The struggle between banner ads and browsers has turned into a full-blown war, and like any war it’s created it’s unleashed horrors, destroyed the scenery, and everyone wishes it would just stop. A barrage of blinking gifs have made us so good at ignoring idiotic annoyances that Tila Tequila released a book and no-one slapped her. If this keeps up the human race will ignore itself to death, wiped out by some horror-plague which grows stinging boils on our genitals, and our final thoughts will be “not as annoying as the ‘hit the monkey’ ads.”

Here we look at some of the worst uses of pixels since John McCain tested a digital camera in a mirrored shower. (Note: Because we at Guyism are 100% against “Things that turn the world into the first level of hell”, we’ve flattened out all the animated ads into images. You’re welcome.)

3. The Instant Credit Check

You see these ads on approximately almost every site ever, combining scam and insult into a filter for finding people who shouldn’t have been given credit cards. We’re used to conmen at least hiring friendly looking actors in sharp suits, or assuming we were dapper chaps who could use a Golden Gate bridge, or at least buying huge cardboard cut-outs saying “1.9%” (next to an asterisk the size of an electron).

If you’re going to try to take our financial information (with your extremely cunning scheme of “a website that asks for your financial information”), at least spend some money on graphics. A table of numbers is especially awful when your target market (people prepared to take financial advice from a blinking banner ad) treats numbers as the enemy: those horrible things the teacher used to shout in school, and the credit card company is still shouting about while you watch Wrestlemania “Oiled Up And Angry 11″ on your new plasma TV. The only number they care about is the “Wasted Space” index (the number of inches between the edges of the TV and the walls of the trailer).

2. Weight Loss

In one way this is the best ad ever – if someone actually clicks after seeing those images they’re dumb enough to do anything you say. “Mail you my credit card while I force my face down the garbage disposal? Well, you did make a female Sumo wrestler evaporate! Sure thing!” A hungry shark couldn’t help you lose that much weight, never mind how you’d look like a pile of dirty curtains wrapped around a mannequin. Those pictures couldn’t be more unrelated if they were Angelina Jolie and a map of Belgium.

The only place you can consistently lose four pounds a week is a Saw movie, and that woman couldn’t drop that much weight if she was cremated – you’d still need a dump truck and a deep love of ham to move the remains.

1. Evony

The number one of all idiotic online advertisements, as it promises free breasts on a website that doesn’t have any. On the internet breasts are closer than the end of this sentence: it’s going to take me eleven more words to get there, but Googling “titties” only takes one. Lying about boobs online is like trying to sell a fleshlight on the Girls Gone Wild set.

Look at the ad, and look at the game:

If you’re not disappointed you’re either under psychiatric evaluation or the most sexually charged architect of all time. Even the words are lies which, after the trauma of truthless tits may be more than your faith in humanity can handle. It says you can play for free, which is true in the same way you can cross-country ski for free if you’re prepared to start foraging for food in the forest as you learn how to make your own skis. In Evony you pay for everything, with an in-game conversion rate of “sixteen hours of play” vs “one american dollar.”

After a few free samples you even have to pay to speak to other players, though considering you’re talking to other mugs suckered into exchanging money for text on an entirely breast-free fourth-rate management game clone, it’s unlikely you’ll have anything to talk about, and something that looks like Civilization 1 was fed through a broken photocopier hardly counts as the best game ever.

That only leaves “Play now secretly”, which is less a lie and more a false claim of responsibility – because if you’re someone who’d play this for any amount of time, no-one has ever paid attention to you anyway.