After yesterday's piece, an awful lot of very irritable fanboy types have been angrily demanding to know what my problem is with the PSP2. I rather thought the feature had explained that in some detail, but I appreciate that kids today have very limited attention spans, so in short, it's essentially this:

(Image to scale. The NGP is also exactly twice as thick as the iPhone.)

If I want to play games on the move, I want a machine I don't need a luggage trolley to carry around (especially once I've added a phone and a camera). And if I want to play PS3-type games, I have a PS3.

Because videogames journalism is embarrassingly bad.

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Two touchscreens, two cameras, two analogue pads, d-pad, eight buttons, accelerometer and gyroscope, four-hour battery life and allegedly PS3-quality games (presumably at PS3-game prices). And of course, it's Sony.

So, anyone prepared to bet on anything below £329?

The Pickford Brothers' turn-based two-player strategy game Naked War is now completely free to download and play. (Previously, if I remember rightly, it was free to download but you had to pay for moves.)

I love turn-based strategy (I've been dying for a good email TBS since Hasbro shut off the Email X-Com servers, the despicable cunts) but I absolutely loathe subscription-based or pay-per-play games (outside of an arcade), so I never actually got round to giving Naked War a try. In the light of this splendid development, I plan to put that right very soon.

Or "Games which are hopelessly flawed, but still entertaining in a slightly rubbish sort of way as long as you didn't have to spend any money on them".

Today's temporarily-tolerated title: Chop Chop Soccer.

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Boardgames are brilliant fun, offering gameplay that’s been tried and tested over years or often decades, but are usually handled terribly on consoles.

Seeking some justification for running on powerful electric machinery and costing twice as much as buying the physical version from a toyshop, they frequently swamp the gameplay in pointless bells, whistles and cutscenes (which the player has to instantly turn off so that a single game of Monopoly doesn’t last 14 hours), as well as imposing an unwavering rigidity of rules.

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Now THIS is how you make a puzzle game.

Inexplicably never seen on a home format before this DS version (with the exception of a single Wonder Swan release with bafflingly bad controls for a system with two d-pads), Slitherlink is in fact, like the mighty Picross, merely one of a variety of generic names for a type of popular pen-and-paper puzzle.

Your task is to draw a single continuous line around a grid of numbers, such that every number is bordered by the line on exactly the specified number of sides.  (If you don't quite follow that, a look at the screenshot above should make the objective a bit clearer.)

This single simple rule results in the creation of the best logic puzzle this reporter's ever encountered.

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So after all the hype, Nintendo didn't announce a launch price for the European 3DS at all. I think it's safe to assume that that means it's going to come in at the higher end of everyone's predictions, and Nintendo are too chicken to take the blame for a handheld costing more than the PS3.

After all, if it was going to pleasantly surprise everyone and sell for under £200, don't you think they'd have wanted to take the credit and make a big song and dance about it?

EDIT: £229 it is, then.

Christ, that's frightening.

Well, okay, strictly speaking it's more like £3.90 or so. But hey, none of us pays full price for our MS Points in this modern online day and age, do we?

The chance discovery of excellent sequel Decimation X3 last week sent me on one of my irregular trawls through the uncharted swamps of the Indie section of the Xbox Games Marketplace, and as usual there was treasure to be found. Listed below are six of the finest recent releases, which form a diverse collection of games whose only common ground is that they can all be yours for the crazy bargain price of 80 MS Points (64p or so) each. 

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Apparently today is the most depressing day of the year, the multiply-aptly-named Blue Monday. I'm inclined to agree, though not for the same reasons as are being cited in most of the stories covering the subject.

I'm depressed today because it's looking more and more difficult with every passing day to avoid coming to the conclusion that most of the British public are irredeemably stupid cretins who should no longer be permitted even the minor and largely illusory say they get in the governing of the country.

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Attentive viewers might recall a little Xbox Indie Games gem that WoSblog uncovered last year by the name of Decimation X. Now the sequel is out – ladies and gentlemen, let's hear it for Decimation X3!

(Hang on, what?)

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This one's for a pretty small micro-set of WoSblog viewers, but both of you might be interested to know that World Of Goo for the iPad – the definitive version of 2D Boy's much loved physics puzzler, and a superb showcase for touch controls – is currently on sale for half price.

The previous £5.99 tag wasn't exactly a scandalous ripoff, but by App Store standards it was off-puttingly hefty, especially for a port. At just £2.99, though, you really ought to be snapping it up sharpish. I know I just did.

Is famously the answer to a very important question, but also to some less vital ones, such as "Hey Stu, how many versions of MAME have you been completely disinterested in since the hateful nerds in charge of the project started piously and systematically dismantling all of its most useful functions?"

That remains the case (the emulator is now on version 0.141 and I haven't downloaded one since 0.99), but yesterday an alert viewer pointed me to a MAME spinoff in which I was very very interested indeed.

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