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.
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.
You've got until May, Treasure. If it's not here by the end of May then Spring is officially over and I'm going to COME DOWN THERE AND PERSONALLY BEAT YOU ALL TO DEATH WITH A FUCKING HAMMER. But anyway.
When manually restoring one-by-one the contents of my old 360's hard drive (because the transfer cable I'd bought was a useless piece of junk), I was mildly surprised to notice that I hadn't actually got round to buying the full version of an Indie game I'd recently referenced in another piece, only the demo, so I swiftly put that right because it's ace. It's called Crosstown.
Seriously – it was supposed to be out last November, then got delayed until "Spring". IT'S SPRING NOW! IT'S LIKE THE FRICKING KALAHARI OUTSIDE! GET THE BLOODY SHITTING BASTARD HELL ON WITH IT! But anyway.
Sometimes I have to stop and remind myself how astonishingly lucky we fans of proper arcade videogames have it in this generation. Back in the 8-bit and 16-bit days, arcade conversions were most often nothing but pale shadows of their coin-op counterparts. From the 32-bit era on they were often better than the real thing, but cost £40 a pop. Nowadays, you can get a reality-plus port of After Burner Climax in your home for three and a half quid.
WHERE THE FUCKING HELL IS BANGAI-O HD? But anyway.
Having finally got my new Xbox 360 up and running (having had to replace my old Premium which finally gave in to RROD a few weeks ago), I've been buying some new stuff to give my eyes an occasional break from staring at the little iPhone screen. First up is the fairly splendid Infinity Danger.
Just a few days after release, Speedball 2 Evolution has had its price slashed from £2.39 to 59p, for an unknown length of time.
At that price, everybody pile in.
As we all know, videogame plotlines are the gamer's greatest source of embarrassment. It's hard to hold your head up in polite society and defend gaming as a pastime when, should someone at a fancy dinner party ask you to describe what your current fave is about, you have to mumble something about dragons and wizards and elves and goblins.
Which is, of course, the way it should be – orc nerds SHOULD be ashamed to show their faces among decent people who grew out of Tolkien (and sub-sub-sub-Tolkien) when they were 12. But now there's Dungeon Raid!
Well, okay, strictly speaking it's more like £3.90 or so. But hey, none of us pays full price for our MS Points in this modern online day and age, do we?
The chance discovery of excellent sequel Decimation X3 last week sent me on one of my irregular trawls through the uncharted swamps of the Indie section of the Xbox Games Marketplace, and as usual there was treasure to be found. Listed below are six of the finest recent releases, which form a diverse collection of games whose only common ground is that they can all be yours for the crazy bargain price of 80 MS Points (64p or so) each.
This one's for a pretty small micro-set of WoSblog viewers, but both of you might be interested to know that World Of Goo for the iPad – the definitive version of 2D Boy's much loved physics puzzler, and a superb showcase for touch controls – is currently on sale for half price.
The previous £5.99 tag wasn't exactly a scandalous ripoff, but by App Store standards it was off-puttingly hefty, especially for a port. At just £2.99, though, you really ought to be snapping it up sharpish. I know I just did.
Sometime back in the 1990s, some idiot somewhere decided that games should stop being fun, and become more like work. That is, having paid (at that time) £40+ for a shiny new game, you were only allowed to play a tiny fraction of it until the developers felt you'd "earned" the right to "unlock" bits of it that for no good reason you weren't allowed to access from the off.
(Never mind that you'd already "earned" that right by GOING OUT AND DOING A REAL JOB TO MAKE THE MONEY YOU BOUGHT THE BASTARD THING WITH IN THE FIRST PLACE.)
Fortunately, somewhere around 2001 everyone got completely sick of the idea of being made to plough through hours of gruelling, joyless slog in order to be allowed to enjoy the games they'd bought, all those developers were happily beaten to death with jagged rocks, and the ugly blight of "unlocking" was banished forever amid scenes of great celebration across the land.
Recently, in the absence of anything very exciting new to play, I spent a lot of time with one of my very first iPod favourites. Pole Position Remix is a game riddled with flaws, and in the light of some of the stuff we're about to discuss its normal £1.79 price point is extremely optimistic.
Over the Christmas period, though, Namco have given it one of its frequent 59p promos, and IF you're prepared to put in a couple of hours of gruelling unlocking work – which I'm by no means saying you should – you'll find something rather splendid hidden away idiotically at the end of it.
Driver's on sale for 59p again, in case you missed it when it was free.
The controls work exceptionally well, it's an all-round superb port, and unless you hate Driver itself (for which there are several legitimate justifications), the iOS version is a stunning bargain. That is all.
Today is apparently the day Americans like to thank their imaginary friend "God" for the fact they they stuffed their faces with turkey yesterday, something they achieve by going out and spending lots and lots of money in shops. The shops helpfully like to facilitate this behaviour with lots of cut-price sales, and in these exciting days of digital global retail you don't have to be an actual American to take advantage of the bargains.
For one day only, then, Microsoft are giving a bunch of really good XBLA games some serious price-tag faceplants.
WoSland – now at wosland.podgamer.com
