Are you a videogame developer? Are you moaning that you're currently not making any/enough money? That's probably because you're not making games that look like this, you idiot:
The Boo Radleys' 1996 album "C'mon Kids" is the sort of record for which the term "commercial suicide" was invented. Like Pulp's "This Is Hardcore" two years later, it was the sound of an indie band reacting in panic to mainstream success by turning darkly introspective and abandoning the idea of writing great pop songs just when they'd finally gotten good at it.
As with Pulp, it wasn't actually the band's last record – they both managed one more album, with Pulp's "We Love Life" meeting a similar bargain-bin fate to the Boos' final effort "Kingsize" – but it was unquestionably the one that destroyed their success and cast them back into indie obscurity and poverty.
All things, though, are put right in time.
Because when you're illustrating a point, you haven't got the whole story until you've got the "after" as well as the "before".
(If you haven't worked it out, the little green $ sign is "price go down" and the little red $ sign is "price go up"…)
Also incorporating: The Story So Far.
Turns out that this one just keeps on running.
Today's thrilling developments include WoSblog's new best friend Olin Coles, Executive Editor of "independent" "reviews" site Benchmark Reviews, being exposed for some fraudulent DMCA claims and for yet more instances of lying to to his innocent, trusting readership. Read on!
So anyway, back to videogames. A special gold spotter's badge goes out to WoS-approved Antipodean correspondent Gabe McGrath for picking up on this little gem, which is going free (normally $16) until Monday 26th July. And it's not even an iPod game!
(I would have posted this two days ago but for all the time wasted on the idiot Olin Coles' dribbling nonsense, so you'll have to hurry.)
It's called Totally Tiny Arcade, it's for the PC, and it's an extremely cute minigame compendium reliving the 1980s glory days of the video arcade. You take the role of Joystick Johnny, a character so authentically 80s he wears his baseball cap the right way round while he's listening to his Walkman.
WoSblog apologises for any inconvenience caused to would-be viewers this afternoon, when for several hours visitors to the site were confronted with the image below.
The blog's suspension for much of yesterday was the result of yet another desperate attempt by Olin Coles, the in-no-way brainless and cowardly owner of widely discredited "review" site Benchmark Reviews, to suppress the evidence of his site's not-at-all dishonest practices.
Ooh, things just got even more interesting. Viewers following the mysterious tale of Benchmark Reviews and where their fully independent reviews come from will recall that WoSblog's shadowy agents tracked down the text of their glowing review of a $1200 office chair to the website of an online retailer called Smart Furniture. When asked, Smart Furniture asserted that the text was their own original work.
Since then, further developments have transpired. Read on!
Ooh, this gets better and better. Viewers who've been following the thrilling story as it develops will recall the eerie similarity between the content of the Benchmarks Review feature on the Herman Miller Embody chair, and the advertising blurb for it on the site of retailer Smart Furniture.
We were a little curious about this, bearing in mind site owner Olin Coles' strident assertion that, apart from the belatedly-acknowledged passages copied from Herman Miller's press release, "the remaining 99.9% of the article is a fully independent review of a self-purchased product."
(Actually it's the remaining 93.6%, but let's not quibble.)
So inestimable Friend Of WoSblog John X dropped Smart Furniture a line.
Wow. I got home from a poker game in the early hours of this morning, and idly wondered if busted shill/"executive editor" Olin Coles might have replied to my polite request for his side of the story with regard to his hopelessly dishonest excuse for a website. What I found was that Mr Coles had instead chosen to post on the Benchmark Reviews forum, in a thread entitled "Forever banned: Hall of Shame". The thread describes itself thus:
"Like any writer, our work comes under fire from time to time. Most of the criticism is taken to heart and used to improve future work, but occasionally the critic can go overboard and begin making personal threats and accusations. This thread is intended to show our visitors that their accusations and threats do not remain anonymous."
WoSblog is internationally renowned for its psychiatric expertise, so I wasn't surprised yesterday when a viewer of the WoS Forum asked me, quite out of the blue, to assess their mental stability.
"I want to know if I'm going barmy", wrote the clearly-distressed reader, whose cause for doubting his very sanity was – of all things – a review of an incredibly expensive office chair.
I don't know why these two things work so well one after the other, but they do. I hope one day to be watching this TV channel.
If you're a member of WoSblog's highly secretive Alert Viewers Society, you might recall that WoSblog recently visited the intriguing city of Gloucester, and in passing mentioned the presence – on the menu of the Varsity Bar pub chain – of an item by the name of the Dirty Dog's Dinner.
It didn't seem fair, though, that WoSblog's beloved viewers should be expected to simply picture it in their minds. So here it is.
[EDIT] This piece has now been removed and its contents shifted into the splendid iOS app Free-App Hero.
Well, that's that, then. The lowest-scoring World Cup of the modern era is won by the lowest-scoring team to ever lift the trophy. Spain's tactic of boring the opposition into submission by spending 80% of their time rolling the ball back and forth along the halfway line paid off and they became champions of the world by scoring a miserable EIGHT goals in seven games.
(By comparison, Brazil's victorious 2002 side managed to find the net 18 times in the same number of matches.)
A grim final featuring a record 13 bookings and – amazingly – only one sending-off for a brutal, ugly Netherlands side put a judge's black cap on the tournament, but it wasn't all bad. Here's my diary.
WoSland – now at wosland.podgamer.com
