Wings Over Sealand

Hell Yeah! finally has an official release date – October 3rd in Europe – and will be coming out for the PC as well as for XBLA. This is the first proper gameplay trailer.

Start saving the spare Microsoft Points from your paper round now (you'll need 1200), because it's freaking awesome. And I should know, because I made some of it.

As the sun made its first appearance of the summer at the weekend, Wings over Sealand wasn't slow off the mark. On the "B" of the "BANG!", we leapt onto a train for a scenic two-hour journey to the seaside, specifically the lovely south-coast town of Weymouth. It's a remarkable place, changing character every time you turn a corner.

The front is a traditional resort promenade, with beaches and ice-cream stands and arcades. Just behind it is a picturesque working harbour town, tatty fishing boats mingling with some extremely fancy millionaires' yachts. (Don't miss the tasty and gigantic battered faggots at Bennett's On The Waterfront fish and chip shop, by the way, the closest thing you'll find to haggis in an English chippy and heavenly with a splash of onion vinegar.) Adjacent to both is a scruffy but bustling town centre, almost entirely free of the empty shops littering every other urban conurbation in Britain.

And if you embark on about five minutes' leisurely stroll from the western end of the prom or the busy, noisy harbour and marina, you'll find the town's only sizeable area of public green space, in the form of the beautiful and peaceful oasis that is The Nothe.

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We've highlighted before the un-over-stateable awesomeness of how many top-quality releases regularly go free on the iOS App Store. Today is one of those days when a whole motorway pile-up of great games for zero cash arrives all at once.

If you have an iThing of any kind, or are even just thinking of getting one in the future, get your iTunes on and download every one of these now:

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Alert viewers may have already noticed a new addition to the central links column: The Sealand Gazette. (If so, they should award themselves 200 Alert Viewer Points and add them to their Viewerscore card.)

The Gazette came about because I have a bad habit of using Twitter as a sort of Post-It Note for news stories I want to keep on file for future reference. It is, of course, singularly badly suited for this purpose, because finding anything you posted on Twitter more than a couple of days ago is a hideous trial and – as I learned only recently – Twitter deletes your old tweets forever when you exceed your quota, which varies according to how prolifically you tweet but can be as little as a few weeks.

So instead, now there's the Gazette, the newspaper for people who increasingly wish they lived on an isolated former gun platform in the middle of the North Sea. Published through the rather nifty Scoop.it platform, the benefits are that it's incredibly easy to use – a couple of clicks adds a story – and both persistent and searchable.

(NB To search the Gazette use the "FILTER" function below the banner, not the Search box at the top of the page, which searches the whole of Scoop.it instead.)

At launch many of the stories are old-ish, because I've been going through my Twitter account grabbing everything I've posted there since April before it gets wiped, but from now on it'll be hot-off-the-presses stuff, and there's even a Page Three girl today as an introductory bonus. (Though of course, it's a rather sinister and troubling one.) Readers can also easily suggest stories to add.

The Gazette should be a lot less trouble to maintain than the short-lived "Reasons Not To Recycle" blog, and fulfil much the same purpose. (Misanthropic nihilism, essentially.) But I'll make a special effort to throw in a few nice stories too, because mass reader suicide isn't the goal. Although in the broader sense, it is a bit.

Much as Scots have grown accustomed to trying to pretend otherwise, you’ll probably have noticed that there’s currently another international football tournament going on without us. This evening sees the first appearance in the European Championship of the England team, the only side competing in the entire competition who don’t have a national anthem to call their own.

Over two decades of living in England hasn’t changed this writer’s feelings towards the country’s international team much. I still want them to lose – not because I hate the English people, but precisely because I like them.

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I was scurrying around in the WoS Archives this evening looking for something else, and I stumbled across this. It's a piece from April 2000 for now-defunct games-industry trade paper CTW, in which I interviewed Andy Smith of Future Gamer, the email magazine that eventually evolved into GamesRadar.

Marvel through your tears, viewers at the eerily accurate foretelling of the state of games journalism that was about to unfold.

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If you're a reasonably frequent reader of WoSland, this is kinda important. Just to the right you'll see a poll. (We apologise for the fact that it's a bit ugly, and in the sidebar rather than in the body of this post – failings which are a result of the absolutely startling shitness of every single WordPress polling plugin.)

Please take five seconds to respond to it. Thanks.

As huge crowds of primitive villagers turn out to marvel at some fire this weekend, here's some old-fashioned journalism to ponder. Click the image to read the article.

Enjoy the torch (possibly the last spectacle invented by Adolf Hitler to still be regularly performed and celebrated), and the two weeks of the Games while they last. Try not to get sick, in either sense of the term. Try not to be alarmed if anyone sticks a missile battery on your roof (and slaps an eviction order on you for making a fuss about it or for just not being lucrative enough), or a sonic cannon, or by the bored police with machine guns hanging around your train station waiting to shoot anyone who tries to protest or take an unlicenced beverage or snack into one of the state-of-the-art stadia.

Enjoy all the top events (on telly, unless you're a corporate sponsor), and as Boris Johnson gallivants around turning them into a giant Tory showpiece, take a moment out to give thanks to Tony Blair and the rest of Labour for making it all possible (with our money, of course) for him. Who needs hospitals and schools anyway?

Is this actually worse than bags of peanuts with "WARNING: MAY CONTAIN NUTS" on them and the like? In some senses, I think, it might be.

Sometimes – okay, quite often – I'm rather jealous of my good chums over on the world-conquering PC gaming site/shopping list Rock, Papers, Hot Gun. I enviously eye their devoted millions-strong audience, weighty peer credibility and enormous paycheques, and think "If only Podgamer could have lasted more than three and a half hours without everyone stabbing each other", and other such wistful regrets.

Then I remember that if I was on RPS I'd have had to devote part of my one precious and irreplaceable life to playing Diablo 3, and everything's alright again.

A few of my favourite lines from this morning's Eurogamer coverage:

"What all the Diablo 3 Error messages mean, and what to do about them"

"UK launch video, images, Iain Lee, people in wizard costumes"

"Though the downloader may show 100%, please allow some time for it to fully complete."

"The server is full. This is likely due to high login traffic. The only solution is to keep trying to log in."

"If you're still running into this issue, there may be an error in your foreign language appdata files. Some players have found a workaround, but please be aware the steps they provide are not something we can currently support."

"Error 3004, 3006, 3007, or 300008 – There are a number of possible causes for these errors."

The future of videogaming, there, viewers. No thanks.

You don't even need to be a particularly alert reader to recall WoSland's worrying piece about recession-hit Bath just a few weeks ago, which drew thousands of viewers from all corners of the net to become one of the all-time top 10 most popular posts on the blog. But this week, Bath's fall from grace was rendered complete.

The image above comes from a piece in Monday's Guardian about dereliction and decay in urban England (click the pic to read the story). The feature talks about northern working-class cities like Bradford, Redcar, Sheffield and Preston, particularly the various consequences (and, it posits optimistically, opportunities) presented by long-term disuse, decay and demolition of long-term empty properties. The picture chosen to illustrate it, though, is of London Road in Bath.

It's not, admittedly, the most salubrious part of town. But Bath is more accustomed to being employed to depict the grand Edwardian age in period dramas. To serve as a passable imitation of deprived modern-day Bradford instead may well be seen by the city's inhabitants as its darkest hour since it was bombed by the Nazis in 1942.

Over the last couple of years, I've been regretfully forced to the conclusion that feminism is the most intolerant ideology currently operating in the UK, leaving ultra-radical Islam trailing a distant second and looking on angrily. Disagree with the orthodox-feminist position on any gender-related subject, in even the most minor of ways, even if you're agreeing with the base principle, and you'll be first shouted down, then called a misogynist and/or "rape apologist" or similar, and then censored out of the debate entirely. (All three often occuring within the space of a few minutes.)

Veteran WoSland viewers may recall the Cara Fiasco, or the interesting "Dickwolves" discussion of last year, but by way of a milder illustration I present a recent Twitter exchange with "rebelgirl59", who appears from her comments to be some manner of activist for the Scottish Socialist Party. (Twitspeak tidied up, otherwise unaltered.)

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