Aged viewers will recall this reporter's once-burning love for the Nintendo DS. But it wasn't just the appearance on the scene of the younger, slimmer, all-touching-all-the-time iThings that caused the flame to die.

This week, with the Western launch of the 3DS just a few days away, I went back to the old stager for one last hurrah, to see what I'd missed in what's now almost two years of iOS-focused gaming and also to see how it felt to use a so-called "real" handheld console again. I found out some things, and have written them down here because I'm old and I forget stuff.

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So Apple are as we speak unveiling the much-hyped iPad 2, and to be honest it's not very interesting. It's thinner, it's got a faster CPU (dual-core) and front and back cameras, and that's about it.

To be honest, it seems like an update for the sake of doing an update, and because if you didn't your share price would fall or something.

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Alert viewers will know that WoSblog isn't averse to banging on about how you make more money by selling stuff dirt-cheap. But even now, people come up with excuses, so we like to keep piling on the evidence. Here's some more.

Street Fighter IV for iOS recently slashed its price by a breathtaking 90% overnight, from £5.99 to 59p. Within 48 hours its position in the overall Top-Grossing chart (that's the list of all apps, not just games) instantly rocketed from 116 to 2. Coincidence or magic? You decide. But that's not all.

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Because videogames journalism is embarrassingly bad.

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It's a fascinating time for the media right now. As newspaper circulations plummet, everyone's getting very excited about the potential of devices like the iPad and the Kindle to be the virtual newsstands of the future.

At the same time, of course, media organisations like News International are experimenting with hiding their web content behind a paywall to see if it's possible to get people to pay for journalism again. (Something this reporter has an obvious vested interest in.)

What a shame, then, that the last great flame of hope represented by the new technology risks being snuffed out by good old-fashioned corporate greed.

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Nintendogs+Cats, Winning Eleven Soccer 3D, Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition, Samurai Warriors Chronicle, Puzzle Bobble 3D, Ridge Racer 3D, Battle Of The Giants: Dinosaurs 3D, Professor Layton: Mask Of Miracles.

(Bold entries are purely for the sake of readability.)

According to Nintendo, the console's battery will last between three and eight hours (ie three hours), and will take three-and-a-half hours to fully charge. In other words, battery life will be shorter than the iPhone 4 and 4th-gen iPod Touch, the latter of which will be selling for about the same price.

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WoSblog viewers won't need reminding that this reporter has spent quite a significant chunk of his professional career (20 years this month, anniversary fans!) suggesting that the price of videogames is artificially high.

Despite the industry's endless red-herring protests about development costs, piracy and whatever, there isn't – and never has been – any genuine reason for new games to cost £40, £50 and more.

With videogames, as with anything else, the best guide to the true value of something is how well it holds that value, particularly in terms of day-one depreciation. And luckily for us, the venerable consumer publication Which? has just published the results of some research it's done into the subject. You're not going to be very surprised.

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It's generally accepted by most sane people that if you want to make money out of something – particularly if it's something that costs almost nothing to physically produce -  you sell it cheap. The mainstream videogames industry is almost alone in continuing to resist this reality.

Some premium titles push that already-horrendous sum up by as much as another £10, plus there are numerous comedy "Special Editions" aimed at the super-gullible, charging as much as £30 or £40 more for discs or books full of screenshots, or little plastic toys.

Now, of course, there's another way.

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Here's the odd thing. Everyone agrees there are videogame addicts. Using fairly standard terms of definition, numerous studies have shown large levels of addiction – this one, for example, claims that 3m players in the US alone are addicts. And yet, that same study also somehow concludes "it's not that the games are addictive".

So hang on – three million addicts addicted to something that isn't addictive? What's all that about, then?

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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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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?

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Recently we took a look at the theory and practice of videogame review scoring (if you weren't here at the time, it was even MORE exciting than it sounds), and arrived at some sensible and rational conclusions,as usual.

Not long afterwards, alert WoSblog viewer Steve Hogarty – a former editor of recently-deceased and generally well-regarded UK games mag PC Zone – sent me a link to an interesting thing.

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Slightly startlingly, GamesTM magazine reaches its 100th issue this month. It would seem we all really ARE that old.

As you'd expect, the 100th issue indulges in some retrospective pondering over the state of the games industry during the mag's existence, but it was an unremarked inclusion in the nostalgia trip that I found really striking.

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Whenever we've previously examined the contentious issue of App Store pricing, people have always tried to find excuses to dispute what seems to be a pretty inescapable conclusion from the evidence – namely the simple fact that selling apps dirt-cheap almost always generates far more money than charging higher prices for the same thing.

I'd love to see anyone try to make the argument after today.

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It's one of the most-observed truths of videogame reviewing that the entire concept of scoring is, as practised almost universally in all forms of current print, broadcast and online media, fundamentally broken.

Everyone knows that the marks awarded in game reviews – whether out of five stars, ten points or 100% – are not in fact sequential numbers as we were taught them in arithmetic lessons, but abstract ciphers whose true value is heavily encoded. In videogame reviewing, 4 isn't any bigger than 2, 6=7, and 10 is more than twice as many as 9.

And therefore – since the sole and entire point of scoring is to attach an instantly comprehensible numerical summary of the reviewer's opinion to the text – videogame review scores are functionally almost meaningless.

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