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

99 Songs Under 99 Seconds In 99 Minutes

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Here’s a bargain that’s not for the iPod for a change. In a Valentine’s promo that lasts until Friday 19 Feb, you can pick up six apparently award-winning PC indie games for the kerrayzee love-addled price of just $20 (normally $85), under the cute name of The Indie Love Bundle. The featured games include the much-acclaimed Machinarium – which is usually $20 on its own – and the rather lovely music-themed puzzler Auditorium (which IS also available on the iPod, where I bought it), the very interesting looking ripped-paper platformer And Yet It Moves, and three more.

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Which is why they’ll never get another penny of my money. There is no greedier games company in existence, perhaps no more nakedly greedy corporation on Earth.

The other day I finally lost patience waiting for Namco to release an update to iPhone Ms Pac-Man (which hasn’t worked since OS 3.1) or answer any support queries about it, and emailed Apple. Widely regarded as an extremely grasping company themselves, Apple nonetheless replied within 24 hours refunding the purchase price of the game in full, which is customer relations at what ought to be the elementary bare minimum.

(Actually it’s a little better than minimum – the game doesn’t get remotely deleted in the event of a refund and is still on my iPod, so if Namco ever do bother their backsides to make it work again, I effectively get a freebie in compensation for all of the considerable inconvenience that I went to in trying to get it to run – repeatedly deleting and reinstalling, rebooting, even doing a complete six-hour system restore.)

Nintendo take a rather different approach.

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Pretty much any holiday or “special” day counts as an excuse for lots of big price reductions and giveaways on the App Store. Here’s a rundown of some of the best freebies between now and Valentine’s – as ever, be quick off the mark, as some of them are free for a very limited time only.

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I know, I know – it’s serious. You’ll have to forgive a little indulgence on this one, because few people seem to care much about paper-and-ink videogames magazines any more, and I still do. Done halfway-properly (eg Retro Gamer, and NGamer the last time I saw it, which was admittedly quite some time ago), they offer an experience that websites just can’t match, and there ought to still be a place for them.

Unfortunately, games mags have committed a long slow suicide over the last decade, becoming institutionally corrupt and attempting to take websites on at their own game, which is a hopeless battle. What’s more, they’ve focused on gaming platforms which aren’t very well suited to static images – look in a PC games mag or a 360 one and you’ll find it hard to tell one game apart from another in the featureless swamp of grey, green and brown fantasy worlds and bleak future dystopias.

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Incidentally, the recently-revamped Stu’s Excellent World Of Pocketeers has just been further expanded, with proper pages for the highlighted US Tomy Pocket Games, lots of new scans and a new page in the Misc section discussing the various attempts made to cash in on the videogames boom by remaking Pocketeers with arcade themes. THAT IS ALL.

Yes, that’s now the number, out of the last 10 times I’ve switched on my PS3 to have a quick game of something or buy a PSN title, that I’ve had to perform a system update first. At least this one only took 15 minutes, compared to the usual hour or so, and downloaded and installed itself without me needing to tell it to halfway through, as used to be the case.

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Gaming sites everywhere are reporting the story of an Australian man who’s just been ordered by a court to pay poor Nintendo AU$1.5m – about £845,000 – for pirating New Super Mario Bros Wii. (By uploading it, that is. He actually paid for his own copy.) The figure has supposedly been arrived at by calculating that the perpetrator’s uploading of the game cost Nintendo 30,000 lost sales, presumably at a cost of AU$50 each. (NSMBW’s sales, incidentally, were 10.5m copies worldwide in its first two months, with over 200,00 of those in Australia.) It’s being widely implied – or even stated outright – that this is a court judgement. But guess what? As usual, it’s a load of bullshit.

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“Pros: very thin, resembles a cat, useful for immobilizing someone”

And fuck you too, YouTube. And fuck you most of all, UEFA.

http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/videos/melchester.avi

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