We all remember this, right?
(Click the pic to watch on YouTube. We can't have it embedded here because the repellent corporate nightsoil at Sony Music Entertainment have laid a copyright block on it and there STILL isn't a remotely decent video plugin for WordPress. This is the original TV version, incidentally.)
It's fantastic, of course. But on this occasion it's not the truly awesome thing.
Get a load of this monstrous boss enemy. Yikes! It's a bit like if Salamander had been written by HR Giger. It'd certainly give me the heeby-jeebies at the end of a tough-level of bullet-hell shmup, or worse yet, if it came hurtling down a corridor at you in some survival-horror FPS. But do you know the most terrifying thing about it?
YOU'VE ALREADY GOT ONE OF THESE LIVING INSIDE YOU.
While it's still free, so that you can enjoy its awesome ghost-racing capers.
Having played Mad Skills Motocross (available for PC, Mac and Linux as well as iOS), I am now OUTRAGED that all other racing-type games don't let you go to the online leaderboards and go head-to-head against the recording of anyone's best run. I'd write to my MP about it, but he's a treacherous cunt.
Many of you will know about this already, but for various reasons it's never actually been made official before now. Friends, colleagues, alert WoSblog viewers and the world in general, please welcome into your hearts and minds the infinite majesty of Free-App Hero.
Free-App Hero is an App Store tracker app with a difference – it delivers hundreds of fantastic free games without wasting your time with any of the thousands and thousands of terrible ones. Who wouldn't want that?
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.
…is the highly excellent and conspicuously free Parsec (iOS universal).
Will this latest spell at the top of the global heap last longer than similar heroic triumphs on Age Of Zombies Lite, Death Ball or Koan? Only time (by which I probably mean "around tea time") will tell.
You know how EDF2017 on the Xbox 360 is more or less the best game ever made (in 2007)? But you know how it's been almost impossible to find a copy of it for sale anywhere since about 2008? Boy, is it ever YOUR lucky day!
Because in a development I really didn't see coming, it's now available for download via Xbox Live. Yep, that's a full-size game previously sold on disc, that you can now buy as a digital download to avoid being scalped by eBay profiteers. Unfortunately you're now going to be scalped by Microsoft instead.
See, told you it was more addictive than the full version. I've been playing it half the day to manage this stupendous feat of excellence.
"1 Friend" is a bit harsh, mind you.
Have been stomping all over someone else's tunes again today. The new album from Swedish lounge metallers Hellsongs recently came to my attention – like the others it's a pretty hit-and-miss covers collection, but the best track is a tremendous version of Alice Cooper's "School's Out".
It's got a fantastic and joyful brass hook line that's tragically cut off in its prime at the end of the song, so I've fixed it with a quick bit of remixing (two versions, here and here – I think I prefer the fadeout one).
If you like it, check out the rest of the album via Spotify here.
It's nearly Christmas, after all. But just so we're clear, the goodwill of the season doesn't extend as far as Sony, who are the same shower of hateful greedy thieving cunts they've been for the last few years.
That's because the game we're about to discuss, like all recent PSN releases, costs six and a half quid on the Xbox 360 and £8 on the PS3, for no reason at all other than that they think they can get away with it.
This might be the only time when they're right.
God dammit. Now I probably have to go and buy something in the Playstation Store again. There goes another two hours.
That's because the latest version of Atari has just released (for £3.99 each) a bunch of their old late-1990s PS1 remakes into the Store for the PS3 and PSP, and one of them is Pong – The Next Level, which annoyingly is one of the greatest videogames of all time.
With the end of British Summer Time almost upon us, the much-delayed new Grand Pier at Weston-super-Mare only just beat the clock when it opened this weekend. You don't have to rush to visit it – unlike the old one, this one is open 364 days a year – but WoSblog got there when the paint was still wet in order to enjoy the carnival atmosphere to the max.
There are lots of official pictures of the opening and the inside here, but WoSblog's considered and expert view is that Weston now has the finest pier in the British Isles. And I'm not just saying that because I won a brand-new iPod Shuffle out of a crane machine.
You'll probably have noticed that things have been pretty quiet on WoSblog for the last week or so, and alert viewers will almost certainly have deduced that it's due to the disproportionate amount of effort currently being put into Podgamer. We're hoping to spread the work more widely on that very soon now, so hopefully there'll be more time for WoSblog again shortly.
In the meantime, and for those foolish viewers who still haven't plugged into the zeitgeist by getting themselves an iPhone 4 or an iPod Touch (available, as ever, for a scarcely-believable-but-lordy-me-it's-actually-true £6 to WoS subscribers), there's Crossfire.
Lots of people are aware that the celebrated Northampton comics auteur Alan Moore penned several volumes (recently reprinted) of Swamp Thing comic for DC in the mid-1980s, giving the strip a radical new direction and a powerful environmental message.
Fewer people know the secret origins of the author's connection to and inspiration for his controversial take on the character, which he first explored a few years earlier via the medium of interpretive dance as part of a protest group making a statement against the overuse of dangerous pesticides.
The footage has only recently been found and translated. He kept his beard a lot tidier in the early days.
(Original discovery via WoSblog's top pals at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, who amateurishly failed to recognise the cultural significance of what they thought was just a funny video of a Czechoslovakian banjo band.)
WoSland – now at wosland.podgamer.com
