Well, £8.19. Alert viewers will recall WoSblog's highly popular recent review of Perfect Dark on XBLA, which noted that the developers had done a half-arsed job of porting the controls over, incompetently removing both legacy and southpaw options that were present in the N64 original. Well, now at least you have the chance to pay a half-arsed price for it too.
This is actually a WoS subscriber piece from last year about the Nintendo DS's bizarre multiplicity of Scrabble games, but it's as relevant today as it was then. Because for some incredibly strange reason people persist in making an inexplicable balls-up of videogame versions of Scrabble, which ought to be just about the easiest development gig you could ever get.
Alert WoSblog viewers will have noticed the absence of posts yesterday, which was entirely due to having most of my day wasted by these idiots:
I used to go to the original Computer Exchange shop in Rathbone Place in London regularly in the early 90s. While the staff were prone to certain amounts of the sort of elitist arrogance you often find in independent record shops, it was as exciting and fun as videogame shops have ever been.
Perfect Dark XBLA is out today, for 800 MS points (about £6.80).
I've been looking forward to this one excitedly for months, as I love PD even more than Goldeneye and the thought of being able to play it in shiny high def and without the framerate catastrophes was almost too thrilling for words. However, knowing how moronically incompetent and lazy modern developers are, I warily downloaded the trial version first. I'm not a complete idiot.
If you want to see it, get in quick before the Digital Economy Bill is passed, which could happen any day now, for it can only be a matter of time before BitTorrent files are outlawed entirely by clueless and discredited politicians desperately clutching for corporate donations.
This week I've been hunting down a few old reviews missing from the WoS Archive, and was fortunate enough to find some of them in a collection of Commodore Format scans posted at the excellent Underground Gamer (membership required). While browsing the site, though, I also stumbled across practically the entire history of 8-bit and16-bit videogames magazines.
or Why Right Now Is The Greatest Videogame Era Of All Time
Mainstream videogaming in 2010 is a bit like paying your gas and electricity bills automatically by Direct Debit – it’s all very efficient and technologically advanced and impressive and everything, but it’s also exactly the same every month, and as a result it’s kinda boring. There, I said it.
Now don’t get me wrong – we’ve seen a lot of brilliant games in recent years. But alert readers will know that for some time now this writer's found it hard to summon up the enthusiasm to try to get all excited about yet another WW2/Space Marine FPS, yet another fantasy RPG or MMO full of elves, or yet another gloomy survival horror.
Sometimes someone needs to write about games made of colours other than grey, dark green and brown. Sometimes, WoSblog feels very alone.
Why don't they make arcade cabinets any more?
(I mean, obviously they do. There are still new arcade videogames being made, but they all run on boring generic cabinets, and they're not really what I'm talking about anyway.)
Why is it that you can't just call up Taito and buy yourself a brand-new classic-style Space Invaders machine?
The newest version of Google Street View is both astonishingly awesome and little short of terrifying. As of this week, the application is now a fully-navigable 3D photographic map of practically every street in the UK, with its previous coverage of major cities and urban areas now expanded to over 95% of the country's public road surface.
I tested it for an entire day, picking little cul-de-sacs in the middle of nowhere from my memory, and Google's vans had been up every last one – even, to my considerable amazement, visiting my auntie's croft down a narrow track in the middle of nowhere in the Highlands and passing so close by that you can identify the plants on her windowledges.
Alert WoSblog fans will probably already have read my awesome "Gender Benders" feature from Total PC Gaming a couple of years ago. In the magazine itself, though, the piece went by the title of "Hardcore Housewives" (taken from a line in the feature), and was accompanied by a rather splendid custom-commissioned illustration, which doesn't appear in the WoS edition.
I recently stumbled across a version of the article (mysteriously credited to "Ben Biggs") on TPCG's website, though, which included the image in all its high-resolution glory, and I felt you all deserved to see it. (Clicking on the image above shows a medium-sized version, which actually looks better.)
In my head I'm just out of shot, as Robin Askwith, about to knock on the door for some hot water.
WoSland – now at wosland.podgamer.com
