Master Chief Mod for Unreal Tournament Elicits Hilarity

Oh Microsoft, you so crazy! Allowing your lawyer to talk all that smack on his blog about your direct rival? Not what we'd call "tactful", but hilarious none the less. Microsoft lawyer (and serious smack-talker) Don McGowan, writing on his blog in response to the Business Week post regarding the use of a Master Chief mod in Unreal Tournament (on the PS3), had this to say:

"Actually it's nothing more than the Game Content Usage Rules in action. When these were developed, people all thought they were focused on machinima. The truth is that while they do address machinima they also allow for a lot of other things. Mods like this are one of them. The developers aren't selling the mod, they're not monetizing Microsoft's IP, they're just creating something to share their love of the Master Chief on a new platform. It's a great thing for us and a great thing for the gaming community. And much though I love my friends at Epic, Unreal Tournament isn't Halo. This will also remind people of just how great the Halo games are and remind them that if they're done with the user-created faux-Halo experience, the real Halo is available only on the Xbox 360. And no one is taking characters from PlayStation games (do they even have any games?) and putting them on our platform..."

Now we know this is a "playful stab" at their competitor but we can't help but point out it smacks a bit of arrogance and (especially given the internet-savvy profile of the gaming community) doesn't help to bolster Microsoft's "street cred" with the gaming pubic at large. While many commenters on his blog immediately pointed out that Microsoft's platform is so locked down that it wouldn't allow for this kind of user generated content, and thus why you haven't seen mods like this showing up in Xbox 360 games, we'd like to calmly point out Rock Band's character creation (though limited, we understand) as well as the fact that you can import YOUR FACE into Rainbow Six: Vegas (1 + 2, no?) Importing Kratos it is not, but the system isn't exactly hermetically sealed.

To be perfectly honest, though he clearly didn't need to post his two cents about Sony's game lineup, we prefer when these types actually say something that isn't straight up PR speak such as this. One commenter on his blog entry even went as far as to call him a fanboy -- he works for Microsoft, people! ::collective sigh:: Oh the internet...