WoSblog has a tips sections now? Blimey, who saw that coming?
Alert WoSblog viewers will have noticed the absence of posts for the last couple of days. This is because almost every moment of spare time during that period has been spent playing Espgaluda 2.
Malcolm McLaren RIP. This is a version of a piece I originally wrote for WoS a few years ago, reprinted in tribute to one of the world's great chancers. The world would have been a much more interesting place if he'd managed to become the Mayor of London.
On the face of it, it's a time for national rejoicing. After just 13 years in government, Gordon Brown has suddenly apparently discovered the secret of 100% employment – state jobs for all.
New Labour's latest attack on the voiceless poor is the stunning assertion that after 30 years of millions-long dole queues, it seems there was no need for anyone to be unemployed at all.
Depressingly, of late we've still been at the stage in the development of the iPod as a gaming platform where the self-styled "hardcore" feel able to dismiss it as not being a "proper" games machine, claiming that it runs nothing but five-minute casual games. As of last Friday, that time is over.
As part of my recent series of snack expeditions I was in a Tesco just outside Bristol on Friday, in which I noticed a new addition to their Tesco Value economy range that raised an eyebrow.
If you can't quite make out the writing, read on for a close-up.
Was in Asda earlier this evening, looking for the new Walkers Flavour Cup crisps (found most of them), when I stumbled across evidence of something incalculably more thrilling.
Recently, for professional reasons, I've been pondering the quality of some old arcade conversions. (I know. It's no job for a grown man in his 40s, but in modern Britain it's either that or selling people crap they don't want from a call centre with a 20-minute lunchbreak, and I hate rushing lunch.)
And one of the things I realised was that there's some old stuff out there that badly needs fixing, and given the hundreds of homebrew coders and hackers still working with 8-bit hardware, really ought to be.
The last bastion of global freedom was put in chains last night. Now, on a whim, a government minister elected by no-one can legally shut down absolutely any site on the internet, indefinitely, on the mere suspicion that it might, in the future, infringe someone's copyright, or in some way inadvertently assist some third party in the breaking of some other law.
Of course, these powers will be used only sparingly and with the most careful and wise consideration. No further democratic scrutiny is or will be required. Authority has been wholly established.
We've been talking quite a bit about Tempest lately, so here's a last special little treat for now.
This, self-evidently, is the little-seen front and back box art for the official Atari ST conversion, which I found while messing around with GamebaseST. The steampunk art style is quite interesting in itself, but more exciting is the shock revelation that Tempest – perhaps the most purely abstract arcade game of all time – actually has a plot.
It's pretty easy to tell which legendary arcade game this is an unofficial home conversion of, right? Award yourself 5.92 points (out of 7.1) if you get it.
(Yeah, you're all so clever. I bet if I'd taken a shot without the yellow lines in you wouldn't have had a clue.)
But this incredibly obscure early-80s videogame teaches us a few interesting things about gaming as it is today, particularly with regard to the aesthetics of art and the intelligent application of technology. No, really, it does.
Or at least, apparently now it will if you tell it to. I got the most extraordinary email today. I'd been watching Breakfast news a few days ago, and was startled to hear one of the newsreaders assert, as part of a report on the progress of the Digital Economy Bill, that "music piracy costs the music industry hundreds of millions of pounds a year".
Since there has, of course, never been a single shred of evidence produced anywhere by anyone ever proving that this is the case, I was somewhat disturbed to hear the BBC suddenly reporting this claim as an absolute fact, without any sort of "the industry claims that…" qualifier in front of it. So I sent off an email via the BBC website politely expressing my concerns.
The case for video replays/TMOs in football is well-worn by now, and pretty much unarguable. Only rank idiots can possibly still contend that it's better to have the outcomes of games, trophies and entire championships decided not by footballers playing football, but by officials making crucial mistakes. So that isn't what this piece is about.
The reason I'd ended up wandering through the Atari ST software library in the first place was that someone in a forum discussion about something else had mentioned an Atari 400 game called Bellum.
I'd never heard of it (and haven't subsequently been able to find out anything useful about it), but it did make me want to play an Atari ST game of the same name that I remembered being very fond of in the late 1980s.
Man, that's a TV show I would pay good money to see.
I recently discovered the excellent Atari ST emulator frontend GamebaseST, and I've been enjoying a little nostalgic revisiting of my main gaming platform of the 16-bit era. (Before it became my job, that is.)
However, browsing through its impressively extensive library (over 3000 games), I was surprised not to see the name of Robotron.
WoSland – now at wosland.podgamer.com
