You start to bargain with yourself, after a little while. "That one didn't count, I got killed stupidly on Mission 1 so it was just a practice", you say.
Then it's "Well, I was going to stop at 10 o'clock, but now it's five past and I've missed the start of the programme I was going to watch, so I might as well have 25 more minutes till the next one's on."
I've been racking my brains for most of this afternoon, because it's too humid to do anything that involves physical movement. I've drawn a blank, so I figured I may as well ask the millions of readers of WoSland for help.
Can anyone think of a single really good shmup in the entire history of gaming that's ever been created by an English-speaking developer?
Readers of a spiritual or elderly bent may be aware of the parable of the Deck Of Cards. (You can listen to a splendidly reverby take of Wink Martindale's definitive version by clicking this convenient link here.)
But you don't have to go back to the 1950s for a similarly instructive metaphor for the contemporary age. Because the iOS game Coin Dozer serves, if you don't want to carry around a bulky copy of Das Kapital, as a bible of the modern capitalist world. Shut up, it's not bollocks.
In all the hubbub about the 3DS price cut, little has been made of Nintendo's compensation package for "3DS Ambassadors", by which they'll all get 20 free Virtual Console titles, split equally between old NES and GBA games. Just a nice offer to make peace with people who might feel a bit ripped off, right?
The problem with the package, however, is that it might be a bit too good.
I get the feeling that Nintendo just don't understand what's happening to them any more. They're doing what they've always done, and what's made them swillions of dollars for the last half-decade, but the public just aren't biting this time. And now the gaming giant's nerve has cracked altogether.
Today's announcement that the company is to slash the trade price of the stumbling 3DS by a third, just four months after release, has taken everyone by surprise. But it really shouldn't have.
Admired WoSland acquaintance and slow reader John X has a piece today on the estimable Rock, Paper, Shotgun about gaming revenues. Obviously it's mostly focused on the PC and is therefore of limiSNNOOOORRRRRE.
Eh? What happened? Where am I? Oh yeah – the PC part of the story is of course epically uninteresting because it's about the PC, but there's a much more intriguing and zeitgeisty fact buried away in the passing.
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.
Distant Assassin: Reload goes free.
And sniper game Contract Killer, without being the subject of any update or price cut or reviews, suddenly leaps out of nowhere up the popularity charts. Sigh. And no, I'm not making those links.
The worlds of videogaming and science were equally stunned this week, when news broke of the disappearance of one of the former's most precious artefacts from the premises of Finnish developer Rovio. At this stage it's unknown whether the loss was the result of theft of accident, but in either event the consequences for gamers are likely to be serious.
That's because Rovio – producers of the iconic multiplatform mega-hit Angry Birds – have somehow contrived to lose the Magic Equation.
"Hello WoSland readers! We are some Angry Birds plushies that Reverend Stu saw in a gadget shop in Cheltenham at the weekend."
"We're fractionally larger than a football, and we each cost FIFTY POUNDS."
Celebrated WoSland associate and cloth-tasted idiot John X has been given free rein on Eurogamer today to spout a load of witless nonsense about the awful cancerous blight on the face of videogaming (and of all humanity) that is the galactically abysmal Tomb Raider Legend.
In the interests of balance and the correction of record, WoSland here presents the opposing view, retrieved from the National Archive Of Sanity.
This has been quite an unsettling week, one way and another.
(A troubling scene from Creatures & Castles, free today.)
If you don't want to know the unexpected, tragic but ultimately life-affirming and deeply moving storyline of Zookeeper DX Touch Edition (which is revealed on completing Normal mode), look away now.
(By which we mean, "don't click on that picture".)
WoSland – now at wosland.podgamer.com
