How to meet girls on the internet:
Tip #1: Never, EVER be honest.

'My Drugs Hell' by adventure game star Synbios
Here's something we wrote a full three years ago -- May of 1999 to be precise -- which was never used at the time. It was recently rediscovered in a Word document entitled "ideasNEW.doc" during a hard drive clean-up operation to remove possibly incriminating images. It is presented here as monument to funnier times (NOTE: Synbios was the star of Sega Saturn RPG Shining Force III).

"My Drugs Hell" by adventure game star Synbios Synbios, the respected leader of the Shining Force III team, was a drug-user throughout his career, selling weapons in seedy village shops to fuel his drug- crazed battles, it was revealed yesterday. “I bought my stuff from the village shops. At first I just visited them to buy weapons and food, but after a while I noticed the ‘herbal’ remedies designed to restore your power. POWDER Shameful Synbios, now 38 and working part-time in a scroll rental shop in Magicia, added: “I started with the weaker stuff, you know, mushrooms and food to restore my strength a bit, until one day a shop assistant offered me some Magic Powder. “It was great! My strength returned, I had more stamina and felt more like a warrior. I started making excuses to visit the shops –- so-and-so needs a new sword, what’s-his-name needs better armour -- any excuse to get some more Powder. “Soon I was selling my weapons to buy more stuff. At one stage my whole team’s inventory consisted of 78,000 gold coins worth of Magic Powder, and I got through the lot in one afternoon while trying to get women to join my party in a local bar. “The Healing Potion was the worst, it made me feel invincible. I would go into a battle, with no weapons or team mates, and take on five, maybe six Dragons at a time, just using my attack turns to freebase Healing Powder to restore my strength. EMPTINESS “I think it was the loneliness of being on the road all the time. New villages, new people, constant battles, it makes you feel empty sometimes. The shop staff were always so friendly, they would take anything in exchange for gear, no questions asked, they’d always do me a good deal. “Some mornings I would wake up and not know which realm I was in,” he continued. “During one battle, I was so off my face I sent my Monk off to fight an army of 50 orc warriors on his own, while I just used all of my turns to search the woods for mushrooms and minerals I could sell for drugs. The Monk was killed in two turns. Nothing could take away the shame of that day, and that senseless death, in part, forced Synbios to make a change. “I knew I had to do something when I swapped my father’s legendary Phoenix Sword for a two-ounce bag of Magic Pollen. That was my low point. I was doing the lot then –- Fairy Dust, Wizard Juice, Mushrooms, Magic Cheese, the works. “I used to give the Fairy Dust to my Magician, and get her to cast it over me for an extra kick,” he shamefully added. “I would stand in the middle, position my team members around me, and get them to use their turns to cast various potions over me. I would sell their weapons so they could carry more drugs. “Lots of them died that way – I sold their weapons and wouldn’t let them fight, what could they do? What could they do? I let them down, but I only thought about the Fairy Dust. Dust was ruling everything.“ “I gave up on my original quest, and was only interested in going to villages that I knew had good dealers,” he continues. “I can only guess how many villages were destroyed because I didn’t help them.” HEALTH POINTS He says he’s on the road to recovery now. “It’s been six months since I last touched Dust. Sega has me on Elf Methadone, which helps. Sega has really supported me through this, but they try to keep me out of the spotlight, you know, so the kids don’t get the wrong idea. “I’m really looking forward to Dreamcast,” he adds hopefully. “I can’t play RPGs any more, too painful, so I’m getting into racing games. “Sega hasn’t been in touch about a Shining Force game on Dreamcast yet.” A Sega spokesman said: “Ten gold coins each, three for twenty, mate”.
	Synbios (far right) idolised by kids, now revealed as sick drug user.
	One of the many hallucinations Synbios would suffer during the course of each day.
	“Can I have two wraps of Fairy Dust and one ounce of Magic Cheese" -- Store security cameras caught him buying his next fix.

UNSPEAKABLY SHIT PHOTOSHOP JOKE OF THE WEEK FOR YOU TO EMAIL ROUND ALL YOUR FRIENDS AND CO-WORKERS LIKE YOU'RE SOME BIG FUCKING COMEDY GENIUS WHO ALWAYS FINDS EVERYTHING ON THE INTERNET FIRST:

#4: A rapidly changing selection of images which may
or may not have some sort of clever meaning.

CHART ANALYSIS!
Same as before. It's summer, what do you expect? Everyone's too busy sipping £3.50 fruit smoothies in street cafes and watching girls walk past pulling their jeans up to hide their knickers to think about games. If you're thinking about games -- shame on you.

Ikaruga Countdown
10,002, 10,001, 10,000, 9,999, 9,998, 9,997, 9,996 -- Yes! Under three weeks! Black or white? Black or white, asshole, black or white?

Shit things about the internet. #4: Instant Messaging
It's not simply the infuriating boredom of a five minute conversation spread out over two hours, it's those infinitely more hurtful moments when people don't contact you that really do the damage. You're online, they're online, you both have a clearly visible small icon signalling that the other is online. But why aren't they talking to you? Don't they like you any more? Do you bore them? Or are they… talking to someone else more adept at using brackets and colons to express emotion?

Mobiles, email, instant messaging -- being constantly contactable makes it all the more depressing when no one bothers and you're left there alone staring at a small icon that never flashes.

Still, it passes the time.

Other things that aren't funny any more. #4 Getting letters
As a kid you'd get eight letters a year, and they were all birthday cards full of cash and book tokens (although, of course, we only ever used them for CDs. If only grandma knew the truth). As an adult you get two letters every day, and they're all from major corporations trying to strip away what little money you haven't already transferred directly to them by direct debit that month. Letters are no longer about giving, they are about taking away.

Oh, for a hand-written envelope, or anything that isn't from Lewisham Council asking why you don't seem to have paid any Council Tax for the last seven years and if they find you they now have a court order legally entitling them to KILL YOU in lieu of payment. Pizza delivery pamphlets are the only exciting things that come through our door nowadays, and we've had to cut right down on them too due to age-related metabolism issues. If only we had the bravery to rip open those veins and end it all.

Frozen in time!
When Sega sites give up. Numer Four: Video Game Express, frozen in time, September 7, 1999.

Sample quote: "While on the subject of DreamCast, it is reported that Sega is not going to put their name or logo anywhere on the product. The feel it will sell better without the Sega name. I think this sounds like a company without any confidence. We'll have to wait and see if it works out for them".

NOTE: Not all of the news links work. But well done on not losing the domain name to cybersquatters. Ahem.

SUBmissions/DOMain
You're all so dirty. We like you. Thanks for joining in. This is what we've been sent this week.

SUBMISSION ALPHA:
This little pic from "Acid Wario" that (hopefully ironically) encapsulates the endless struggle for domination that rages between the two gameplay legends. Ahh, how we used to doodle the very same image inside our business studies work folders back in 1992.

SUBMISSION BETA:
The Fujitsu-Siemens promotional image archive wins over yet more fans! We'd love to print T-shirts of these, if only they weren't the actual copyrighted property of the Fujitsu-Siemens corporation. This nice variation comes from long time reader and first time submitter Jay Filmer, and, frankly, is very very good and much better than the one we've done ourselves. Wanker.

SUBMISSION, ER, THREE-DRA:
We converted this to a .gif which took the file size down from the original jpeg's 37.3k to a more compact 19k. That's the sort of thing that makes us happy these days. We complimented the submitter (Andrew Doyle) on making the characters small so you couldn't tell he was shit at drawing.

SUBMISSION... FOUR-O:
Entirely text-based performance art. Presented in its original format as the writer intended and making no sense whatsoever from the enigmatic "Matt #".

look at me i'm a frickin internet comedy genious:
***
im fed up of prissy girls, gimme a tomboy anyday says:
just invited a few ppl to throw some ideas at me

google is your friend says:
can i throw bricks instead
***

notice how the lack of puntion makes me soooo funneh (LOL!!!)

note: this was taken from an actual conversation between me and bill gates
and thats a fact

CoD

That's it. We were also sent a cool animated Shockwave image of a woman getting her tits out, but at 500k we had to reject it on basis of size. Sorry Matt Bennet. It's a miracle the web hosting account has stood for us this long, we're not taking any risks. Oh, and someone sent us a link to Superbad which we were reading, like, three years ago, duude. Keep up.

Submit to us to see your stuff here -- almost guaranteed.

Great jobs for paedophiles!
God, the media has been glamourising paedophilia for so long it's getting hard to resist. If you or a bald, fat, 49-year-old local government worker who still lives with his parents friend of yours is considering becoming a paedophile, we present this handy guide to excellent paedo-careers. The pay's bad, but the potential for "innocent touching" is high.

Yes, we just drew it. That's a fat bald man's back, just
in case you couldn't tell. Please don't analyse the handwriting.

Fun with the Fujitsu-Siemens promotional photo archive!
The non-ironic wonders of promotional photography never cease to amaze. Look at that man. Don't you want to kill him? Run a knife along his thick, five-o'clock-stubbled jaw line and plunge the blade deep into his sagging, desperate, sarcasm-free flesh? Then laugh as his fake photographic family flees in terror after witnessing the horror you are capable of? Look at his eyes -- he's already dead. Wouldn't feel a thing.

Your task for the next two weeks...
Develop a vague sense of social responsibility for your actions and their consequences on others while listening to the Manic Street Preachers' brilliant album The Holy Bible, then blow it all by buying their entire back catalogue for £17.99 a copy in HMV and realising that, in fact, they are just a bunch of grown-up, whining students with as much right to tell you what to think as ex-ITN newsreader Carol Barnes.

See you at ECTS!