Readers of a spiritual or elderly bent may be aware of the parable of the Deck Of Cards. (You can listen to a splendidly reverby take of Wink Martindale's definitive version by clicking this convenient link here.)

But you don't have to go back to the 1950s for a similarly instructive metaphor for the contemporary age. Because the iOS game Coin Dozer serves, if you don't want to carry around a bulky copy of Das Kapital, as a bible of the modern capitalist world. Shut up, it's not bollocks.

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In all the hubbub about the 3DS price cut, little has been made of Nintendo's compensation package for "3DS Ambassadors", by which they'll all get 20 free Virtual Console titles, split equally between old NES and GBA games. Just a nice offer to make peace with people who might feel a bit ripped off, right?

The problem with the package, however, is that it might be a bit too good.

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I get the feeling that Nintendo just don't understand what's happening to them any more. They're doing what they've always done, and what's made them swillions of dollars for the last half-decade, but the public just aren't biting this time. And now the gaming giant's nerve has cracked altogether.

Today's announcement that the company is to slash the trade price of the stumbling 3DS by a third, just four months after release, has taken everyone by surprise. But it really shouldn't have.

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Admired WoSland acquaintance and slow reader John X has a piece today on the estimable Rock, Paper, Shotgun about gaming revenues. Obviously it's mostly focused on the PC and is therefore of limiSNNOOOORRRRRE.

Eh? What happened? Where am I? Oh yeah – the PC part of the story is of course epically uninteresting because it's about the PC, but there's a much more intriguing and zeitgeisty fact buried away in the passing.

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Back in June we forecast that it'd take about a month for the three-game downloadable content pack for Galaga 30th Collection to drop from a frankly optimistic £5.49 to an entirely more reasonable £2.99 price point.

In fact, I got it wrong yet again – it was six and a half weeks.

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In one screenshot.

Distant Assassin: Reload goes free.

And sniper game Contract Killer, without being the subject of any update or price cut or reviews, suddenly leaps out of nowhere up the popularity charts. Sigh. And no, I'm not making those links.

On plugging in one of WoSland's many iThings for a sync this week, iTunes invited me to install a minor iOS update, iOS4.3.4. The only thing listed in the changelog was a bug fix to a "security issue with PDF files", which immediately made me think someone must have cracked 4.3.3 for jailbreaking.

Sure enough, not long afterwards I got a message from an alert viewer suggesting that I might like to check out some new unofficial apps available on Cydia, in particular one that removes Apple's ridiculous 11-page limit for displaying apps on Springboard, and confirming that 4.3.3 was now easily crackable on PC. And wow, they weren't kidding.

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The worlds of videogaming and science were equally stunned this week, when news broke of the disappearance of one of the former's most precious artefacts from the premises of Finnish developer Rovio. At this stage it's unknown whether the loss was the result of theft of accident, but in either event the consequences for gamers are likely to be serious.

That's because Rovio – producers of the iconic multiplatform mega-hit Angry Birds – have somehow contrived to lose the Magic Equation.

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Returning from the shops yesterday, I picked up an unexpected A4 envelope from the hallway by the door. Angry letters from debt collectors aren't usually A4, so I opened it. Inside was a short note from my mum saying "This isn't The Dandy as I know it", attached to something so odd that I instantly knew I had to scan it for posterity and share it with my beloved viewers.

Mums are always right about stuff.

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I like to watch the news for a few hours in the morning. I let it burble away in the background while I check out the day's free iOS apps, generally repeating the same 15 minutes of stories over and over again but occasionally breaking something new or cutting away to interview some reality-show "celebrity", the latter of which provides the ideal opportunity to go to the bathroom.

But to an extent not seen since 9/11 or the death of Princess Diana, watching the news has become increasingly pointless over the last two weeks or so. Because there's only one story, and it's a story about nothing, whose primary function is to distract the public with a soap opera (occasionally punctuated with slapstick) while the whole of Western democracy quietly implodes.

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"Hello WoSland readers! We are some Angry Birds plushies that Reverend Stu saw in a gadget shop in Cheltenham at the weekend."

"We're fractionally larger than a football, and we each cost FIFTY POUNDS."

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Celebrated WoSland associate and cloth-tasted idiot John X has been given free rein on Eurogamer today to spout a load of witless nonsense about the awful cancerous blight on the face of videogaming (and of all humanity) that is the galactically abysmal Tomb Raider Legend.

In the interests of balance and the correction of record, WoSland here presents the opposing view, retrieved from the National Archive Of Sanity.

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I got a rather unpleasant surprise this morning when I went to download Jeff Minter's newest iThing game (a remake of his old VIC-20 title Deflex) this morning. And for once it wasn't actually Jeff's fault.

The nasty shock came in the form of an unfamiliar price tag. When I'd noticed the game's release last night it was priced at the usual "Tier 2" point of £1.19, but when I tried to buy it this morning that had gone up by a startling 25%, to £1.49. And it wasn't just Deflex.

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There are lots of great writers. Even within the professional community, let alone the general public, you'll have a hard time getting two people to agree on who was the best ever. Shakespeare? Orwell? Joyce? Sega Zone-era Jonathan Davies? The arguments echo timelessly through the ages.

I've got many heroes and inspirations of my own – Steven Wells, Miranda Sawyer, Barbara Ellen, Craig Kubey, Rosie Boycott, Douglas Adams and plenty more. (Including the fictional composite entity Lloyd Mangram.) But the greatest writer of all time is someone whose name I don't even know, and who to earn the accolade only had to write a single word.

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