Wings Over Sealand

Wow. I got home from a poker game in the early hours of this morning, and idly wondered if busted shill/"executive editor" Olin Coles might have replied to my polite request for his side of the story with regard to his hopelessly dishonest excuse for a website. What I found was that Mr Coles had instead chosen to post on the Benchmark Reviews forum, in a thread entitled "Forever banned: Hall of Shame". The thread describes itself thus:

"Like any writer, our work comes under fire from time to time. Most of the criticism is taken to heart and used to improve future work, but occasionally the critic can go overboard and begin making personal threats and accusations. This thread is intended to show our visitors that their accusations and threats do not remain anonymous."

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WoSblog is internationally renowned for its psychiatric expertise, so I wasn't surprised yesterday when a viewer of the WoS Forum asked me, quite out of the blue, to assess their mental stability.

"I want to know if I'm going barmy", wrote the clearly-distressed reader, whose cause for doubting his very sanity was – of all things – a review of an incredibly expensive office chair.

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If you're a member of WoSblog's highly secretive Alert Viewers Society, you might recall that WoSblog recently visited the intriguing city of Gloucester, and in passing mentioned the presence  – on the menu of the Varsity Bar pub chain – of an item by the name of the Dirty Dog's Dinner.

It didn't seem fair, though, that WoSblog's beloved viewers should be expected to simply picture it in their minds. So here it is.

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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?

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Chatting to a chum yesterday, something they said gave me cause to recall a feature from Amiga Power in which former full-time members of the AP team recounted their experiences on leaving the mag for the "real" world.

Sadly the issue in question (AP54, October 1995) is one of those that still hasn't been scanned for the Amiga Magazine Rack, and only a fragment of it is available in the WoS Archive, so I had to go and get the actual magazine off my shelves, like some sort of caveman.

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This is totally NSFW, if you’re a dragonfly. It may also cause depression among male viewers. If you’re absolutely sure you can handle XXX-rated dragonfly action, then click on the pleasant picture below to peek through the leafy window and into the dragonfly boudoir.

(Pics taken this afternoon in the botanical gardens of Victoria Park, Bath, with a Fuji Finepix F70 EXR compact digital camera.)

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With just two days until an election that could mark either one of the greatest days in British political history or one of the blackest, we're all a bit nervous about the future. But one thing that's great for easing tension is free cash, and that's what appears to be on offer from Stan James this week.

The terrifying image above is Ladbrokes' predicted map of the UK come Friday morning. (You can find much more detail on it here.) It makes a few questionable assertions and contradicts itself in a number of places (eg Glasgow East), but where's the money?

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Malcolm McLaren RIP. This is a version of a piece I originally wrote for WoS a few years ago, reprinted in tribute to one of the world's great chancers.

The world would have been a much more interesting place if he'd managed to become the Mayor of London.

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On the face of it, it's a time for national rejoicing. After just 13 years in government, Gordon Brown has suddenly apparently discovered the secret of 100% employment – state jobs for all.

New Labour's latest attack on the voiceless poor is the stunning assertion that after 30 years of millions-long dole queues, it seems there was no need for anyone to be unemployed at all.

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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.

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When the ugly duckling becomes the swan.

Hats off to you, Dan Parks.

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With a tremendous sense of comic timing, the International Football Association Board this week ruled (despite the votes of the English and Scottish FAs) against any possibility of even experimenting with the use of goal-line technology, almost at the same minute as Birmingham City were denied a clear goal in their FA Cup quarter-final against Portsmouth that might have kept them in the competition.

It’s embarrassing that in the modern age such crucial refereeing errors, so simple to rectify, can still see teams knocked out of a nation’s biggest cup tournament. What’s more embarrassing still is that another sport has successfully demonstrated just how easily many of the niggling issues that dog the thankless task of football officiating can be solved.

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