Wings Over Sealand

Get a load of this monstrous boss enemy. Yikes! It's a bit like if Salamander had been written by HR Giger. It'd certainly give me the heeby-jeebies at the end of a tough-level of bullet-hell shmup, or worse yet, if it came hurtling down a corridor at you in some survival-horror FPS. But do you know the most terrifying thing about it?

YOU'VE ALREADY GOT ONE OF THESE LIVING INSIDE YOU.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

While it's still free, so that you can enjoy its awesome ghost-racing capers.

Having played Mad Skills Motocross (available for PC, Mac and Linux as well as iOS), I am now OUTRAGED that all other racing-type games don't let you go to the online leaderboards and go head-to-head against the recording of anyone's best run. I'd write to my MP about it, but he's a treacherous cunt.

or Why The iPhone Is The New Amiga, Part 17.

Minotron 2112 was released today (at the time of writing an iTunes or App Store search for "minotron" doesn't bring it up, but if instead you search for "llamasoft" it's there), the second outing for Jeff Minter's game-in-a-month Minotaur Project after the flawed but fun Minotaur Rescue.

(Which incidentally is apparently about to have many of the issues raised in the WoSland review – or "moaning", as Mr Minter refers to user feedback – fixed in a just-submitted update.)

Read the rest of this entry →

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, get up to speed here. Just be ready to lose any last shreds of hope in humanity you might have had.

Read the rest of this entry →

Ask a thousand people what the best videogame of all time is and you’ll only get back a tiny handful of names (with variants) – Super Mario, Half-Life, Grand Theft Auto, Call Of Duty, Naughty Ones, all the usual suspects. But ask the same thousand people what the worst game ever is and you’ll get a thousand different answers.

It’s time someone stood up and made a decision.

Read the rest of this entry →

Does anyone recognise these two fine figures of chaps puzzling over how to deal with their recycling backlog? You know them well.

If you can't work it out from the plentiful clues found in the pic, click below to reveal the SHOCKING TRUTH!

Read the rest of this entry →

Many of you will know about this already, but for various reasons it's never actually been made official before now. Friends, colleagues, alert WoSblog viewers and the world in general, please welcome into your hearts and minds the infinite majesty of Free-App Hero.

Free-App Hero is an App Store tracker app with a difference – it delivers hundreds of fantastic free games without wasting your time with any of the thousands and thousands of terrible ones. Who wouldn't want that?

Read the rest of this entry →

It's one of the most-observed truths of videogame reviewing that the entire concept of scoring is, as practised almost universally in all forms of current print, broadcast and online media, fundamentally broken.

Everyone knows that the marks awarded in game reviews – whether out of five stars, ten points or 100% – are not in fact sequential numbers as we were taught them in arithmetic lessons, but abstract ciphers whose true value is heavily encoded. In videogame reviewing, 4 isn't any bigger than 2, 6=7, and 10 is more than twice as many as 9.

And therefore – since the sole and entire point of scoring is to attach an instantly comprehensible numerical summary of the reviewer's opinion to the text – videogame review scores are functionally almost meaningless.

Read the rest of this entry →

Anyone who's been reading WoS or WoSblog for any amount of time will probably already have noticed that I have very little time for videogames that want to tell stories.

There are plenty of fields of culture available already for people who want to be told stories. Books, films, comics, TV,  theatre and even music are all ideally suited to story-telling, and frequently do a brilliant job of it. You wouldn't hire a footballer to come round and do your plumbing, so why would you look to videogames for storytelling?

Read the rest of this entry →

It's weird how bad people are at looking even a tiny bit below the surface. All you have to do is quietly mention in passing somewhere that Tetris, Columns, Bejeweled or any of their millions of clones and derivatives aren't actually "puzzle games", and all hell breaks loose.

Even nowadays, with a resurgence in indie games making abstract graphics (relatively) popular again, most gamers angrily insist that if something doesn't look like a traditional spaceship, it can't be a spaceship.

Read the rest of this entry →

Read the rest of this entry →