This week Game Kid ducks into hiding following a Fatwah placed on him by both sides of the Online-Offline gaming war. The results are scarily tickular.

"Ohhhhh the humanity!" Game Kid was crouched in front of a 12-inch black and white TV in the corner of a roach motel on the seamier side of the westbound M4. The flickering images playing on his heavily dilated pupils portrayed a scene of such sickening viciousness that he had trouble stifling tears of honest, workmanlike distress.

"Reruns of GamesMaster with Dexter Fletcher." He fought back an urge to vomit. Turning from the television and mounting the nylon-sheeted and heavily stained bed he consulted his Hewlett Packard EasyMate 770, which was attempting to access the Official Website of the Offliner Contingency.

The war between Offline and Online gamers that had been signaled by a direct attack on the Kid's own Bath office the week before had escalated. Attacks on BT workers in the streets have been met with a particularly nasty series of flour bombings on secondhand shops selling old 8bit games.

"Why oh why can't people just live together?" thought the Kidmeister as yet another Error 404 crawled back to him up the beleaguered old copper wires that passed for telecommunications in his hideaway. After a massive amount of thought-inducing Wild Turkey and Red Bull had eased the smoke from his specially imported "Exotico Cherooto" smokes, he looked up from the lavatory. His revelation led him to proclaim, in a way that would have made Kofe Anan proud, "We must get these people to talk to each other across a table, or at least a WAN. It must happen, and I, Game Kid, will see that it does - despite the personal dangers to my person."