(From the Angry-Birds-meets-Peggle Cow Trouble, free today.)

(From the all-consuming Tiny Tower, free.)

One of the least welcoming and most unfriendly games I've ever been totally unable to stop playing, Evolution Tennis (today reduced to 59p) is so spartan it barely even qualifies for the term 'half-baked'. If we're being generous, there's half a game here. But it's a heck of a half a game.

A front end that's a piece of exhibition-level brutalism leads you swiftly into a tennis tournament. You can't even enter your name (you go by the title PLAYER), the tournaments comprise fixed three-set matches (no quick game here), and once you're playing there's no way out other than to win, lose or press the Home button – you don't even get pause or quit options.

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Is still this, which I was reminded of by last week's Glastonbury email. It's the stunning last song of Spiritualized's closing Other Stage set on the Saturday of the one and only Glastonbury I ever attended (1998) – which I watched on telly at home, having abandoned the festival on the Friday night.

And even though this is a crappy-quality video, remember – it's still about 10 times better than what you see if you're actually there.

(Brought to you in association with Free-App Hero, natch.)

Star Keeper, which is free at the time of writing, is 60 (or 90) seconds of sheer design genius. The simplest of premises (it's a little bit reminiscent of Qix, and not just in the fact that you draw boxes – the way risk grows the bigger the area you try to "capture" is conceptually very similar, as is the simplicity of the gameplay) conceals a game of extraordinary beauty and compulsiveness.

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Since the sad but wholly predictable demise of Podgamer, I still sometimes get emails from developers with new iThing games. If someone's gone to the trouble of sending a promo code it's rude not to at least take a look, and almost invariably the games turn out to be pretty good. (Because if your game was rubbish, why would you encourage people to play it?)

The likelihood of a review subsequently appearing is approximately sixteen million billion trillion times higher if you don't choose to illustrate the game with fuck-awful App Store screenshots with PR bollocks spewed all over them, but very occasionally if I really like something I'll make exceptions even if you've made me needlessly piss around taking my own pictures like I've got nothing better to do with my time, you fucking idiot.

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I originally wrote this piece for a website recently set up by some Labour MPs and MSPs from Scotland, which had solicited contributions from supporters of other parties. The site had attracted a large amount of comments (almost all of them genuine attempts at discussion, rather than jibes) from non-Labour voters, but some readers got very huffy about this "cybernat invasion".

Sadly, despite asking me to write the piece after I suggested it to them, they've declined to publish it, and the site has now taken to deleting comments from non-supporters wholesale. (I had a minor Twitter scuffle with the Labour MP behind the site last night, and he's turned out to have a very thin skin. One of his posts on the blog was also so mercilessly shredded for inaccurate facts that its entire comments thread has now been deleted.)

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Herosoft Ltd is proud to announce a double landmark today: the 750th game featured in Free-App Hero, and the release of two awesome new versions of the app that various sources have described as "fantastic" (Cult Of Mac), "useful" (Pocket Gamer), "wonderful" (iPhone App Review) and "crap" (someone called 'Krakatomato', which we suspect may be a pseudonym).

FAH 2.0 is a major upgrade, offering several much-requested features and some other stuff nobody even thought of asking for. Frankly, it's so stupendously great that we're actually a little bit embarrassed.

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My least-favourite every-five-years task is buying a new PC. Not only because it costs as much as a car, but because it means days and days of horrible tedious work just getting everything re-installed, and all you end up with for spending hundreds of pounds is something that does what your existing PC ought to be able to do already, but can't because inevitably by this point it's a broken-down heap of junk choked with garbage that runs like a noisy toilet.

So, does anyone want to recommend me someplace or some person where/from whom to buy a vaguely-useable machine that I'll only have to sell at most one internal organ to pay for? Requirements follow.

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He doesn't actually specify whether he means this one or this one.

But either way: welcome to 2005, Dave!

Namco's first attempt at bringing the Galaxian/Galaga series to iOS, the near-unplayable Galaga Remix, was a game that could have been described as a pig's arse only if you really wanted to hurt the feelings of some pigs. Rarely can a professional videogame publisher ever have demonstrated so complete a lack of understanding of their target platform.

For their second try, though, they've got very nearly everything right.

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Occasionally, dismally stupid internet twats whine moronically at me that I never admit to being wrong about anything. There are numerous idiotic flaws in that argument, but just so that we've got an example on the record for future reference: I was definitely wrong about the price of the PSP2.

And as a bonus, even though I never actually said this in writing anywhere: I was also wrong in believing, as I did, that Sony would surely never burden it with a name as monumentally, clatteringly shit as "Playstation Vita".

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So predictably, the internet is alive with people mad at Spotify, who have finally rendered the free version of their music-streaming service unusable. After ramping up the frequency of ads until they were after almost every song, then restricting free users to 20 hours of listening a month, and then reducing that to 10, the latest wheeze is to only let users play any particular song five times ever, before locking it away.

But hey – if you're not paying you've got no grounds for complaint, right?

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If you've been missing it, the Playstation Network is now more or less back up. Expect many errors starting with an "8", but you should be able to batter your way through eventually and access online gaming and the PS Store.

A few handy tips follow for the minimisation of displeasure and rage.

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