I haven't played Flashback in almost 20 years. The iOS port is burdened with a control system so faffy and unintuitive that I had to sit through the entire intro sequence three times in the first 15 minutes (including one full shutdown and reboot due to a particularly cretinous oversight on the developer's part*). Now I'm here, which experienced Flashback players will recognise as being roughly six seconds from the start:

HOW IN THE HOLY NAME OF THE POPE'S TINY WITHERED COCK DO YOU GET BACK OUT OF THIS SCREEN?

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So I've got a 3DS now. For someone who's still just about a functional videogames journalist, the professional obligation and the economics finally more or less converged, and I'm now the owner of a rather handsome Cosmos Black machine. (No games yet, but I'll pick some up at some point.)

But don't worry, viewers – WoSland's principles remain firmly intact.

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Alert viewers will already be aware of WoSland's determination never to give Nintendo any more of its money until the end of time. Yet I have to admit I'm mildly tempted by the 3DS now that it's going for as little as £115 new (and I have some stuff I can flog to CEX to offset the outlay). So I thought I might see if I could pick one up preowned, saving a couple of quid and more importantly keeping my cash out of Nintendo's pockets.

I'm thinking probably not from Gamestation, though.

I just bought one of your fancy electric toothbrushes, because I live on sweets and I'd quite like to still have some teeth left when I'm 50. I have a consumer question relating to it, which I wonder if you could help me with.

What the FUCK am I supposed to do with this, you fucking halfwits?

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In one screenshot.

I got a rather unpleasant surprise this morning when I went to download Jeff Minter's newest iThing game (a remake of his old VIC-20 title Deflex) this morning. And for once it wasn't actually Jeff's fault.

The nasty shock came in the form of an unfamiliar price tag. When I'd noticed the game's release last night it was priced at the usual "Tier 2" point of £1.19, but when I tried to buy it this morning that had gone up by a startling 25%, to £1.49. And it wasn't just Deflex.

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He doesn't actually specify whether he means this one or this one.

But either way: welcome to 2005, Dave!

Sometimes it's good to remind yourself of knowledge that has, for one reason or another, temporarily slipped out of your mind.

Today, I've been remembering that there still exists a company that's even more hatefully inept, and filled with even more absolute loathing for its unfortunate customers, than Apple. It's been a while.

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Man, there certainly are an awful lot of hormones flying around the room in the videogaming community at the moment.

Months behind the zeitgeist as ever, I've only just caught up on the whole "Dickwolves" business. If you don't know what that means, catch up here. Just be ready to lose any last shreds of hope in humanity you might have had.

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Boardgames are brilliant fun, offering gameplay that’s been tried and tested over years or often decades, but are usually handled terribly on consoles.

Seeking some justification for running on powerful electric machinery and costing twice as much as buying the physical version from a toyshop, they frequently swamp the gameplay in pointless bells, whistles and cutscenes (which the player has to instantly turn off so that a single game of Monopoly doesn’t last 14 hours), as well as imposing an unwavering rigidity of rules.

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Now THIS is how you make a puzzle game.

Inexplicably never seen on a home format before this DS version (with the exception of a single Wonder Swan release with bafflingly bad controls for a system with two d-pads), Slitherlink is in fact, like the mighty Picross, merely one of a variety of generic names for a type of popular pen-and-paper puzzle.

Your task is to draw a single continuous line around a grid of numbers, such that every number is bordered by the line on exactly the specified number of sides.  (If you don't quite follow that, a look at the screenshot above should make the objective a bit clearer.)

This single simple rule results in the creation of the best logic puzzle this reporter's ever encountered.

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This ought to be the enormously endearing tale of a cheery wee monkey in a spacesuit making the universe a cleaner and happier place. Instead, yet again, it's the story of some idiots. SAD FACE.

       
Space Monkey (currently on free promo, so try it for yourself) is a cute little action game of the sort the App Store does so well, except not done so well. But the things that ruin it aren't restricted to Apple's world-enslaving handhelds, and are all too common.

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Ooh! Pretty graphics, great performance even on old hardware, real-life cars, 15 opponents on track, surprisingly good CPU competitiveness. Let's play!

Race. Grind, grind, grind, unlock new track. Grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, unlock new track. Grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, quit.

The funny thing about WoSblog's recent Gran Turismo 5 piece (at the time of writing by far the most-read individual post in WB history, although the various Benchmark Reviews bits added together outstrip it by miles as the single most popular topic), is that everyone took it as being mostly an attack on Eurogamer, which was never really the intention.

This is, though.

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Come on. It must have been one of you, or someone you know, and it's time to own up. Because until we deal with this serious issue and reach some sort of closure, Jobs is going to keep taking it out on the rest of us.

There's simply no other remotely plausible explanation for the staggering hostility – no, make that absolute naked loathing - with which Apple continues to treat the hundreds of millions of customers who've made it so rich.

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