I am sure I'm not the only person out there that while playing a video game, if I see a url or domain name in a game curiousity gets the best of me and I try and load it up in a browser. I know I'm not the only one, but evidently Ubisoft doesn't as displayed by their recent oversight in Rainbow Six 3. Yes, Ubisoft put a link into the game and did not even bother to register the domain. One entrepreneurially minded man took advantage of their ignorance and allegedly slapped a porn site there (I say allegedly because I do not actually own a copy of Rainbox Six 3 and no news site is actually reporting the domain name, or providing a screenshot). Has no one learned anything from the lesson taught to us by Tommy Tutone's Jenny? For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Tommy Tutone released the song "Jenny" which contained the memorable phone number 867-5309 causing instant headaches for anyone who were unfortunate enough to actually possess that phone number. And that my friends, is why we have the 555 prefix for phone number. So, back to urls in video games. Ubisoft messed up - big time. They failed to register the domain and now if you go to it, you get redirected to a porn site. Thanks! Now, while I recognize they have no actual obligation to snatch up the domain it can do nothing but cover your ass. Either that or make it a completely invalid url so squatters can't litter your links with pornography.

Where Rainbow Six 3 should have covered their bets, Ubisoft should have just kept their links out of Beyond Good & Evil. For those of you not familiar with the game, you live in an alternate universe where there's only one twentysomething female girl on earth. And you've been raised by a pig. In this alternate world, there is the Internet! Despite the fact that there apparently are no communication outlets besides 'MDisk' kiosks that play newspapers as glorified postcards, and local hooligans loitering on the corner to give you the lowdown on the latest political intrigue there is this unseen, fictional Internet (I became quite fond of calling it 'Internet 2'). This "Internet" includes the Iris Network (your friendly neighborhood political activists) and Hillyan News (Hillyan being the world of Beyond Good & Evil). While the Hillyan News site doesn't contain a Hillyan police blotter, it at least conveys a sense of what the city is about, whereas the Iris Network site barely constitutes a website with very little in the way of actual content and the same Beyond Good & Evil 'Simulation' ad that Hillyan News features. It's just not very convincing, interesting to read or even worthwhile to visit.

Compare that to the mother of game/web tie-ins: GTA3. Pogo the Monkey, PetsOvernight.com, Dormatron (and the hub newspaper that blows away the Hillyan News, Liberty Tree), Rockstar had sprinkled these little inside joke sites across the Internet because after all, GTA3 actually took place in the present day. The sites were motivated by the world that the game populated and Rockstar covered themselves by actually registering the domains and doing something with them. You don't see domains being scrawled on scrolls in Zelda: Wind Waker do you? Of course not, that'd be ludicrous. However, that's exactly what Beyond Good & Evil's sites feel like. And the simple fact that Rockstar bothered to make sure they did something with the domains is a big step above Rainbow Six 3.

I suppose it may sound a bit cantankerous for me to complain about easter egg websites included in games but quite frankly, I'd rather that Ubisoft spent their time with Beyond Good & Evil by working out some of the bugs in the Gamecube version rather than sticking urls into the game, snickering to themselves about how cool this will be and how it will raise the bar for 'immersive multimedia entertainment'. The end result just doesn't work, and that's the point - don't put websites into your game if it doesn't work in the environment. There was absolutely no reason to put websites in Beyond Good & Evil like that, and all I hope is that companies will think before trying to throw more of these gimmicks into their games.

Can you think of any other games that have integrated websites into their games with either positive or negative effects? And I'm not talking about a site that contains your latest score, or ESPN Sports for your Sega Sports games - something that is integrated into the environment of the game. Let me know below!