"…sharing our videos."

The clip below the jump is the video for my favourite single by the awesome Leeds-based agit-pop subversionists Age Of Chance. I stumbled across it on YouTube when a friend was asking for songs that started with the sounds of an orchestra tuning up, and was surprised to note the high quality. Immediately I wanted to share it with the beloved viewers of WoSblog, and was dismayed to note that it had embedding disabled, which always strikes me as churlish.

"No problem to a semi-tech-literate nerd such as I," I pondered. "I shall cunningly download the video via the splendid KeepVid, re-upload it to my own YouTube account, and embed it from there. Ha!"

Man, I'm wrong such a lot.

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So there I was, putting together The Definitive Xevious – Deluxe Edition for WoS viewers this weekend, and discovered that there was a new Xevious game, Xevious Resurrection, on the PS3 as part of the Namco Museum Essentials download compilation. (Which features the all-new Xevious, plus the original and the same old versions of Dig Dug, Pac-Man, Galaga and Dragon Spirit that Namco have already milked about fifty times.)

Namco Museum Essentials came out in Japan and the USA in June 2009, but still hasn't shown up in the UK Playstation Store, despite already being in English (with the manual also in French, Spanish, Italian and German) and clearly, as a digital download, requiring no translation or adaptation of any sort or new packaging or anything. Still, WoSblog has a US PS3 account, so with a price of $9.99 it should be a fairly straightforward business to buy some US PS Store credit and pick the game up for the current-exchange-rate price of £6.50, right?

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"The DS version of Scotland Yard ought to be nailed into the brain of anyone ever considering bringing a boardgame to a games machine, because it’s a textbook example of how to do it right."

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"For the next three months, take the money you were going to spend on PC games and put it to one side. Then each month, instead of just going out and buying whichever World War 2 FPS or goblin-slashing sub-Tolkien fantasy grindfest you were going to buy and pour endless hours of levelling-up into, spend the time instead by downloading pirate copies."

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I’ve been putting together another Definitive feature for WoS subscribers today – this time The Definitive Frogger, a 28-game epic history including the modestly remarkable ZX81 official port of the arcade original, and it led me to a bit of a nostalgia trip to the days when I was a young ’81 owner reliant mostly on magazine type-ins for gaming thrills.

In those days, impoverished gamers would spend hours at a time copying down text listings on the dead-flesh keyboard of the tiny Sinclair wonder-machine, and the only way magazines could get them to do that was to literally paint a picture of the magical experiences that lay in wait for the truly dedicated.

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I’ve been a little disappointed with the (lack of) reaction to ‘99‘ so far. Big Songs For Little Attention Spans swept the web a few years back, being linked all over the place and generating terabytes of downloads, and I’d hoped the easier accessibility and collaborative nature of Spotify – where you can just click a link to play all the songs legally, rather than having to download 100MB of illegal MP3s – would make ’99′ even more popular, as well as uncovering a whole bunch of new uber-short songs I’d never heard of.

But at the time of writing it hasn’t managed so much as a single retweet, and it seems doubtful that everyone in the world would have spontaneously become bored of the idea of punchy short songs tied into a theme (one small thread on The Word’s forum generated over 50 additions to the “b-side” playlist), so I started to wonder if making the compilation with Spotify – now almost exactly a year old – might have been more of a curse than a blessing.

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I've never trusted straight men who don't like football. Something just isn't wired up right in there.

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Some stuff I couldn’t squeeze into The Definitive Space Invaders, but which deserves to be seen even by cheapskate non-subscribers.

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WoS Central has today been updated with the complete two-part Retro Gamer feature The Definitive Space Invaders for subscribers. The web version – The Definitive Space Invaders Deluxe Edition – is in one big chunk, including stuff deleted from the printed piece and updated to include all the Invaders games released since the article was published.

This epic Definitive clocks in just shy of a mammoth 14,000 words – for comparison, the shabbily mangled version published on NowGamer is a mere 8,033 words. So if you like Space Invaders, and you're a WoS subscriber, it should keep you out of any sort of productive work for most of the afternoon.

EDIT: Other updated and extended Definitives added for subscribers now include:

The Definitive Galaxian
The Definitive Xevious
The Definitive Bubble Bobble
The Definitive 194X
The Definitive Frogger