Debunking Clamdigger

There's an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force that, unlike many of the episodes of the show, I find actually funny. Well, that and the Bible Fruits episode. And the Handbanana episode.

Anyways, in the episode "Super Computer," (season 2 episode 4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Aqua_Teen_Hunger_Force_episodes#Season_2:_2003) Meatwad discusses one of his favorite games which is called Clamdigger. (Or is it Clam Digger?) For some odd reason after watching it again recently I decided to see if this was, in fact, a real game.

Google searches returned a website called everything2.com with an article claiming that it was a real game; a game that the publisher eventually shelved amidst concerns that it might cause children to kill themselves. However, something felt fishy. A visit to the everything2 home page portrays it as something of a user submitted content page where you can submit whatever you feel like. There's quite a wide range of things on there. The entire thing is pretty much harmless. Except that there's a few websites (about.com and another) that have used it as a source to verify the actual existence of Clamdigger. For some reason this bothered me.

If you'll notice the ASCII image of Tyrone looks a lot like Ash Ketchum with his hat's logo changed to a T.


Maybe it's just me. Or maybe it's the fact that "Adrian Damenschnitzel" seems like a rediculously fake name. And then on top of that, "Damen Schnitzel" translated from German to English turns out to be "ladies shreds". Or that googling "Adrian Damenschnitzel" only returns the everything2 article and two places that use it as a source to verify the existence of the Clamdigger game.

I'm not saying there's a huge conspiracy. I'm not even really sure what I'm saying. I just think it's amusing that even about.com was tricked into believing that this game is actually real.

Evony steals true advertisements, spams and more! High five!

If you're not familiar with the latest cancer that is surging through the internet, I would be surprised. I can't go three minutes without seeing another advertisement for a brower game named Evony. Previously called Civony, the name was changed for reasons unknown (to me, at least). Evony is owned by a Chinese company called UMGE, which specializes in selling gold to people who play World of Warcraft. I suppose this means they specialize in hacking and stripping WoW accounts, employing key loggers and other types of malware to achieve their goal. Then again, I'm just guessing on that one.

Anyhow, their advertisements have progressed from a picture of a knight in armor with the tag "Play for free!" to a picture of a woman in a fairy costume they stole from a costume site, to now something equally hilarious. They have stooped to stealing advertisement material from another internet sleaze machine: the True online dating service.



Hilarious, to be sure, but it just shows how low that UMGE will go to attract customers to its game without having to spend a lot of time coming up with advertising. If you're going to just steal pictures from a costume website and plagiarize a dating service's advertisements, why not just spam people too?

UMGE claims that the people who are doing the spamming are part of a program they have created that will reward their players with credits for referrals, but it seems very unlikely me to me that the average player would go that far for credits for what is almost assuredly an incredibly mediocre Civilization clone.