There's something odd about the chart above, isn't there?

Apple makes dizzyingly vast amounts of money selling software, music and iOS apps, yet there's only a teeny tiny little broken yellow slice of that graph accounted for by videos. But hang on – don't we live in the age of video? Aren't we all walking around with amazing high-definition screens right in our pockets? So why aren't people selling us reasons to look at them?

Pop videos are one of the iconic cornerstones of modern culture. Record companies spend vast amounts of money on making promos for singles, but then – incredibly – don't offer people a way of watching them on demand.

The App Store doesn't even have a pop videos section. A couple of half-hearted streaming services offer a pitiful selection from a tiny handful of bands. I've never seen any sort of multi-artist Now That's What I Call Music Videos compilation, and very few artists ever release their own collection, certainly not while the band's still active.

Much the same goes for YouTube, which would initially seem the obvious answer. Only a microscopic percentage of videos are made available through official channels, and much of the time even those are hideously disfigured to the point of distracting unwatchability by advertising "wraps".

The rest of the time, the industry actively tries to HIDE its work from consumers, often pursuing reflexive or automated takedown orders if its audience tries to do its promotional work for it.

If you're lucky you'll be able to find a logo-strewn version ripped off a TV channel that isn't at TOO crappy a low resolution, but even then you're reliant on an internet connection or mobile signal if you want to actually watch it.

If it's not one of the many videos which are watchable on PC but blocked from running on mobile formats, that is. Funnily enough, the official version of the song in the above example only just reappeared in public view on the artist's own channel – just two weeks ago when I was searching for it, it was invisible. But even now I can't play either the official or unofficial versions on my iPhone.

(And that's without even going into what an increasingly-painful chore it is to use YouTube at all these days. If there's a way I can access or link to anything in my list of Favourites now without triggering the spewing-out of the entire thing in sequence as a "playlist", I'm buggered if I can work out what it is. And adding insult to injury, the list is full of "Deleted Video" entries with no way of knowing what they used to be so I can try to find another version.)

Why are pop videos the most tightly-restricted cultural commodity in the world? Why can't fans of an artist buy their videos as easily as they can buy their songs? Why do record companies spend millions of dollars and huge amounts of creative energy making often-brilliant PROMOTIONAL devices which they then go out of their way to STOP anyone from seeing – let alone giving them money for – other than by watching endless hours of music TV in the vague, remote hope that a truncated, censored, ad-mangled version might just come up?

Seriously, anyone. It's been 15 years and I'm none the wiser. What the fuck?

Racing games are one of the few remaining mainstream genres where (with the exception of the Need For Speed series and a handful of others) the player plays as themselves, rather than as a predefined character in a story. As a result, personalities are rather thin on the ground – if anything, the cars are the stars.

But nobody wants to read 800 words about the Nissan Skyline (nobody who doesn’t urgently need drowning in a bucket, anyway), so instead let's focus our attention on something altogether more beautiful, in every possible way.

Ironically, of all the Ridge Racer games, Type 4 is the only one that IS burdened with something approaching an ingame plot, but it’s got nothing to do with “Reiko Nagase”, a made-up lady whose only job is to add a bit of class and glamour to the intro. She pulls it off memorably in one of the very few videogame opening scenes worth watching, 100 seconds of sheer soft-focus genius which deftly and wordlessly encapsulates the entire ethos behind Ridge Racer.

(Indeed, so perfect is RRT4’s atmosphere-defining introduction that when imaginary Reiko – who actually first appeared in Rage Racer, but without any kind of story – was dumped in favour of the equally-unreal “Ai Fukami” for Ridge V, fans made such a fuss that she was brought back for 6 and 7.)

We first meet Reiko sitting up in bed in her immaculate, tastefully-minimalist apartment. She appears to be a young secretary (according to Namco’s subsequent “biography” she was 23), and we next see her apparently heading off to work through a rundown-looking industrial dockland area. All this is designed to make Reiko look tiny and delicate and serene, and accordingly is shot with very static cameras, but is spliced with furious, fast-cutting action-movie images of high-octane racing, with huge metal cars thundering down the track, smashing into each other and the roadside barriers and flying off the tarmac into the air.

The deliberate contrast between the fragility of little human Reiko and the brutal machinery of the racing cars is further emphasised when, as she passes some towering skyscrapers and walks on through one of the trademark Ridge tunnels, the heel snaps off one of her shoes. (It’s such a nice day that she seems to have spontaneously decided to eschew the daily grind of work and head off towards the coast, which in Ridge Racer games is always conveniently close to the city.)

She rolls her eyes and continues walking, now on the road itself, as the coastal highway has no pavements. Hobbling along with one shoe in her hand, she cuts an even more vulnerable figure than before, and suddenly we switch back to the race and realise, in some alarm, that the cars are hurtling down the very same road Reiko is walking along. But our brave heroine, hearing the roar of approaching engines, doesn’t fret. Instead, she turns and calmly sticks out a thumb to hitch a lift.

By now, an especially daring and reckless overtaking manoeuvre has seen the silver-grey Solvalu 02 barge its way to the front of the pack and establish a lead. As it speeds out of the tunnel into the dazzling sunlight, the driver spots Reiko and slams on the anchors. What’s the point in winning the race, after all, if you can’t stop to help out a pretty girl in a short skirt along the way?

When the car stops, so does the music. We look from the driver’s seat, a faint glimpse reflected in the passenger window. The driver, too, is a faceless machine-like being hidden behind a helmet and driving suit, but the reflection disappears as the electric window winds down, first revealing the sparkling ocean, then Reiko as she approaches in the wing mirror, and finally her face as she leans in hopefully.

She flashes a sweet, heart-melting smile and then we see her feet – one shoeless, slight and exposed between the hard steel of the car and the hot, unforgiving tarmac – as she climbs elegantly in. There’s still no sign of the other racers as the Solvalu gets back under way, cresting a hill with just the ocean and the horizon in sight.

Shortly afterwards, we see it rocketing over the familiar finish line – raw power and unspoiled beauty fused together in the spirit of optimistic, soulful humanity that sets the RR series apart from its ugly, macho and joyless competitors – as the screen fades to black and the opening greeting flickers into life:

“Welcome to the world of Ridge Racer.”

Today has seen the much-trailed worldwide release of Real Racing 3 for the iOS platforms. The controversial "free-to-play" game has a horrendous IAP structure which forces players to have to either wait for hours and hours (and hours) at paywalls between sessions or cough up a mindboggling fortune to play it continuously.

This, contrary to what you might think, is a good thing.

It's mildly important to point out from the start that Real Racing 3 is a terrible game. Even leaving aside all the IAP nonsense, it follows much the same path as its immediate predecessor, which despite having no IAPs was a soul-destroyingly tedious grind aimed at people who were too anoraky even to enjoy Gran Turismo.

What's more surprising for the latest release in a series which has always set the graphical standards for iOS is how ugly it looks in real life. On my brand-new 5th-generation Retina-screened iPod Touch, it's bland and grainy with bad anti-aliasing, and undermined further by the sterile, almost-featureless real-world tracks that are making their debut appearance in the previously made-up franchise.

But that's the end of the review. The point of this piece is instead to commend EA's financial model, because it enthusiastically embraces a strategy which is good news for the vast majority of gamers, and that's the strategy of milking idiots.

Real Racing 3 will – and I don't think this is going out on a limb – make lots of money. It's hardly a revelation that the "free-to-play" sector is populated by a lot of people who won't pay a penny (instead extracting however much entertainment out of the game they want before moving onto the next freebie), and a tiny minority of "whales" who will haemorrhage actual currency like a gigantic cash pinata in order to buy their way to the end screen (or top of the online leaderboards) as quickly as possible.

I have no idea what motivates such "gamers" – how much of a sense of achievement or enjoyment can you get from simply spending money in order to "win" instantly without actually playing a game in any meaningful way? – but their existence is mana from Heaven for the rest of us, because they provide the long-term means by which the price of games can finally come down, at the sole expense of stupid people.

By having braying cheats with too much money contribute most of the funding for big-budget "free-to-play" games, the likes of EA secure the funding which lets them make normal games cheaply. (The company's iOS catalogue of paid titles is very frequently available at 69p a pop, a price point which sees them regularly clog up the Top 20 with high-quality games that anyone can afford.)

I'd like to see EA get even more aggressive with IAP. I'd like to see them charge to skip cutscenes. I'd like to see them sell car-pimping kits of useless purely-cosmetic wheel rims and neon strips and furry dice and driver hats. I'd like to see delay timers set for days, not hours. Because the fact is that there would still be twats who would pay for them, because they have more dollar bills than braincells, a spoilt-brat demand for instant gratification, and/or a bewildering desire to "support the industry".

It is simply not possible to extract too much money from these willing dolts. And every penny they'll happily hand over is a penny that the rest of us don't have to pay in order to keep a stream of videogames that cost less than a bar of chocolate coming our way until the end of time.

Similarly, new consoles ought to cost £10,000 for the first month or so after release. People will pay it, and in doing so will effectively redistribute wealth to the rest of us in a way governments no longer even pretend to try to. The same goes for AAA games – let's see Grand Theft Auto 5 costing £500 in launch week for the bog-standard edition, or £1000 if you want the limited-edition 1:1-scale embossed crowbar.

Why not? Is it really going to kill you, having patiently held on for years since episode 4, to have to cool your heels for seven more days? And in the meantime the industry that gamers profess to love will get a hefty cash boost from those salivating, mouth-breathing "early adopters" who just can't wait.

So hurray for Real Racing 3. It's a shit game that sucks money out of dimwits and to all intents and purposes gives it to you and me, so that we can spend it on vastly more enjoyable ones that cost literally pennies. Why would you be upset about that?

It's weird how the simplest games can have the longest stories. Today we're going to talk (well, I'm going to, anyway) about a couple of games (well, four games, but we'll get to that) that are about as Zen-basic as it's possible for electronic entertainment to be.

They're a pair of games which could be played by the one-armed dishwasher from Robin's Nest (one for the mums and dads, there), a duo that require all the brainpower of a starving dog pondering the best course of action to take with a pound of sausages that's just fallen out of an old lady's shopping bag right under his nose.

And yet, by the time we're done we'll have covered inspiration, plagiarism, moral flexibility, flagrant copyright infringement, public-spiritedness, cultural history, corporate pragmatism, collective short-sightedness and the proudest moment in your correspondent's career to date. Which is a lot of stuff, so let's get on or we'll be here all day.

Wild West Hero is one of the most esoteric games in the history of the Spectrum. It takes Robotron – not the world's most complex videogame to start with – and distils it down to its most basic essence. All the enemies except the first level's GRUNTs are discarded. The cloned human family to be rescued? Gone. The twin-joystick moving/firing mechanism? No more. There's no fire button in WWH at all, in fact – your little guy just automatically pumps out a constant stream of fire in whichever direction he's facing.

No level in Wild West Hero lasts more than about 10 seconds. Your enemies materialise onscreen and immediately start shuffling slowly but inexorably towards you. Within moments, they'll either have got you or you'll have killed them all. No other outcomes are possible. (Unless you count killing yourself by colliding with one of the static obstacles as you bolt for one of the screen's edges, there to implement the game's core tactic of turning round and massacring the bandits as they march towards you in single file.)

Bandits? Oh yeah. While your avatar is the same teeny robot dude who appears in Robotron, and the game shares the coin-op's bright, flashing neon colours and futuristic sound effects, for some reason your enemies are all big-hatted spaghetti-western cowboys, with beady yellow eyes peeking out from under their ten-gallon hats. This inexplicable thematic clash is one of the things that gives WWH its unique and strange character, but that isn't one of the things on our list, so we'll move on.

The point is, Wild West Hero owes a clear debt to Robotron, but it's also its own game. Which makes it pretty weird when you see it gradually metamorphose back into its parent.

In the early 1980s, Atarisoft (the home-software division of the then-still-massive hardware company) had put a lot of effort and money in cracking down on unlicenced home-version clones of their arcade smash hits. Eventually, though, some bright spark realised that spending loads of cash suppressing highly-skilled copies of your intellectual property was pointlessly counter-productive, when you could turn it to your advantage instead.

Here, after all, were ready-made conversions, ripe for selling and free from development costs. All Atari had to do was say to the author, "Turn it over to us and we won't sue you", stick an official badge on it and sit back and wait for the profits to start rolling in.

Among the first beneficiaries/victims of this strategy was DJL Software's Z-Man, a direct Pac-Man clone that was by far the most authentic of the dozens of Spectrum versions cluttering game-shop shelves. It's one of the great legends of the Speccy gaming era that the author, David J. Looker, was then approached by Atarisoft with the offer he couldn't refuse – "Edit this into the official Spectrum version of Pac-Man and give us it for nothing, or our lawyers will crush you like a tiny worthless bug" – and a few tweaks later the company proudly made its debut in the Speccy market with a hastily-relabelled, essentially blackmailed version of what had previously been a pirate ripoff of its most valuable licence.

(As an exciting postscript to the story, the "illegal" Z-Man incarnation of Pac-Man was subsequently given away on the covertape of Speccy magazine Your Sinclair almost 10 years later. An extensive and painstaking investigation into this baffling turn of events – that is to say, emailing the renowned scientist, adventurer and gadabout, and more relevantly former YS editor, J Nash – provided the following splendid explanation:

"This was because I liked Z-Man, and knew about Atari and the Nigel Moustache accident, and thought it would be an appropriate victory for justice and a funny in-joke to buy the world's most accurate Speccy Pac-Man for the [covertape] under its original name. Dave, slightly bemused anyone remembered the game, agreed. Inexplicably, Atarisoft failed to notice. I expect they were still busy spending all the profits from the conversion of Bump and Jump."

For more information on "the Nigel Moustache accident", see a forthcoming feature, possibly on an entirely different website. But back to our story.)

After Z-Man, DJ Looker (Shout out to the massive! – Ed) moved into "respectable" development. He coded the excellent Spectrum version of fun Atari coin-op Road Blasters (which is, coincidentally, the game without which your correspondent wouldn't be in the videogames industry at all, but that's another story), then went on to fame and fortune as Your Sinclair's covertape editor, and also, ironically enough, co-invented the highly controversial "Speedlock" fastloader/anti-copying protocol.

But this poacher-turned-gamekeeper tale isn't why piracy is good (which, particularly alert viewers who are concentrating unusually hard will recall, is what this feature is supposedly about). To get to the bottom of that particular assertion, we first need to take a small tangent.

The success of Pac-Man assured Atarisoft of the wisdom of their cunning co-opt-the-copyists policy, and the strategy was soon applied to the forbidding task of bringing Williams' awesome twin-joystick coin-op Robotron 2084 to the Sinclair machine. Most of the previous attempts at reproducing the arcade's fast-moving, action-packed mayhem on the Speccy's primitive 8-bit hardware had produced woeful results, so Wild West Hero author Paul Holmes was always going to be the man getting a midnight knock on the door from burly Atarisoft associates armed with contracts and baseball bats.

(Holmes hadn't been idle since coming up with WWH – he'd subsequently produced the heroically weird Dustman, a slicker and even more surreal variant on the theme than Wild West Hero, and one in which the player has to survive assaults from all manner of cultural detritus. Levels include several cameo appearances from Pac-Man, a stage called "A Copyright With Teeth" – in which the dustman is attacked by chomping copyright symbols – and one titled "Out Come The Heavies", where swinging doors disgorge hordes of huge green robots uncannily similar to Robotron's indestructible Hulks. These facts may or may not be coincidental. Dustman, in fact, deserves a feature all of its own, but WoS can see readers beginning to visibly age already, so we'll save that for another day.)

The result, as perceptive viewers will have figured out some time ago, is that Wild West Hero's code became the basis of the official Speccy Robotron. But that's neither the end nor the point of our story. Because despite being completed , Robotron was never released.

(It was glowingly reviewed by a games magazine, though of course these days we know that doesn't necessarily mean it was finished – it's surely just a coincidence, however, that the reviewer in question went on a few months later to co-found Future Publishing)

Atarisoft never even got round to advertising it for the Speccy (something which they did do for a whole bunch of other games whose conversions were never even started, far less finished), and the code languished ignored for years, even as the Speccy carried on for nine more years as a viable gaming platform. (The company, in fact, abandoned the Spectrum shortly after the completion of Robotron in 1984, also taking with it a fairly splendid unreleased port of another fine Williams coin-op, Moon Patrol.)

Oddly, no other magazines had so much as previewed the game, so copies of the finished code were thin on the ground – so much so that soon, even Holmes himself didn't have one. It would be almost a decade before anyone ever thought of Spectrum Robotron again.

The mid-1990s, of course, brought the birth of emulation. For the first time ever, computers were so powerful that they could accurately reproduce the behaviour of their ancestors, and the still-beloved Speccy was one of the very first subjects of the phenomenon. Soon, archive websites like World Of Spectrum began to spring up to preserve the cultural heritage of the medium. But for some games, it was already too late. Atarisoft no longer existed, neither did Personal Computer Games, and Paul Holmes didn't have a copy of his own conversion.

The only known surviving Spectrum Robotron code was an early work-in-progress alpha of Holmes', missing most of the enemy robot types (for example, there were no Brains on Wave 5, and the Spectrum's Wave 7 – where the first Tanks appear in the arcade game – simply completes itself as soon as it starts), and clearly showing the port's Wild West Hero roots. The player and the enemy robots appear onscreen in the same way they do in WWH, and destroyed robots melt away rather than exploding in a shower of particles.

At this point, in fact, apart from the title screen the game more closely resembles Wild West Hero 1.5 than it does Robotron. Which is (if you were wondering) where piracy, your reporter and his proudest moment come in. 

Your correspondent, viewers, has to make a confession at this point. In the early 1980s, this writer – like pretty much everyone else, it ought to be said – was a serious and diligent software pirate. The school playgrounds of the 80s were alive with kids swapping C90 cassette tapes packed full of the latest games, 20 and 30 at a time.

(Curiously, this hugely widespread buy-one-and-copy-100 practice somehow entirely failed to destroy the entire games industry, and the Speccy had a longer commercial life than any gaming platform before or since.)

The more dedicated copyright infringers, though, also participated in nationwide piracy networks, trading tapes with complete strangers from across the country. Your correspondent, naturally (because if a job's worth doing it's worth doing properly), had a number of such underground acquaintances, one of whom was "James" from Glasgow. (Whose name has been changed to reflect the fact that I can't remember it. For all I know it actually was James.)

"James" had a contact in Atarisoft, and towards the end of 1984 had casually included copies of Robotron and Moon Patrol on one of the regular C90s despatched to your living-on-the-edge reporter. They both swiftly graduated onto your host's special "My Favourite Games" shelf, but it wasn't until nearly 12 years later that their true rarity and worth would be fully appreciated.

Y'see, chums, this writer frequently speaks up for the importance of emulation – and even outright piracy – as a preserver of culture. No other leisure medium has ever regarded its heritage so carelessly as videogaming (not even the early BBC, which would commonly record over the only copy of priceless programmes to save on tape costs), and there are countless games which have been lost to posterity forever. Without piracy, the Spectrum ports of Robotron and Moon Patrol would be among them.

Because it was only piracy that enabled your reporter to contact Paul Holmes several years ago and return his own work to him (at which point he generously allowed it to be made freely available to everyone), and even if this writer never achieves anything more worthy than that in the rest of what passes loosely for a career, he'll leave the games business a happy man. (Actually, the act of leaving the videogames business would make anyone a happy man, but that's not strictly relevant here.)

Had it been left in the sole care of the games industry, Spectrum Robotron simply wouldn't exist any more, and our cultural history deserves better treatment, and more respect, than that. The bodies which present themselves as the guardians of gaming culture aren't just incompetent at the task, they are in fact the active enemies of it.

Where ELSPA and their ilk should be doing something worthwhile to preserve gaming's heritage while there's still time, they devote themselves instead to pointlessly persecuting the very websites that are actually doing their job for them. (And to chasing idiotically after small-fry market traders, like an elephant trying to stamp on a colony of ants.)

The industry attempts, as a matter of policy, to portray emulation – not even piracy – as a mortal danger to its very existence, and is assisted in doing so by a media that unquestioningly presents the industry's side of the argument as gospel truth, and an increasingly brainwashed public ready to believe the industry's farcical propaganda about how Al-Qaeda and the IRA and Ian Huntley and the Mafia all started out by copying Playstation games.

But let's be crystal-clear about this, viewers, for the avoidance of doubt and confusion. Take it from someone who's personally been on every single side of the equation at some point in the last 20 years. Here's the truth. Write it down somewhere.

Emulation does NOT hurt the videogames industry.

Piracy does NOT hurt the videogames industry.

Because if either of them did, then it's amazingly obvious that – after more than 10 years of the former and 25 years of the latter – the videogames industry would have been long dead by now, rather being bigger and wealthier now than it's ever been at any time. The reality is that piracy and emulation are in truth phenomena whose primary influence on gaming is to save its legacy from the greedy, narrow-minded, short-sighted recklessness of those who control the worldwide videogames industry.

Chums, the fact of the matter is that the cultural heritage of videogaming is safe only in your hands. Recent changes in the law with regard to copyright have made the position of old games even more perilous than it used to be. Now, practically any measures which gamers could take to preserve the future history of gaming are, either effectively or literally, illegal, and accordingly are becoming harder and harder to actually enact.

In the meantime, it's in that same spirit of preservation that WoS is proud to offer the downloads below as an illustrative, iNTeRacTIVe accompaniment to this feature. Enjoy them while you still can.

DOWNLOADS

EmuZWin, the best freeware Speccy emulator (link)

Wild West Hero

Wild West Hero (great PC remake – WoS remix)

Dustman

Robotron 2084 – author's alpha version

Robotron 2084 – beta version, preserved by piracy

Robotron 2084 – final version, preserved by piracy

"We have to acknowledge that over the last five years those on out of work benefits have seen their incomes rise twice as fast as those in work. With pay restraint in businesses and government, average earnings have risen by around 10% since 2007. Out of work benefits have gone up by around 20%. That's not fair to working people who pay the taxes that fund them."

Terrible, isn't it? Hard workers paying to lose ground to those layabout skivers who watch Jeremy Kyle all day. But let's leave aside for a moment the issue that with an average of 23 applicants per vacancy (and sometimes far more), the huge majority of unemployed people are in fact desperate to find work, not lazy spongers. Let's instead just take a simple look at what those figures mean in real life.

Osborne specified "out of work benefits", which basically means Jobseekers' Allowance. (The other benefits which are most commonly associated with the unemployed, particularly housing benefit and Council Tax Benefit, are in fact widely claimed by working people – 24% of all Housing Benefit recipients, and a staggeringly vast majority of new claimants, are in work.)

JSA is currently paid at £71 a week, or less for younger people. Were that to rise by 20% over the next five years, the typical adult jobseeker would therefore see an increase in their income of £14.20 a week.

The average UK salary is £26,500. Were that figure to increase by 10% in the same period, it would mean the typical worker having £50.96 a week more in their pay packet (before tax/NI). Osborne's next sentence specifically referred to public-sector workers, for whom the average salary is £28,802. A 10% hike in that figure between now and 2017 would yield an increase of £55.39 a week.

If one person's getting an extra £14 a week and the other is getting an extra £51 or £55, it takes an incredibly perverse definition of "fairness" to make out that the first person is the winner in the deal, when in fact they're falling further and further behind the second person every year. Slashing their figure to £7 simply adds insult to injury.

If you look closely, Osborne and Clegg's argument is in fact even more dishonest than that. But as an illustration of how the word "fair" has been hijacked and twisted by the coalition, it's hard to better.

(Never mind about the Iraq war – I'd put Tony fucking Blair in prison for the rest of his life just for robbing us of proper lightbulbs, the wanker.)

The heater has three replaceable halogen elements. This is the process for replacing one of them (click to see the whole thing):

I have two questions for the manufacturers.

1. Are you SURE there isn't some further level of disassembly I could have to go to in order to put a new bulb in? Perhaps I could have to melt the plastic down to a liquid and then re-form it around some sort of mould made out of the polystyrene packaging, or take the whole fucking thing down to the Large Hadron Collider and have them bombard it with electrons at close to the speed of light until there was a decent-sized hole in the front panel that one could insert the replacement bulb into.

2. What are you, fucking STUPID OR SOMETHING, OR WHAT?

2(a). Or just CUNTS?

Almost every one had a single-word biog, and as I went down the list it seemed to have a certain poetry. I had just enough syllables to make two haikus (plus titles), with four left over. If you can do better with the words, send 'em in.

HAIKU 1: "stone father"

prison boy bent down
soap day condition: fight time
cork invention sweet

HAIKU 2: "sugar dust"

stocking grain, tongue throat
thin political insect
plough that straight sister

spare words

plane
way
match
than

(Haiku 2 is for Germaine Greer.) Make me proud, readers.