I had a bizarre consumer experience today, viewers. My four-month-old 64GB iPod Touch decided yesterday to commit suicide for no particular reason – it crashed mid-browse in Safari and then locked up on the Apple-logo screen. I tried all the normal and emergency restore methods without success – iTunes wouldn't even acknowledge its existence.

Then things got interesting. But if you're pushed for time, the moral of the following story is never buy anything from Currys, and never believe the government.

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In which WoS appears in a movie with Ricky Gervais!

Ish.

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Veteran WoSblog viewers will of course be aware that gamers in 2010 are more sharply divided into two factions than at any time in living memory, with all the cool kids increasingly abandoning tired, overpriced mainstream gaming to inhabit the sexy, fast-moving, instant-action world of the New Arcade.

Wario Ware on the GBA is pretty widely regarded as the groundbreaking game that defined the genre, but I've always wondered where the first seed was sown, and today I think I accidentally stumbled across the answer.

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So, WoSblog has an iPhone 4 now. Complex equations of justification had been agonised over at length, and eventually I managed to arrive at a view whereby I could construct a reasonably rational case for buying the SIM-free 32GB model at a horrendous £599, on the basis that I could recoup at least half the money straight away by selling stuff it replaced – old phone, HD video camera, the smaller of my iPod Touches etc.

The first thing the iPhone 4 appears to do is make the iPad completely obsolete, but more on that in a bit.

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Since WoSblog was going out to the M4/M5 interchange this week anyway, it seemed silly not to hop over the Severn Crossing and drive the handful of extra miles to Newport (subscriber link).

I was desperate to find some more Halls lime flavour Vita-C sweets, plus it was an ideal opportunity to document how (or at least, if) things had improved for the recession-blighted town in the eight months since my first visit.

To cut a long story short, the picture above (taken on the main shopping street) deals with the issue fairly concisely. But this time there was also something a bit more cheering to see.

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This week, WoSblog took a works trip to the rather excellent random museum of Oakham Treasures, located in a barn a couple of miles off the M5 and comprising a novel mix of old tractors and chocolate wrappers.

Chiefly (but far from exclusively) comprising exhibits from the 1930s, 40s and 50s, one of the collection's most striking features is the preponderance of a powerful word that crops up in the most mundane and unexpected places.

No, not "radium".

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It's one of the most-observed truths of videogame reviewing that the entire concept of scoring is, as practised almost universally in all forms of current print, broadcast and online media, fundamentally broken.

Everyone knows that the marks awarded in game reviews – whether out of five stars, ten points or 100% – are not in fact sequential numbers as we were taught them in arithmetic lessons, but abstract ciphers whose true value is heavily encoded. In videogame reviewing, 4 isn't any bigger than 2, 6=7, and 10 is more than twice as many as 9.

And therefore – since the sole and entire point of scoring is to attach an instantly comprehensible numerical summary of the reviewer's opinion to the text – videogame review scores are functionally almost meaningless.

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