I'm famous.  I don't mean to sound conceited, but I am famous.  To put it in terms more palatable to the lower classes who are only capable of absorbing information when it rhymes: I'm more famous than John Stamos - I mean now, not at the height of his fame.  For those of you that still need to muddle through each pathetic, fameless day gripping your worthless high school diplomas secure in the knowledge that the thousands of hours you spent sort of learning French and Science make you better than the average illiterate working man, I can offer only this advice: don't fully explore level Q3DM19 of the monster hit game Quake 3 Arena.  Just don't, that's all I'm saying.  If you want to continue to feel good about your hard-won but ultimately anonymous existence, just skip that level entirely.  Come to think of it, I'm more than regular famous; I'm one of the special, single-name celebrities like Charo and God and Frankenstein.

Yet with all my fame and heavy connections, nobody at Origin had the common decency to include me in the industry-wide memo that informed famous heavy-hitters of the fact that Ultima IX is broken and should not be purchased.  

As a result, guess who payed for Ultima IX?  Me.  And guess who's going to pay for making me pay for Ultima IX?  Lord British. 

This is the point where I would normally take a phrase and cleverly turn it to make it more foul-mouthed and punch-centric.  For instance:  I'm gonna put fifty bucks of fat into your fucking lip, British. 

If there's one thing funnier than punching, it's punching a forty year old man wearing a crown.  And if that man just stole fifty bucks from you and everyone you know, including sick children, then it might just transcend mere comedy and become something magical, like vigilante justice.

However, our shift supervisor at UGO feels that all our "punch and fuck" humor appeals mainly to people living below the poverty line and not to the coveted demographic of super-smart adventure game types with a strong desire to spend their disposable income on detailed instructions for viewing "Tomb Raider's" tit-like cubes.  He suggested that we try some "classy and intelligent" humor, such as anagrams.

After some research, I've discovered that nothing says "punch me before I talk about Linux" like anagrams.  I enjoy the general broken English vibe of anagrams - foreigners = funny- but I really hate the headache-generating rule that you have to rearrange the existing letters of a word to form these funny phrases.   I don't want to do that.  Nobody I know wants to do that.  So I've invented a new form of wordgame for people who aren't fucking geniuses that I call Cramagrams.  I named it Cramagrams because when some bearded stinkpit wearing a potato-chip stained User Friendly T-shirt and fat pants whines that your work isn't really an anagram, you can tell him no, it's a Cramagram.  When he asks what that is, you tell him it's just like an anagram except you're going to cram your foot up his ass.   If your life is anything like Sanford and Son, he'll probably say "Well, I never" at which point you should consider replying "and with that distended belly, you never will."  Then cram your foot up his ass.

Anyway, here's how it works:

1. Pick a word or phrase to be "rearranged".  In the rough street-inspired parlance of Cramagrams, this is called the "motherfucking determinant".

2. Cramagrams borrows the concept of "buying a vowel" from TV's Wheel of Fortune, with the following two modifications: your purchase doesn't have to be a vowel and you don't have to actually buy it.  In other words, simply replace the motherfucking determinant with any phrase you want.  As long as it sounds like it could be a clever anagram, you win!  That's the "motherfucking magic of Cramagrams!" [Note to id software: ®©™ - ed.]

3. The third rule of Cramagrams is that you don't talk about Cramagrams.   It's really more of a personality test than a word game.  Explain the rules only if somebody's uptight enough to point out that your found poetry isn't a proper anagram.  The explanation can help pass the time as the fire department is uncramming your foot from his ass.

Here's a sample:

Ultima IX: Ascension

Don't work? Tuf!
I rip u off
pewter ankh. bah!
buy fast car! thanx!
L Brit: crowny fag
Cloth map? wipe ass!
boo hoo TNT
Money where? In toilet?

If anybody has Lord British's email address, home address, or phone address, please forward it to me.  I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm getting my money back.  If you're Lord British and you're reading this: you and your boyfriend Chuckles better enjoy my fifty bucks while you can, jerkoff.  If you're Chris Roberts: you and your boyfriend Lord British better enjoy my $7.50 while you can, asswipe, because, now that I think about it, I want my Wing Commander The Shitty Movie money back, too.

All our preparations - the drills, diagrams, hypothetical escape routes, and ingestion of dangerous amounts of prohormone muscle building powders - paid off handsomely on Friday when a package actually did arrive from id Software.  After a three hour battery of tests and some frantic, tearful calls to our arch-nemesis, the grouchy Cleveland Police, we were relieved to discover the box contained nothing more menacing than a battered and soggy copy of id's Unreal Tournament clone, Quake 3 Arena.

Not particularly interested in playing the game, we immediately set to the business of burning copies for distribution overseas.  Chet must have accidently installed and launched it, though, because the tranquil whirring sound of our CD writing equipment was interrupted by his cries of shock and humiliation.  I grabbed my smelling salts and ran to his aid, only to discover this image emlazoned on his monitor and now branded permanently onto the insides of my eyelids:

This isn't some kind of Gates McFadden blowing Captain Picard fakeout job, this is for real - search q3dm19.  Our first response?  Deal with it the same way we handle all of life's trials: call 911.  Not surprisingly, they were no help and were, in fact, dismissive and mean.  "911 is a joke in my town," I said.  Chet motioned for me to hand him the phone.  "Fuck tha poe-lees" he told the 911 lady.  There was a moment of silence during which we both wracked our brains for another rap-inspired law enforcement epithet.  I finally settled on "you're the Grinch that stole justice!" but by then I was sobbing at a dialtone.

Generally, our second response to adversity is suing and lots of it.  And I think this time we're in the right both ethically and legally.  That logo is copyrighted material.  How would id like it if we released a game called Doom 3 that was actually just a box we made containing a burned copy of Quake 2?  No need to guess, they didn't like it very much.  But how is this any different?  Maybe they should just call the game Old Man Murray Arena.  Only then they'd be twice as sued as they currently are.

The upside to all this is that id is no penniless group of dopers and submarine rejects like, say, Monolith.  Sanity could be nothing more than a screen depicting Chet's social security number and home address typed in a circle around our trademarked Marvin head with the results of my monthly HIV testing scrolling across the bottom, and what would we stand to gain from a lawsuit?  A pallet stacked with unsold copies of Odium, probably.  When a company such as id enters into a conspiracy to enact chicanery on your copyright, it's like winning the lottery.  The next time you see someone daintily stepping out of his Ferrari, wearing a baggy fur track suit and unaware of the effect his lordly display of emerald necklaces hung from his ten normal fingers plus his golden extra robot finger is having on all the fine, foxy people, it won't be Dennis "Thresh" Fong, it'll be motherfucking me.  Unless he's also wearing a monocle, owns three jet skis, and is dating his butler, Latin pop sensation Charo, in which case it's Chet.

And in case you think we can't succeed against a powerhouse such as id, here is a copy of the out-of-court settlement we received from the even more powerful Cendant software (former owners of Sierra) who we sued over some comments and menacing erotic gestures made by Jane "the other Roberta Williams" Jensen.

Note the amount: 2/3 of the complete number of the Beast.  We tried to get the full six dollars and sixty-six cents, but couldn't quite swing it.  It was a moral victory, mostly.

While still just previewing his site gamers.com, Thresh out did us by spending his money to find a gamer named "pooh" and interviewing her.   What can we say?  Bravo, young sir.  You have beaten us at our own game.   The best we could come up with was a Sony Executive named Gayman. You are truly a master of gaming. Your venture capitalists should be sleeping well this Thanksgiving Eve knowing you are spending their investment wisely.

Thresh, Pooh and Satan at T3.

We remember hearing about Shiny's Messiah from our parents long before we were aware of the Christian version.  So pardon our disappointment when, after all this time and devotion, we just get crap.  Crap incarnate, but crap nonetheless.  We were promised Christ and instead got some kind of crummy, Lubavitcher Rebbe messiah booby-prize.  Where are the the phenomenal, load balanced, intricately detailed character models?  We know the one place you shouldn't look: in the game. 

Meanwhile, a better and smaller demo was released at almost the same time and deserves more attention than it's getting:  Muckyfoot's Urban Chaos.  It's a Final Fight for the new Millennium.

One more thing: When we finally got Messiah to load, we noticed this message:

We uploaded all of Voodoo Extreme to the address listed in the demo, thus stripping ownership of the site from Billy 'Stupid' Wilson and ending our war.  Thanks to all involved and special thanks to God for being so clearly on our side.

One question, or perhaps it's more of a comment or a threat, comes from Billy 'Stupid' Wilson himself:

If there is anything cut and pasted, we will follow up with our lawyers for any copyright violation (fyi).

Billy "Wicked" Wilson
Web chump at the only honey-roasted gaming news site:9 "Driving Aloud (Radio Storm)" by Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians   

It doesn't seem very sporting to bring your lawyer attachment to a battle of wits, but so be it.  Nobody ever accused you of sex crimes against a child's corpse - well, not by the year 1999 (fyi) - and nobody ever ends up accusing you of playing fair.   You may very well destroy us with the law and its bias against those of us whose conscience guides our actions.  We'll take that risk and shut the site down rather than submit to you .  If what we've done is illegal, then maybe the law is wrong because the community is better for our work.  We'd like to see you prove your case in court.  Though, if it comes to that, you'll have to email us all the details because we'll be in Canada.  But, seeing as you're now owned by Eidos, you may someday feel the icy grip of Todd Porter on your ass and reconsider having killed us.  Or maybe you'll just do a little extra hot monkey pasting from Tomb Raider 5 press release #17 - I'm not sure since, local police blotter mentions and time and gruesome manner of death aside, history has forgotten the details of your life and of your spicy love twinkie.

On an unrelated note, I wanted to respond to a bumper sticker I saw today that read "You can't hug children with nuclear arms."  I hope I'm not giving too much away, but you morons aren't going to beat the Chinese in WW3 with hugs.

Hey Marvin,
I'm eleven years old and you rock!  I espeshilly liked when you called that guys moms a cunt!  Damn your mean!!!!  What'es the diffrence between Saving Private Ryan and Voodoo Extreme?
KornRocks666_72@aol.com

Well KR666_72, as I see it Saving Private Ryan is Steven Spielberg's stunning Word War II masterpiece, while Voodooo Extreme is just fucking stupid.  I hope that answers your question!

Several smarter sounding readers have also written to express their delight at our use of the word 'cunt', especially when employed as a metaphor for Tom Vykruta's mother.   Other readers have asked why we're so mean and what I have against Voodoo Extreme.  

Addressing the question of our meanness:   I'm from the future, where everything is better.  And I mean everything.  Cardboard?  Indestructible and can sing.  Mummies?  No longer such a problem.  Retards?  Smarter than your Dr. Spock, and indestructible and can sing.  So you can probably understand why I'm so frustrated.  Not a day goes by that I don't command some clerk or vice president of marketing to "Electro Extrude 4000 me that fax" only to remember where I am and have to tell him to "just fax me the fax... caveman."  Chet and erik, not from the future, are mean simply because they're mental defectives.

As to my hatred of Voodoo Extreme - doesn't everyone in your time despise these idiots?   They adequately perform the menial cut and paste labor too distasteful and mundane for the rest of us, but then have the gall to pollute the appropriated content with their dimwitted pimp talk.   Generally, I accept your world's stupidity with superior indifference.  Occasionally, I will stoop to calling one of you a fruit.   Unfortunately for Billy 'Stupid' Wilson, one of his "crack!" ctrl-c/ctrl-v "monkeys!" (dumbo codename: 'Octane') sent one of our readers the following critique of erik's Roberta Williams retrospective:

We wouldn't post that article because its nothing but a bunch of flaming shit. The whole article sounds like some dumb 13 year old kid venting because his mommy wouldn't let him stay out past bedtime or something...

Dave

I'm sure erik's piece wasn't as clever as most of Octane's contributions to Voodoo Extreme - pasting the middle two paragraphs of the readme.txt packaged with the most recent Drakan patch for instance.  But erik is a special guy and it's my job to defend him.   So as a vengeful act of community service, I've created an intelligent agent that monitors Voodoo Extreme in real time and reports on each of its updates - but strips out the cruddy, embarrassing, michael-jackson-jacket-wearing pimp talk!   You get only the straight facts that VE creatively yanked from someplace else.  No need to thank me.   I didn't do it for you, fruity.  Go knock yourself out:

Marvin Sedate

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