the last few minutes typing out the Japanese Developers’ names as they scroll by seems perfectly normal. As the credits progress, zombies burst free from their zombie-sized test tubes and perform the Thriller dance in sync, threatening to distract you from typing “Shibamiya Osamu” without any typos. Clearly, Smilebit was one of the few creative teams left at Sega. Shame about that whole second-party developers being folded back into Sega following the Sega-Sammy merger thing. Alas, Smilebit, we hardly knew yee.

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In early December, I had an interview for a job that involved dealing with gaming mods as part of its responsibilities. Had I got the job, I would have had a company blog to do with as I pleased. In a pathetic exercise in wish fulfillment, I brainstormed a few ideas I could turn into posts there, figuring that if they decided I wasn’t good enough for them (and let’s be honest with ourselves here, things were clearly pointing in that direction), I could use them as the basis for updates here.

So! A top ten list! I hear everyone on the Internet loves those. Let me clearly define my terms by reminding everyone that “top” is a random combination of objective quality, historical significance, and personal bias.

“Enough talk! Have at you!” Etc.

10. Battlefield: Galactic Conquest (Battlefield 1942)
In retrospect, covering the team-based, vehicle-heavy gameplay of a Battlefield or Tribes game with a fresh coat of Star Wars paint seems like a no-brainer. And yet, before Galactic Conquest, nobody had bothered, including LucasArts. The mod allowed players to relive famous battles from the original trilogy and Clone Wars, making for some shockingly effective fantasy fulfillment. Best of all, there were no Jedis in sight, just two teams of 32 players each, a whole mess of Star Wars vehicles, and tried-and-true Battlefield gameplay. The mod was such an obvious use of a famous license that LucasArts saw fit to royally rip it off, leading to the wildly successful Star Wars Battlefront series (and the wildly annoying Star Wars Battlefront PSP ads).

9. BTmod (The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion)
In their rush to get the game out the door within the Xbox 360’s launch window, Bethesda made one obvious oversight: An interface designed to work with a control pad and look great on a standard definition television doesn’t always measure up when ported to the PC. Some clever mod makers quickly answered the call, greatly shrinking the size of on-screen text and optimizing the game’s interface for PC players. While the list of changes doesn’t sound like much – weapon durability now shows up on the main HUD, map and inventory screens are enlarged – this short list of seemingly simple changes had a huge impact on the game, greatly reducing the time players spent fumbling through cumbersome menus. Of course, the mod was also only available on the PC, further cementing the PC version of Oblivion as the definitive version of the game, even without achievements.

8. Garry’s Mod (Half-Life 2)
When it was first released, it was hard to imagine the point of a mod that allowed users to spawn and manipulate objects and characters in the world of Half-Life 2. Sure, it was fun to crucify scientists, but outside of making funny screenshots, what was the use? Oh, how naïve we were. Garry’s Mod has become an indispensable tool for machinima makers, leading to hilarious interpretations of bad fanfiction and crazily complex virtual Rube Goldberg devices. It’s also proven itself as a welcome addition to any map maker’s arsenal, allowing mappers to enter and edit their maps from a first-person perspective. The mod’s become so successful, in fact, that it now costs $9.95 through Steam, joining the short list of mods that have gone retail.

7. Natural Selection (Half-Life)
Natural Selection managed to out Alien vs. Predator every Alien vs. Predator game, pitting heavily-armed space marines against monstrous aliens. Blending real-time strategy with a first-person shooter, Natural Selection featured the sort of bird’s-eye-view commander gameplay made popular by Battlefield 2 a full four years before EA’s behemoth hit store shelves. The mod was an Alien fanboy’s wet dream, featuring tight, claustrophobic corridors soaked with xenomorphic goo that played host to an endless online battle between the resourceful space marines and the efficiently deadly aliens. The Half-Life 2 sequel can’t come soon enough.

6. CTRaid (World of Warcraft)
Before The Burning Crusade, serious World of Warcraft raiding guilds had three requirements for new members: (1) you needed to be level 60, (2) you needed to have mostly decent gear, and (3) you needed CTRaid. The interface mod improved on Blizzard’s default raiding interface by adding ready checks, main tank targets, and built-in boss mods. Blizzard has since pilfered CTRaid’s most interesting features, reworking them into their default interface. Still, for the first couple years of its life, no World of Warcraft mod was as popular or as necessary as CTRaid.

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No words. Too funny. Apologies for content-less YouTube update. SERIOUS REVIEW post later today.

P.S. There’s more.

This image (alt text: “Halo movie stop-motion epic confirmed”) has tripled the site’s traffic over the last week. Clearly, images searches are valuable tools.

Rather than let this newfound traffic go to waste, as has always been this site’s guiding philosophy in the past, let me instead point all you disappointed Halo fans to my eBay auctions. Haven’t you always wanted the inferior PS2 version of Killer 7 or the stupidly overpriced Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II (now with no servers to play it on!)? Well then, now’s your chance! And look, a used copy of Ikaruga! Buy it now before it shows up for a third of the price on XBLA! RADIANT SILVERGUN SATURN ISO ROM XXX!

Clearly, project Figure Prints is go.

Tomorrow: Watch as I use 1500 words to say “Super Mario 64 DS is Super Mario 64 with more content and poor controls.”

The top ten list (here a term I will use to define a “top” list with any number of ranked items) has become an Internet staple, the lowest common denominator of online content. Listing off the “best,” “greatest,” or “top,” things in a given category easily generates hits – there’s nothing a Google cache loves more – and promotes rapid, mostly unintelligible discussion. As I previously mentioned, CRACKED.com basically exists only to list things in descending order. Any video game site with “game” in its URL will gladly create an arbitrary list of stuff and bill it as a feature article to buy time while the intern transcribes the David Jaffe interview. No less than 30% of GorillaMask’s content (I’m told it’s a very popular site) is comprised of links to lists, almost always of the top ten variety; there have already been three posted so far today. A top ten list requires very little work and has the potential to reap the sort of epic rewards that can only come handed down from Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and the other Gods of Web 2.0 on high.

The problem I have with these lists, our own better-left-forgotten example included, is their general failure to define their terms. This failure of clarity is generally the reason people rant and rave over the content of these sorts of things. Normally these lists use catchall terms like “greatest” or “top” to rank items based on non-transparent criteria. Technical excellent, overall importance or influence, and personal bias are each factored into a final ranking. The real problem here is that there is a difference between “best,” “important,” and “favorite.” “Best” describes technical excellence, an undisputed, quantifiable quality; “important” measures a thing’s originality, influence, and impact; and “favorite” is largely based on personal bias, it ignores obvious flaws in favor of personal preference. Unfortunately, these terms are often used interchangeably.

Now it’s time to have my cake and eat it too. Let’s say I was going to list the five best, most important, and my five personal favorite video games from the last hardware generation, Dreamcast excluded. In this example, I’ll go against standard listing conventions and rank my items from top to bottom rather than bottom to top. See if you can spot the differences.

Because nobody cares and I don’t want to make this update any more retarded and space-filling than it already is, the reasons for these ranking will be relegated to a very special blogger’s commentary edition of the comments.

Though there is some overlap, clearly the lists are ranked based on different (and clearly labeled) criteria. GameSpy’s infamous 25 Most Overrated Games of All Time feature, despite having what appear to be clearly defined terms, still falls prey to the general murkiness of “top” lists. By lumping together games that were disappointing and overhyped with the titular overrated games, GameSpy produced a list no better than a general “greatest” list. Of course, this very same ambiguity lead to a tremendous amount of online discussion, and therefore an equally tremendous number of pageviews.

People love lists, even bad ones. They give folks a chance to quickly and efficiently express an option using numerical ranks. Lists are clean, orderly, and promote discussion. And here on the Internet, where “discussion” means poorly proofread attacks and lengthy opinionated stories leading nowhere in particular, the list is a mighty useful tool, regardless of its quality.

Now everyone sign up for a Listology account and compile lists of the “greatest” DORK Club updates.

In the last 24 hours, Halo 3 made more money than either Spider-Man 3 or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows did within the same time period. Congratulations on your newest $170 million, Microsoft. No adjustment has been made to take the difference in price between a $10 movie ticket, a $20 book, and a $120 cat helmet into effect. Regardless, be sure to celebrate with a Halo 3-themed Whopper meal and the largest bottle of Game Fuel you can get your greasy gaming hands on. I’ll be doing my part.

The perfect video game: Diablo 3 co-developed by Blizzard North and Flagship Studios. No monthly fee. Monthly patching. So much character customization that it is technically impossible for two identical characters to exist. Simultaneous release on Mac, PC, and all major home consoles. The final boss is Bill Roper’s head on a stick.

The perfect movie: a western staring Kevin Costner, Christian Bale, David Bowie, and a CGI young Clint Eastwood voiced by Kurt Russel. A total running time of just under four hours. No gun is fired until the last 15 minutes.

The perfect TV series: Law & Order: Trial by Transformers. Taking place in the mid-1980s, a young Jack McCoy teams up with Prowl and Nightbeat to bring justice to the streets of Autobot City on Earth. Teletran-1 serves as the city’s DA. All cases, in one way or another, involve the Witwicky family.

The perfect novel: a rogue AI from the future accidentally ends up in 1930s New York. It becomes a Christ-like figure for a community of poor Jews. Every fifth word is a Biblical reference. Every seventh word is an anagram of a Biblical reference. Every nineteen word is “boi.”

Konami has gone to great lengths to protect the integrity of its franchises in recent years. Sure, they’ve completely mishandled the Legend of the Mystical Ninja series (Ganbare Goemon, if you’re a “core” gamer) and there’s that large, brown smudge on their otherwise fine smelling track record called Every Nintendo 64 Game The Company Released, but Konami learns from its mistakes. After disasters like Legacy of War and C: The Contra Adventure, Konami used the Playstation 2 as the staging ground for a Contra comeback with Shattered Soldier and Neo Contra. The former is a Treasure-developed boss fight hell; the latter is a wacky Smash TV clone with poor controls. Though the upcoming Contra 4 looks to be all flavors of awesome with a side of “it’s about damn time,” the PS2 games, for all their faults, should not be so quickly forgotten. Today, let’s not forget Neo Contra.

Upon first starting the game, players are immediately deafened by the sort of blaring, electronic video game rock that hasn’t been in vogue since the days of the Ocean action platformer. In fact, in a lot of ways, Neo Contra harkens back to a simpler time when video game heroes were muscle-bound meatheads with full heads of hair and a game’s story was written entirely by a Japanese level designer and localized by a PR flunky. Bill Rizer, star of the original Contra, is awoken from cryogenic sleep and teamed with a gun-totting samurai named Jaguar. Together, they must kill the four members of Neo Contra, an elite force that includes the likes of Animal Contra, a pit bull in WWI-style military uniform complete with a Pickelhaube, and the beautiful but deadly Pheromone Contra.

Cutscenes bridge levels, highlight boss fights, and feature an over-the-top absurdity reminiscent of Karamri Damacy. Bill and Jaguar exchange deathly serious dialogue with hilariously named characters such as Mystery G. Our heroes travel between levels by blasting themselves out of volcanoes, riding in the warheads of space missiles, or saddling up on armored dinosaurs. One of the levels even has the characters running along helicopter blades, tiptoeing with alarming speed in order to keep up with their rotating perch. Neo Contra takes the sillier elements that have always been present in the Contra series and ratchets them up to the extreme. Players battle four-legged tongues, surf on torpedoes, and blast boulder-riding robots with arching beams of electricity. This overwhelming, seemingly random wackiness permeates the entire experience, keeping players grinning at both its sheer stupidity and inspired brilliance.

Unfortunately, the game doesn’t play as well as it looks. Neo Contra is not a side-scrolling shooter like most entries in the Contra series, its PS2 brother in arms Shattered Soldier included. Instead, Neo Contra is a top-down shooter in the same vein as Robotron 2084 or Smash TV (or, more accurately, the top-down levels in Contra 3). That’s all well and good; I love a top-down shooter as much as the next guy. Hell, I even played through Robotron 64. But rather than feature directional firing and aiming via use of the second analog stick or face buttons themselves, players are given only a single fire button that shoots in the same direction they are facing. This is bad. To make up for this, Konami instead allows players to use the L2 button to lock the direction they’re facing – allowing the D-pad or analog stick to be used for strafing – or to use R2 to lock their character in place, thereby allowing for 360 degree aiming. Neither system works particularly well, and players will find most of their deaths coming from enemies standing directly next to them as they are left with no sufficiently quick method to eliminate these threats. Such a glaring control oversight is particularly damning given that Konami’s own Contra 3, released 12 years earlier, at least lets players use the shoulder buttons to rotate their characters, allowing for greatly simplified aiming. And only two of Contra 3’s six levels were top-down.

Thankfully, Neo Contra is a very easy game. Too easy, in fact. Actually, were it not for the lackluster controls, dying in Neo Contra would be a near impossibility. Still, the game is playable, even if its control options prevent it from stranding on equal footing with other games in its genre. There’s a lot to unlock – weapons, playable characters, new levels – but unless you’re completely won over by the game’s presentation, or at least enough to stomach the poor controls, there’s very little incentive to do so.