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 and 16-bit videogames magazines.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

The Definitive Defender, originally published in 2006, is the first in the Definitive series to be freely available online. It's the shortest feature in the series, with even this specially expanded and updated WoSblog version clocking in at only 3000 words or so and covering just 11 different games.

It also serves as an illustration of why plummeting standards of literacy might yet finish off videogames magazines once and for all.

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(From the incomparable Yo Gabba Gabba!, via Stereogum)

WoSblog would like to take this opportunity to admiringly offer its warmest congratulations to Christoph Waltz, who was this week quite rightly rewarded with an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in recognition of his superb portrayal of SS Colonel Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino's excellent WW2 knockabout Inglourious Basterds.

But what's going on here?

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This 7,000-word feature, originally partly published in GamesTM magazine, was an odd one. GamesTM commissioned it as part of their long-running "Bible" series of all-encompassing guides to gaming genres, and sent the most rigid copy template I've ever seen in my career (eg all the boxouts like "The Iconic Character" are predefined).

I duly submitted the piece as commissioned, making only one small alteration to the template, which was entirely necessary both for space and practical reasons. Nobody raised any issues at that point, so several weeks later when it was published I was greatly surprised to see it bumped to the Retro section of the mag, cut down to six pages (from the original eight), and now billed as a vague sort of history of old racing games instead of a "Bible" piece.

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I find it hard to keep up to date with the latest health news.

It might seem like nobody needs to go to Swindon twice in the space of one month. Not even people who live in Swindon. But I've got a bit of a soft spot for it, because it's making an admirable effort to be a good place to live.

It was the first town in Britain to get rid of speed cameras. It's got a permanent giant-screen TV in a big open plaza in the middle of town showing BBC News, and (one would hope) major sporting events and the like. It's got free internet and email terminals in the street (though none of the ones I tried actually worked). And it's also going to be the first town in the country to be completely covered by free public wifi. (Which I didn't realise was largely already in place, or I'd have tested it out during this trip.)

On this particular occasion, though, WoSblog was making a special visit to see one of Swindon's more niche attractions.

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Today WoSblog returned to Swindon. STAND BY FOR FURTHER INFORMATION.

With a tremendous sense of comic timing, the International Football Association Board this week ruled (despite the votes of the English and Scottish FAs) against any possibility of even experimenting with the use of goal-line technology, almost at the same minute as Birmingham City were denied a clear goal in their FA Cup quarter-final against Portsmouth that might have kept them in the competition.

It's embarrassing that in the modern age such crucial refereeing errors, so simple to rectify, can still see teams knocked out of a nation's biggest cup tournament. What's more embarrassing still is that another sport has successfully demonstrated just how easily many of the niggling issues that dog the thankless task of football officiating can be solved.

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We all remember Mr Do!, right? The smiley-faced star of a series of rather good arcade games by Universal (and a rubbish update on the Neo Geo) is one of the icons of early videogaming. But did you ever wonder why a clown was digging underground for cherries? After more than 20 years of tireless investigation, WoSblog has finally uncovered THE TRUTH.

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