Have been stomping all over someone else's tunes again today. The new album from Swedish lounge metallers Hellsongs recently came to my attention – like the others it's a pretty hit-and-miss covers collection, but the best track is a tremendous version of Alice Cooper's "School's Out".

It's got a fantastic and joyful brass hook line that's tragically cut off in its prime at the end of the song, so I've fixed it with a quick bit of remixing (two versions, here and here – I think I prefer the fadeout one).

If you like it, check out the rest of the album via Spotify here.

Today is apparently the day Americans like to thank their imaginary friend "God" for the fact they they stuffed their faces with turkey yesterday, something they achieve by going out and spending lots and lots of money in shops. The shops  helpfully like to facilitate this behaviour with lots of cut-price sales, and in these exciting days of digital global retail you don't have to be an actual American to take advantage of the bargains.

For one day only, then, Microsoft are giving a bunch of really good XBLA games some serious price-tag faceplants.

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It's nearly Christmas, after all. But just so we're clear, the goodwill of the season doesn't extend as far as Sony, who are the same shower of hateful greedy thieving cunts they've been for the last few years.

That's because the game we're about to discuss, like all recent PSN releases, costs six and a half quid on the Xbox 360 and £8 on the PS3, for no reason at all other than that they think they can get away with it.

This might be the only time when they're right.

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Gran Turismo 5 is finally out! (Or possibly almost finally out!) Woo! It's no more than four or five years late! And worth every minute!

I haven't played it, obviously. But there's something you should know.

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Well, that'll teach me to write a loving but very gently semi-critical appraisal of the iPad. Apple's crack Unbeliever Punishment Squad was scrambled immediately, and within 24 hours punishment was duly delivered.

The main engine of retribution was to be – as is so often the case – the vile, stinking, loathing-fuelled execresence that is PC iTunes.

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I'm pretty much Steve Jobs' bitch now. In my defence, while I do now own almost a complete set of iProducts – a 2GB iPod Shuffle (4th-gen), 16GB iPod Nano (4th-gen), 16GB iPod Touch (2nd-gen), 64GB iPod Touch (3rd gen), 32GB iPhone 4 and now a 32GB iPad – I didn't give Apple the £1800 they nominally cost. In fact, I only actually bought one of them for money. 

(The Shuffle cost £2 as a prize out of a crane machine on Weston pier, and everything else except for the iPhone was booty from the WoS Subscribers Awesome Reward Scheme, and cost me less than £20 for the whole lot.)

Back in August when I got the iPhone 4, I wondered aloud about whether it effectively rendered the iPad redundant. So now that I've got one of my own, what's the answer?

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If not, you're going to look a bit stupid when you fail to download one of the iPod's very best tap-shooting games. Westbang will be highly familiar to fans of both the 1983 Sega coin-op Bank Panic and its splendid unofficial 1985 Spectrum port West Bank.

Westbang is free today, and it's a brilliant implementation of the game that's been sat on my apps front page for many months. It's got difficulty settings for players of all abilities, from "small child wearing boxing gloves" to "can complete Ikaruga on one credit while controlling two ships at once and reading a newspaper, also wearing boxing gloves".

NB WoSblog does not recommend the wearing of boxing gloves while playing games, except for the game of boxing.

Not right now you can't. I've been meaning to write about the excellent and deeply weird Be2 – Escape From Pongland for a couple of weeks now, but kept putting it off as it's SO weird I couldn't really figure out how to explain it. But now developers Kismik have very kindly saved me some trouble.

The full version of the game has just gone temporarily free, so you can tackle its seriously freaky Pong-meets-VCS-Adventure vibe, and wrestle with the extremely unusual controls, for yourself. It's one of the most original, inventive and strange games on the App Store, so I firmly recommend that you do. Phew, that was close.

Sometimes, stupid people who don't want to face up to the truth criticise WoSblog's numerous articles on game pricing (particularly iOS game pricing) by complaining that even Top-Grossing chart positions alone are meaningless unless they're backed up by actual sales figures.

These people are idiots, since the point of all the articles has been not the precise amount of pounds and pence any of the games in question made, but whether they made more money by being sold at much lower prices (which, in all cases, they did). Still, just for the sake of argument, now we DO have a couple of specific figures, and they make for most interesting reading.

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It cost me £8 (for the 32GB wifi-only model), via another application of the terrific WoS Subscribers Awesome Reward Scheme Enterprise.

You could have one too for around the same price if you wanted (no pyramid schemes, no participation from anyone else required). But anyway. It's pretty tremendous so far. More impressions to follow shortly.

Earlier this week we pointed out that for most people in Britain, the current economic crisis is in fact no such thing. If you're in the blessed section of what in modern times is an unprecedentedly polarised society, which is defined by home ownership – something the majority of adults are – then the chances are you're doing just fine out of the banking catastrophe of 2007-8.

So the widespread vilification of Lord Young of Graffham (above, centre) in this morning's press for accidentally saying out loud what most people already know to be perfectly true is a little… well, it's not surprising, exactly, but it's another nail in the tattered, sieve-like coffin of the concept of honesty between the people and their semi-elected leaders.

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Legendary cult shmup developers Cave have brought iOS gaming two of its most impressive flag-bearers. Espagaluda 2 and Dodonpachi Resurrection are spectacular showcases for the power of the iThings, in some respects actually superior to both the original arcade titles and the Xbox 360 home ports.

Now the company has released its first all-original iOS game, albeit one that's a spinoff from another of its hit shmup franchises and borrows a lot of Cave's standard trademarks. Mushihimesama Bug Panic, though, is an overhead-view twin-stick shooter, and is departure from the norm in more ways than one.

The biggest is the fact that it's rubbish.

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As the growing horror that is the coalition government unfolds more hideously every day, the British people could easily be forgiven for harbouring a sense of complete and utter hopelessness.

The choices presented to them in May 2010 already amounted to little more than three slightly different shades of the same colour. But the moment when even any manufactured pretence at significant difference between the policies offered by the three major parties evaporated – the minute Nick Clegg got behind his Deputy Prime Minister desk – it became impossible to maintain the delusion that Britain remains a democracy in any meaningful sense any more.

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This is the fastest-selling videogame of all time, I think:

Relatedly, this. On the upside, "CoDBlOps" is a pretty funny word.

Hey, you know what we haven't had on WoSblog in ages? (Any kind of post? – A. Disgruntled-Viewer, Hartlepool) An iPod freebie alert! Mr Aahh!! is one of the first iOS games I encountered that hooked everyone I knew at once.

Its simple rope-swinging gameplay and gorgeous, uber-stylish presentation give it instant appeal, and I played it for days on end before giving up in a fit of pique at being unable to better a friend's high score.

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