3am: “Angry”
Even if you haven’t seen the back page column in the June issue of Computer Games Magazine, you can still get the gist of what’s going on from this wonderful letter written in response to it.
Letters like this make it all worthwhile. And while it’s possible that Deltaeagle is actually trolling me, I still wouldn’t enjoy his letter any less.
gg Matt.
Deltaeagle is one of the more active fans in the SWAT 4 community. He tends to get very worked up about things.
Either way, I’m not sure which piece is funnier: the article or the response.
Btw, here’s the related thread on my site’s forums: http://www.10-david.com/?p=forum_item&id=1190&self=21
Aww, man, the dude deleted his letter! That was seriously funny. Why’d he have to go and spoil it for everyone?
-TomI’ve been trying to get it in a google cache or something, but no luck.
Anyone got a cached copy or something?
If I’d known you wanted to save this lunacy, I never would have set him straight last night.
I apologize for being a helpful citizen.
And yeah, no google cache that I can find.
Troy
Summary?
This guy read Tom’s Three Finger Salute column in last month’s CGM. It was a send-up of overexcited parental protection groups and singled out SWAT 4 as a game in which you could incapacitate and then mace people or abuse them.
So Deltaeagle - taking all of this literally - writes an hysterical screed against the fictitious Delia Stone and takes up the cudgel for SWAT 4. He had angry smilies and everything.
Troy
And the obligatory rediculous/ridiculous mispelling.
Ah, rediculous.
Right up there with nucular.
The joys of people taking joke article’s seriously.
My favourite one when I was Gamer:
Fielded a random phone call, from someone who was working on an education book for secondary school. There was a module on advertising to niche demographics, and they wanted to know who they’d have to ask permission of to use an advert from a previous magazine. I said, naturally enough, the publisher. Which advert was it?
“Return to Castle Wittgenstein”
Return to Castle Wittgenstein was the previous issue’s joke back-page, which featured a badly photoshopped Staff Member and an array of elitist philopsophy based gags, mainly pulled directly from the texts*.
KG
*Also, the “Real-time metaphysics” one, which I’ve re-used twice since then. Shush!
Let’s not even get into the “fake ads” issue.
Sparky still gets e-mails from people wanting to publish Shadenfreude Interactive games in random European countries thanks to their fake ads in CGM and their fake website. People particularly like Nazgul Thunder 2004 and Need for Speed Underhill.
And kids on some Nintendo message board were very, very confused that Hannibal Crossing could exist. That was too cute. “Wouldn’t that be illegal?”
But I have to hand it to the Age of Empires site that had a full-blown strategy guide for Age of Ornithology. “How do you counter the robin rush?”
Tom made up some book once (if I recall), and I got a couple of calls from people wanting to buy it.
Those wacky guys at Versus books, who make those glossy sweet strat guides in between freebasing carb cleaner and chopping their editors up into suitcase-sized morsels, dropped a nerdgasmic joke into their BG2 start book. It was in the item list, and it read as follows:
Dragon Head of Destruction
[i]Location: The only place to find this idol is by defeating the entire staff of the Versus Books strategy guide.
This idol summons forth Craghackdor’izlsnizzt, the red dragon to end all red dragons. Not only can he jump through hoops and waterski slalom, but his overwhelming “stink powers” shall everyone and everything in his path…[/i]
Humour on that level was roughly par for the course for those retards, who never met an ellipses they didn’t like. However, the actual funny part of that IQ-draining passage was the forums on planetbaldursgate and the like, a veritable flood of THE RED DARGON HED WERE DO U FIND IT.
Although, the funniest BG-related forum explosion was over the bugged, broken BG1 quest where two thieves poisoned you with a special poison that killed the entire party in 2 weeks’ game time, unless you hunted them down and got their special antidotes. But, ha ha, OOPS one their antidotes was often bugged ad was a gernic antidote, so you never were able to heal yourself, then you played two weeks worth of game time game playing, and then your whole party died YEEEARGH. God, the BG1 forums totally ruled.
There was a similar spate of idiocy over the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, which some dudes in a random special encounter in Fallout were looking for, in what I believe was a flimsy Monty Pyhton riff.
Kinda like you and italics.
And the obligatory rediculous/ridiculous mispelling.[/quote]
What about the obligatory mispelling/misspelling misspelling? :P
I thought I knew how to spell “no one”, but I have seen soooooo many people spell it noone or no-one, I am pretty sure it will have 2 or more accepted spellings in the near future.
I wish you (Tom) had done this article for a later issue so we could get to bottom of how serious this percolating issue of holy book desecration in games is. In the US, I am guessing an E+, maybe, but in some regions overseas an M would be in order, of course, or maybe a complete ban on sales to anyone.
Shall we meet at Ye Olde Sandwyche Shoppe at Noone? “No one” is always two separate words, unlike “anyone” and “someone.”
I am going to save the above quote for the next time. :)
Yes, but it has been shown again and again that if enough misguided souls repeat it in print, the Webster’s folks will just slap it into the next edition. Jiggy and crunk are going to be added in 2008 I hear.
Crunk? That’s a new one for me.
Troy
Really? All it takes is flipping past MTV, turning on an R&B station, or walking by a car booming rap music. That is the new tired Rap word du jour. It kinda means getting your party on.