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"The tale of how SR came to give away free games"

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Sat 14/09/02 at 00:28
Regular
Posts: 787
Once upon a time, in a land far away, there was a leprechaun (not Grix's) called Tonty. Like all Leprechaun's he enjoyed to dress in green and speak in an Irish accent to be sure (though when this story was brought to Hollywood he was played by Sean Connery because the yanks hadn't figured out the whole Ireland and Scotland being two different places thing in "The Untouchables" and Sean was popular so they did it again) The problem was that Tonty was a bad leprechaun who used to get up to all sorts of mischief in the town of Basildon, which happened to hold the woodland homes to his merry band of Leprechauns.

Aside from stealing cats and hiding pots of gold at the feet of rainbows, Tonty and his horde of marauding leprechaun friends (still not including Grix's) would pull off spectacular displays of mischief that made global headlines. That was until he pulled off the biggest practical joke of them all... You see, Tonty had invited all of the residents of Basildon to a "Fantastic Fondue Party", which very much pleased the residents as they thought that Tonty was growing up a little and willing to give up trouble-making for good with a celebratory fondue party. Once all of the townsfolk had gathered in the hall, Tonty signalled to his leprechaun minions (still not including Grix's) to bolt the doors to the hall. Then he set the entire Steps back-catalogue playing on the PA system and hurried from the hall. At first the crowd squealed in delight because Steps were a very popular band of the day, but as the records played on, and the hits subsided into album fillers, covers and b-sides, the residents began to panic. It wasn't until an elaborately constructed human pyramid allowed a small child to escape through the skylight that the residents were able to escape. Many suffered thereafter from post-traumatic stress, with some going into shock every time they heard a Steps record on the radio.

At this point the townsfolk decided that they had had about as much as they could take of Tonty and his mischievous ways. In a hastily convened town meeting they decided that each one of them would pay a small sum and that with that money they would purchase a Robocop - the most fearsome crime fighting force of the day. Unfortunately the townsfolk were not very wealthy, having all been taken in by, and in some cases still giving money to, some get-rich-quick pyramid scheme that a spamming noob had posted on the town noticeboard. Their combined efforts totalled a measly 10 groats and a turnip. However, the maker of Robocops, one William Gates, took pity on the townsfolk having heard of their plight on the evening news, and offered to exchange their 10 groats and a turnip for one of his broken Robocops. And so the townsfolk received Mr Snuggly - the nerdy Robocop, who hadn't passed the gratuitous brutality tests at the factory.

Mr Snuggly had suffered two misfortunes in his production. Firstly he had contaminated Linux while having Windows installed on his system, which left him 98% nerdier than the other Robocops. Then to top it off an engineering c***-up had left him listening to continuous Coldplay rather than the speed-death metal that turned the other Robocops into purveyors of lethal violence. Snuggly was left somewhat more sensitive than his hard-rocking amigos and was prone to crying and writing long poems that didn't rhyme. As the other Robocops bullied him mercilessly Mr Snuggly was rather glad to get this chance to prove himself as a lethal monger of death, especially against so worthy an adversary as Tonty.

Things got off to a bad start, however, when Tonty and his gang of leprechauns ambushed Mr Snuggly, who was patrolling the high street, and called him very nasty names. One of the more daring leprechauns even leapt forward and scratched Mr Snuggly's shiny new stainless steel armour. Before anymore damage could be inflicted Mr Snuggly ran away and locked himself in a cupboard, where he cried and wrote long poems about his ordeal that didn't rhyme. None of the townsfolk could persuade him to come out of the closet, no matter how hard they tried to convince him that coming out make him much happier in the long run. But try as they might, no-one could convince Mr Snuggly to come out.

While Mr Snuggly stayed in the closet, Tonty was free to run riot in the streets, and he did. In the night he and his merry leprechauns would steal the outhouses from outside everyone's houses, as they didn't have indoor toilets in those days. Even Tonty's mischief-addled mind couldn't have predicted the consequences of this move. When the town awoke the next morning, many of the still-slumbery locals managed to fall into the open cess-pits on which their disappeared outhouses had sat before. Even the stinky oblivion into which the townsfolk found themselves falling could not persuade their nerdy Robocop to come out. However, it draw someone else's attention to Tonty's boundless capacity for mischief.

You seem as time had gone on Tonty had begun to get quite a reputation as a trouble-maker. So much so that people began to ask if he might be Loki, the Nordic god of mischief. Well, for the real Loki this was something of a threat, and so he went down to Earth and disguised himself as an internet mail order company called "Special Reserve". The townsfolk of Basildon were amazed that such an edifice had appeared from nowhere free of the graffiti and obscenities that the leprechaun Tonty had painted on to all of the buildings. It was a great white beacon, in a land of stolen outhouses and smelly cess-pits. Possibly it was the impact of the miracle, or possibly just the phallic symbolism of the last sentence that led finally to Mr Snuggly coming out of the closet. Initially the townsfolk were angry with their nerdy Robocop, as he had cost a full 10 groats and a turnip and hadn't done much to justify the expenditure. However, after he gave a note-perfect rendition of Coldplay's "trouble" the townsfolk decided to keep him as a juke box in the town's tavern. (That was until lawyers from the state of EMI came on horseback and threatened to sue the nerdy Robocop for copyright infringement unless he desisted immediately.)

As Mr Snuggly lay dejected in the tavern's half-light, like a railroad track abandoned, Tonty was all the while plotting some grotesque extravagancy of a defacement that he could inflict on the pure white paintwork of the "Special Reserve". At midnight, he and a dedicated leprechaun militia crept through the town silently. When they reached the "Special Reserve" some threw climbing hooks on to the tall building's roof and others shimmied up the drainpipes and then, under Tonty's supervision, they began to paint. For hours they worked furiously, and all the while a mountain of empty paint tins was accumulating next to the building. Then as the sun's first rays began to creep over the horizon, they moved back to admire their masterpiece - a giant portrait of their illustrious leader Tonty, with the legend "Tonty Rulz OK" painted beneath in bright red letters. The mural was half a mile high, and several, possibly three, furlongs wide - a masterpiece to rival Leonardo Da Vinci's doodlings on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. The leprechauns ran back to their woodland homes where they had drank much Guinness in celebration of their grand coup.

However, in the morning, while the paintcan mountain remained, the building was again pure white. This only occurred to Tonty after he had strutted and postured his way up the high street to see the looks of horror on the locals' faces. Indeed he hadn't so much as seen a grimace so far, let alone a look of fathomless dismay, though a rather rude child had poked his leprechaun belly and made fun of his green clothes, to be sure. Humiliated by the whole scene Tonty suddenly began to wonder if he had dreamed the whole incident up. thinking that he definitely must have, he decided that it must have been a vision of what he had to do to deface the building. So he and his somewhat tired band of leprechauns (note to plot-pickers: the reason why no-one told Tonty that they had in fact painted the building was because they were all suffering from sleep deprivation) set about painting the building that night. Again in the morning the painting had disappeared. By now the leprechauns were really beginning to hallucinate, not having slept in nearly three days, so again they painted, more sloppily this time, their leader's image on to the wall of the "Special Reserve".

However, this time Tonty had made his own sketch of the greater artwork, as proof to himself that it had indeed been completed. Again the morning's arrival saw the artwork's disappearance, and Tonty decided that the solution to the quandary of how to triumph over this shining white building would probably come to him if he slept on it, which to the Leprechaun's relief he did immediately. By now the townsfolk were in very high spirits, as not one cat nor any outhouse had been stolen or defaced in the past week. Some residents even began to repaint their own houses with the buckets of white paint that they found abandoned outside the "Special Reserve". Soon the whole town was an immaculate shade of white, which everyone agreed was very pleasing to the eye. One kind soul even offered to give Mr Snuggly a lick of paint, which meant that everyone in the town was happy at last.

Meanwhile Tonty was devising ever more spectacular acts of vandalism in his dreams. Some were so elaborate that he had to dream them at four times the normal speed in order to fit them all in before he woke up. After two days of solid sleeping he woke up refreshed and with his eyes positively burning with mischief. Later that night he and a crack team of commando leprechauns again infiltrated the village, with the objective of demolishing the "Special Reserve". They walked past row upon row of clean white houses and ignored them, with only that one goal in mind. When they arrived at the giant glass doors, two of the Leprechauns readied the lock cutters, but Tonty was shocked to discover the door had been left unlocked. He pushed it open and stepped in, only for the door to slam shut behind him and the everything faded to black and he found himself falling down and down, then he landed with a loud thud in a pile of camel dung fourteen-thousand times the size of he solar system, laid by a gigantic intergalactic camel. However, no sooner had he fallen into the dung he was falling out of the other side of it at an increasing speed. After the billionth dunking, which had been achieved in little under two minutes, he called out for someone to help him and everything faded to black.

When he opened his eyes he was standing in front of the Nordic god Loki. Who was also wearing green (this had to be changed in the movie because a test-screening revealed that the audience had become confused between the two main characters) Loki spoke to Tonty in many tongues all at once in two seconds. And Tonty understood. He promised that he would turn the "Special Reserve" into the biggest internet mail order company in the world, and that to try and atone for his earlier mischief, he would give away not one, not two, but three free games (subject to terms and conditions) to the people whose lives he had made a misery. After much bargaining he also agreed to employ the defunct Robocop Mr. Snuggly as an adjudicator for the competition, so long as Loki would help him to run the company secretly. Loki agreed and after they shook hands, all was well in Basildon ever after. Strange characters from across the globe flocked to the "Special Reserve" where free gifts were to be had on a daily basis, these including the be-afroed Joe, the mighty Meka Dragon, the intergalactic hero Grix Thraves, a communist called Sheepy, a very smug bloke called Stryke, a boy with a goat's face, a monkey-shaped man and many more weird and wonderful characters whose names would fill the tomes of Titans, let alone this meagre post. Oh and there was a leprachaun who later married the intergalactic space hero Grix Thraves, but that's another story.

And that is the tale of how Special Reserve came to give away free games.
Thu 19/09/02 at 14:30
Regular
"Remember me?"
Posts: 6,124
Pure brilliance. Pure and utterly butterly brilliance.
Wed 18/09/02 at 18:14
Regular
"Excommunicated"
Posts: 23,284
Nice one ma son

*in strange accent*
Wed 18/09/02 at 18:09
Regular
Posts: 23,216
I was thinking that actually...
Wed 18/09/02 at 17:59
Regular
"sdomehtongng"
Posts: 23,695
Brillianto.

Well done, yet again.

(Y)
Sun 15/09/02 at 13:25
Regular
"funky blitzkreig"
Posts: 2,540
I just thought I'd pop in to explain why Snuggly bears characteristics uncannily similar to Grix's (hiding in closets :-) crying and writing long poems)

Well it's because I'm lazy. Originally there was a second sub-plot where the intergalactic superhero Grix Thraves came to help save the town from Tonty, but while preparing a trp he saw a female Leprachaun who had been spelt wrong, and fell passionately in love with her. However, this was a conflict of interests and so he went and locked himself in a metaphorical closet and wrtoe long poems and cried. Then finally decided to go and run away with his fancy-lady. Which he did, only while writing this I was already thinking of bringing in Snuggly and it was like one in the morning, so I went back and edited it to fit Snuggly's character.

So that is why Snuggly is similar to Grix, because he was Grix in places.
Sat 14/09/02 at 20:01
Regular
"You've upset me"
Posts: 21,152
Mexcellent. :-D
Sat 14/09/02 at 19:59
Regular
Posts: 23,216
:0D
Sat 14/09/02 at 19:38
Regular
Posts: 5,630
Quality.
Sat 14/09/02 at 15:40
Regular
"In and out :)"
Posts: 272
I read half of it and it is a very good post GAD worthy :)
Sat 14/09/02 at 14:24
Regular
"Excommunicated"
Posts: 23,284
I hardly ever read these... so well done.

I enjoyed it quite a bit.

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