If there's one thing we all love here at WoSland, it's a good old-fashioned All-Time Top 100. And from a critic's standpoint, we've long thought the gold standard was the 1991 Your Sinclair chart for the ZX Spectrum. Not for its writing, or even (so much) the games themselves, but because the list showcased an incredible breadth of game types, such as we never thought we'd see again in mainstream commercial gaming.
That was until iOS arrived, of course. Now, for the first time in 20 years, it's once again possible to create a legitimate one-format Top 100 in which there are barely any two games in the same genre. And to prove it, that's just what we've done. But there's something even more special about this particular list.
There are two groups of videogamers in the UK (and perhaps the world) whose Venn diagram has a surprisingly small intersection. In Group A we have "People who own a Nintendo DS", and in Group B there's "People interested in buying a Nintendo 3DS".
In fairness, this may be because Group B is so small it'd be a tiny intersection even if it was entirely contained within Group B, but that's neither here nor there. In any event, because WoSland loves Nintendo so much, we're going to try to help increase it a bit.
I was out and about today, and finally saw a 3DS in action for the first time. As billed, the 3D effect is absolutely gobsmacking, but even after just a few minutes I was finding it quite tiring on my eyes and I imagine the novelty will largely wear off after a couple of days, leaving you with a very pricey way to play Ridge Racer and Super Monkey Ball again. But not quite THIS pricey:
Viewers, a confluence like this comes around about once a decade. If it’s as sunny, warm and beautiful where you are as it is in Bath today, get out there and witness the phenomenon for yourself.
If it isn’t, don’t worry – you can do it indoors too.
The world moves alarmingly fast nowadays, doesn't it? But right now, at this particular moment in time and until something else shiny and exciting comes along (probably around lunchtime), this is the best game ever.
With a certain amount of irony, then, (and for no very good reason that I can immediately discern), it's called Forget-Me-Not.
Aged viewers will recall this reporter's once-burning love for the Nintendo DS. But it wasn't just the appearance on the scene of the younger, slimmer, all-touching-all-the-time iThings that caused the flame to die.
This week, with the Western launch of the 3DS just a few days away, I went back to the old stager for one last hurrah, to see what I'd missed in what's now almost two years of iOS-focused gaming and also to see how it felt to use a so-called "real" handheld console again. I found out some things, and have written them down here because I'm old and I forget stuff.
Hey! It's time for another WoSblog Challenge! WOO!
We're all familiar with the concept of Where's Wally/Waldo, right? The above is a tableau in similar vein but with a bit of a Biblical theme, taken from the iThing game Where's Jesus? Your job is simple: find the inset character (bottom left) somewhere in the main picture. He usually shows up after you've found three or four others in Level 1 (of 10).
There is literally nothing more tedious on Earth than some scared 15-year-old fanboy thicko witlessly pronouncing that the iPod, iPhone and iPad aren't "proper" videogaming devices, because "all the games are five-minute casual Flash rubbish or Angry Birds".
It gets really wearisome having to point out how ignorant and stupid they are in detail every time, so to save myself a bit of effort in the long run I've knocked up a convenient one-stop counterpoint for easy reference.
"If you've got the crowd behind you, you're probably facing the wrong way."
- S. Munnery
Reality
"Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children, not Fate that butchers them or Destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us."
