Alert WoS viewers will already know that despite having lived adjacent to it for almost 20 years, I've never really got on with the oddly characterless city of Bristol. This year, though, I made an extra-special effort, which included going to the Bristol Harbour Festival.
So do we care about the 3DS or not? I just don't know.
Since the release of the software lineup trailer, everyone on the internet's been getting very excited, in a way that only Nintendo really achieves.
(I know people queue up at midnight to buy Halo Reach and gobble up Modern Combat in their billions and beseige Apple Stores whenever Steve Jobs removes another feature from the iPod Nano, but only Mario and Zelda seem to still have the ability to turn grown men into simpering fanboys.)
But something struck me on watching the video, and in the light of the recent news about the console's price. Is the 3DS actually the new PSP?
I saw one running in Tesco HomePlus on Friday while I was out looking for a new office chair, and was quite interested in having a go on the table-tennis game that was being shown, so I had a read of the on-screen instructions and grabbed the cute and nicely-built (if rather light) "wand" controller.
I spent five minutes unsuccessfully trying to calibrate it, then gave up. 1/10.
"…and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to tell which was which."
Is the tremendous Finger Sling.
I have to go out right now, but I'll explain why it's so great later. Although since it's free, you really ought to have found out for yourself by the time I get back anyway. Get to it, and I'll see you on the leaderboard.
Man, I've been waiting for this to happen for ages. A long long time ago, when I was barely half as old as I am now, there was a magazine called Cut. A sort of artsier Scottish version of the NME, it was a music-and-culture-and-politics newspaper that came out either weekly or fortnightly, I forget which.
Either way, in 1989 Cut began publication of a comic strip written by Grant Morrison (the eccentric/mental creator of Zenith and The Invisibles, among many others), called The New Adventures Of Hitler.
Another punch in the kidneys today for all those people who say the iPod's touch screen is no good for "traditional" types of game.
Aftermath is basically Resident Evil meets Robotron, a third-person twin-stick zombie shooter conducted mostly in darkness, but the ingenious aspect is the way that your character shoots automatically at anything illuminated by his torch, simplifying the controls without reducing the difficulty any.
It's excellent and temporarily free right now, so don't hang about.
"Frog in a rainbow flowing water to drink, had a special ability.
Oh! Swim in the sky…
Listen to the sound of frogs in the wind.
More snow jump right to the shorter distance, and if it does drip a little to be recovered.
What's new
The birth of a new game."
Alert viewers will recall the events of just a couple of weeks ago, when a simple command from WoSblog caused the international games industry to jump immediately to attention and promise to bring a version of Treasure's magnificent Bangai-O to Xbox Live Arcade before the end of the year.
But WoSblog's powers grow mightier still – earlier this week I merely thought about an XBLA version of the same company's legendary Saturn shooter Radiant Silvergun, and look what happened:
Enhanced visuals, online co-op and new modes. Spring 2011. Life is good.
I think my Formspring page has run its course, so before I shut it down I might as well round up the last of the vaguely interesting questions it raised.
The collected Parts 1, 2 and 3 have already appeared on WoSblog, so here's the 4th instalment, which comprises more questions about gaming and media and is scarily as big as the first three volumes put together. Tomorrow we'll do everything else, and that'll be that.
…who like the Monkey Island games? If so, you may well want to pick up Monkey Island 2 Special Edition today, while it costs 59p instead of £4.99.
If you've enjoyed this weekend's diet of gore and splatter (thanks to the visceral delights of Doomsday: Hellraiser and Zombie Flick), you're about to get even happier.
Cut Him Up!, free today.
But it's totally worth stopping the presses for a minute for this one:
That's Zombie Flick, going free while stocks last. Rush!
For various mostly-exciting reasons, WoSblog is currently insanely busy. Normal updating service should be restored early next week, but for now, why not take a trip back to the early days?
These are some classic WoSblog pieces you may have missed from a time when the site had only a fraction of the readership it does now.
WoSland – now at wosland.podgamer.com
