Alert viewers won't (or possibly will) need reminding of Forget-Me-Not, a superb neo-retro iOS game we reported on way back in March that crosses Gauntlet with Pac-Man and Robotron and Crossroads. Well, now it's back with a whole bunch of new enhancements, but not on iOS.

The game's author has ported it to the PC and Mac, where you can have it entirely for free. You should do this immediately, unless you're an idiot.

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In keeping with their general levels of inept bumbling irritancy, Namco have ungraciously just rendered much of last Saturday's enthusiastic piece about Pac-Man S inaccurate and redundant, by wiping the leaderboards and releasing a new and substantially different version of the game.

Luckily for them the new version is even better, and therefore few will die.

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Actually, I probably still won't. Google is one of the most sinister multiglobal corporations on Earth, and it still astonishes me that people will entrust them with their main email accounts. But more importantly, they don't have this.

(It's not that I have a lot of faith in Facebook either, you understand. I'm extremely selective about what apps I let it install and what personal data I keep there, and I pretty much only accept people I actually know in real life as friends, with few exceptions. But games this good are welcome to know my fictitious school history if they want to.)

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Is, of all things, a Facebook game. I know! Specifically, it's Pac-Man S.

Namco are on a great run of doing excellent stuff with their old IP these days, and we might easily have been recommending New Rally-X S instead, which is also pretty darn good. But Pac-Man S, which borrows several elements from the Pac-Man Championship games, is arguably even spiffier.

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Alert viewers will doubtless recall a recent piece in which we praised the toweringly magnificent gameplay engine of Evolution Tennis for iOS, while savagely attacking its awful, unbelievably user-hostile metastructure.

As ever, though, WoSland's nudging has managed to secure tangible and thrillingly awesome results where others merely flail around impotently.

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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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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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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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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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Because you can download a game that's already pretty good, frequently for nothing, and then for no good reason a few months later it gets made enormously bigger and better at no extra charge.

The shot above is of a complete new mode that's just been added to Donut Games' rather spiffy Traffic Rush (currently 59p). It's just one of a whole slew of improvements made in the latest update, including an upgrade to shiny Retina graphics, native iPad support and the replacement of Donut's awful web-based leaderboards with proper Game Center ones.

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We live in the prettiest galaxy, I think.

(Via @jimrossignol)

First there was Bangai-O HD, then there was Radiant Silvergun, and now this.

WoSblog, 18 March 2011:

"There's a You Don't Know Jack game for the DS! It's awesome, as all You Don't Know Jack games are. Why is there no You Don't Know Jack game for iOS yet? Have someone killed immediately."

8 April 2011

You Don't Know Jack announced for iOS. Sometimes I scare myself.
 

Sorry updates have been a bit thin on the ground for the last few days, viewers – I've been insanely busy with about eight different things, and probably will be until Monday. One of them was reaching a milestone with the mighty Free-App Hero, which has now featured a frankly amazing 500 games since being released four months ago and written 150,000 words (roughly two novels' worth) about them. Yikes.

Astoundingly, that translates to somewhere in the region of £5 million saved by the app's users since it came out, and all without having to spend hundreds of tedious hours wading through thousands of godawful ad-strewn games written by escaped mental patients in order to find the good stuff.

Anyway, here are some pictures of weird stuff I saw in the park last week.

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The world moves alarmingly fast nowadays, doesn't it? But right now, at this particular moment in time and until something else shiny and exciting comes along (probably around lunchtime), this is the best game ever.

With a certain amount of irony, then, (and for no very good reason that I can immediately discern), it's called Forget-Me-Not.

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