Alert WoS viewers will have seen this a while ago, but as it’s my all-time favourite piece of videogames-related art it’s worth repeating for the hundreds of new readers of WoSblog. Once you’ve grasped what it is you won’t expect that you’re going to watch all nine minutes of it. But you will.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDbTP0B94AM&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0]
1. Get hold of Super Ghouls'n'Ghosts for the GBA. (If you need an emulator, use Visual Boy Advance.)
2. Choose Original Mode, check the time (pro tip: use some sort of clock or watch for this) and start.
3. Finish level 1 (continue or restart as often as you like, but no cheating with save states) and note how long it's taken you.
4. Fastest by midnight tomorrow wins!
This is such a lovely thing.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPbh6Ru7VVM&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0]
(Salute: alert WoS viewer Subman.)
WoSblog is planning a two-person weekday trip to London soon. A simple enough undertaking, right? But of course it isn’t. Ever since the UK’s railways were privatised by lovable Mrs Thatcher, it’s a well-documented fact that (a) we have the most expensive rail network on Earth, and (b) trying to find out the best and cheapest way to travel between any two points is an insane labyrinthine nightmare of routes, operators, countless different ticket types and “magic stations” – places in the middle of your journey where for no obvious reason you can mysteriously slash the price of your ticket by pretending to make your journey in multiple stages, even though you never actually get off the train or even change seats.
As usual, some of these are free for a limited period only, so don’t hang about.
Numeric Paranoia
The picture pretty much explains what’s going on. It’s a path-finding/line-drawing puzzle game related to Polarium on the GBA and DS, and like Polarium comes with Arcade and Puzzle modes. From simple 4×5 grids with four numbers, up to scary 10-number 8×6 levels, there’s loads to keep you amused here, and it’s very slickly executed.
After all those stats and stuff.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDIzMGh94vo&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0]
Finger-snappin’ pop tune? Check.
Awesome chorus? Check.
Video featuring chainsaw accident? Check.
Super hot girl? ULTRA-CHECK!
Something else occurred to me this morning after reading over yesterday’s lead story again. According to 24/7WallSt’s largely-invented figures, just 4% of iPhone/iPod owners use their device for piracy, yet have been responsible for actual real losses of over $450m in revenue that would have been spent were piracy not possible.
Logically, this means that the other 96% of owners must be spending the same sort of amount, (since the figure was arrived at via an allegedly-conservative notional conversion rate of 10% of pirated copies being genuinely lost sales, rather than just stuff the pirates wouldn’t have bothered downloading if they had to pay for it). Which means that the App Store must have generated an impressive $11.48bn of revenue in the last 18 months.
Since Apple have revealed that there have been a total of 3 billion downloads, which includes both paid and free apps, that would make the average price per download just short of $4. But since the 247WS figures were based on just an estimated 17% of downloads being paid apps, that bumps the average per-paid-app price up to a little over $23.50 (compared to 247WS’s claimed average of $3). If other analysts’ estimates of the proportion of paid apps to free ones is more accurate, the average price of each paid-for download could be as high as $160.
Doesn’t seem awfully likely, does it?
The content industry has a long and shameful history of spurious figures when it comes to the subject of intellectual-property piracy. This much we already knew. But the most recent set of “statistics” on the economic cost of piracy – which have, of course, been seized on and repeated unquestioningly by the press – may have set some sort of record.
There’s been something of a Biblical flood of the-end-of-civilisation movies in recent years. From 2007’s 28 Weeks Later (zombie plague) and I Am Legend (cancer cure gone wrong) to Charlie Brooker’s harrowing alleged comedy Dead Set (another zombie plague), the BBC’s remake of Survivors (lethal virus pandemic) and the same broadcaster’s re-remake of The Day Of The Triffids (er, homicidal walking plants), 2009 mega-budget effects-fest 2012 (the classic “solar flares cause planet to boil from the inside”), and right up to this year’s The Road (unnamed catastrophic event), the cultural world is suddenly alive with the mass culling of humanity. Hurrah!
The one avenue for the obliteration of mankind that hasn’t been explored for a while is the classic nuclear holocaust, even though – or possibly because – an increasingly aggressive and powerful Russia has been rattling its sabre on the world stage for the first time in two decades. However, with the imminent The Book Of Eli making reference to a war that leaves the planet a ravaged wasteland, it looks like the atomic menace is back, Back, BACK! Which got WoSblog thinking – what’s the bleakest nuclear holocaust movie ever?
WoSland – now at wosland.podgamer.com
