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.)
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iOS, iPad, videogames
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.
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things of all time, videogames
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!
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Category
culture salvage, videogames
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?
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Category
awesomeness, iOS, videogames
The funny thing about WoSblog’s recent Gran Turismo 5 piece (at the time of writing by far the most-read individual post in WB history, although the various Benchmark Reviews bits added together outstrip it by miles as the single most popular topic), is that everyone took it as being mostly an attack on Eurogamer, which was never really the intention.
This is, though.
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Category
stupidity, videogames
Come on. It must have been one of you, or someone you know, and it’s time to own up. Because until we deal with this serious issue and reach some sort of closure, Jobs is going to keep taking it out on the rest of us.
There’s simply no other remotely plausible explanation for the staggering hostility – no, make that absolute naked loathing – with which Apple continues to treat the hundreds of millions of customers who’ve made it so rich.
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apocalypse, disturbing, investigative journalism, iOS, iPad, stupidity, useless Apple cunts, videogames
Gran Turismo 5 is finally out! (Or possibly almost finally out!) Woo! It’s no more than four or five years late! And worth every minute!
I haven’t played it, obviously. But there’s something you should know.
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ps3, videogames
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.
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Category
analysis, videogames
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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iOS, videogames
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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previously on WoS, videogames
Is this okay, or really really not very okay at all? I just can’t tell.
“Finally a SNIPER game where you play as a soviet soldier to help liberate the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp!”
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Category
iOS, things of all time, videogames
The PSP? Hwurgh! What is it good for?
Absolutely some things! Say it again!
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Category
videogames
