It cost me £8 (for the 32GB wifi-only model), via another application of the terrific WoS Subscribers Awesome Reward Scheme Enterprise.
You could have one too for around the same price if you wanted (no pyramid schemes, no participation from anyone else required). But anyway. It's pretty tremendous so far. More impressions to follow shortly.
…who like the Monkey Island games? If so, you may well want to pick up Monkey Island 2 Special Edition today, while it costs 59p instead of £4.99.
Because by any rational process of objective appraisal this is a terrible game, and reviewing it honestly you'd have to give it about 40% tops.
So why have I just played Slingo Supreme for about 11 hours straight? To be honest I can barely explain it, and in fact I'm not even going to try.
I'll just say that while the app's normal price of £2.99 is indefensible to the point of being laughable, the current 59p sale somehow makes it the kind of thing I feel able – nay, obliged in the name of integrity – to recommend, even while acknowledging that it's total rubbish. Make sense of that.
…is Meteor Blitz. Normally £1.79, today you can grab it for just 59p. And you should totally do that.
It's basically an unashamed tribute to the wonderful Super Stardust HD on PSN, and plays very similarly, with multiple upgradeable weapon paths and lots and lots of asteroids and space baddies. Control is very well thought-out, and while it could perhaps be a little tougher, even if you only play through it once it's a snip at the price. (And most people like their games a bit easier than I do anyway.) One from the top drawer.
Cinematronics' 1983 laserdisc coin-op Dragon's Lair (on sale at the time of writing for an unspecified period in the App Store for 59p, down from £2.99) is the most successful videogame in the history of the world that nobody will admit to liking.
For over 20 years, Dragon's Lair games have been coining in cash hand over fist, while drawing nothing but sneering bile from press, critics and "hardcore" gamers. And they're all wrong.
Shrewd viewers will already be sitting on a big pile of cash from taking WoSblog's last betting advice. Now there's a golden opportunity to turn it into a pile of cash almost twice as big.
Frankly I'm astonished this bet is still available, so get in quick.
Rather kindly, EA have decided to provide WoSblog with a handy and timely illustration of why you might want a US App Store account.
For the opening weekend of the World Cup only, the multinational software giant is celebrating what it appears to believe is a match between the USA and Great Britain on Saturday, by slashing the price of 2010 FIFA World Cup to a bargain $0.99 (down from the previous $6.99).
Sadly, the pricing of the app is rather less multinational – while the US price equates to just 59p, British FIFA fans are expected to pay FIVE TIMES as much, with the UK App Store maintaining its £2.99 price point for the game.
You don't have a PSP Go. Nobody does. That's because, even in the idiot world we live in, nobody is QUITE stupid enough to pay double the price of a normal PSP for one with a smaller screen, no facility to play UMD games and no ability to run the custom firmware that's needed to use almost all of the PSP's attractive features.
Which is why, in an obvious warehouse-emptying initiative designed to erase the entire ham-fisted episode from memory as quickly as possible, Sony are now basically giving their stock of unsold PSPGs (which is to say, nearly all of them) away for nothing.
Perfect Dark XBLA has finally been patched into the condition it should have been released in in the first place, so I bought it. So far it seems to be just as fantastic a game as I remembered from a decade ago, but with nicer graphics and a silky-smooth framerate, so well done to all concerned.
I still had some MS Points left over, though, so at the same time I also picked up the splendid Retrofit: Overload.
As part of my recent series of snack expeditions I was in a Tesco just outside Bristol on Friday, in which I noticed a new addition to their Tesco Value economy range that raised an eyebrow.
If you can't quite make out the writing, read on for a close-up.
Saturday – Arkedo Series 01: Jump!
If I've learned anything over the last 30 years, viewers, it's this – videogames are like girls. It's always the cutest ones that make you cry. And rarely can a game have illustrated that maxim better than the final purchase in WoSblog's seven-day Perfect Dark Substitute Adventure than Arkedo Series 01: Jump! which prices the pitiless gutting of your very soul at 240 MS points.
I'm a total sucker for one-life games, and I also love to see screens full of dozens of tiny missiles with vapour trails, so when it came to my week-long quest to more productively spend the 800 Microsoft Points that the shoddy and incompetent XBLA version of Perfect Dark costs, Missile Escape (80 MS Points) was a no-brainer.
Thursday – Monaco 360: Retro Racing
Experienced WoS viewers are probably sick of me going on and on about Monaco GP at the slightest opportunity. Sega's 1979 coin-op racer is, nevertheless, a timeless classic that's as gripping and addictive now as it was 30 years ago, and I have no plans to shut up about it until it's universally accepted as the seminal work of genius that it is.
At first glance, Decimation X (80 MS Points, about 61p) looks like just an pumped-to-the-max version of Space Invaders for up to four players. But in fact, there's a lot more to it than that – it's actually an pumped-to-the-max version of Space Invaders for up to four players that also… wait, no.
Sorry, my mistake. In fact it IS just a pumped-to-the-max version of Space Invaders for up to – well, you get the idea, right?
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