Since the demise of the Nintendo DS, I've done almost all of my videogaming on smartphones and tablets. A confluence of circumstances made traditional console formats less attractive for a variety of reasons, but also saw me spend more money on gaming than I had done in years. iOS and Android games offer a huge range of incredibly good titles at mindbogglingly tiny prices, almost all of them capable of fitting into whatever free time you have available.
(And not just because they're short, snappy arcade twitch games like Super Hexagon or Impossible Road. Classics like Civilisation and Shadowrun have been revived brilliantly to suit the format, and traditional genres such as scrolling shooters have actually been improved by touchscreen controls, with the likes of Dodonpachi and Raiden rendered far more player-friendly without reducing their fearsome difficulty one iota. Pinball games and others can finally get the aspect ratio they've always wanted.)
More to the point, it almost never takes 47 days to download one.
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Category
videogames
Fans of the bewildering in Scottish politics don’t look set to be disappointed in 2015.
Jim Murphy’s only been the Scottish Labour “leader” for a week, but already he seems hell-bent on hurling the party’s North British branch into the padded walls of its cell with more vigour than ever before, heroically ignoring the open door.
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Category
analysis, comment, football, scottish politics, wtf
We thought you might like a wee glimpse into the machinery.
Tags: Chris Cairns
Category
navel-gazing, video
Political etiquette is a funny thing. Should some of the more vocal supporters of a Yes vote dare to express any degree of satisfaction at a couple of dozen journalists’ jobs being lost on a Unionist newspaper, social media is suddenly aflame with pious, angry lectures about the poor taste of rejoicing in others’ unemployment – regardless of whether it might perhaps have been caused by the paper’s own unethical actions.
But when tens of thousands of blameless oil workers face unemployment just before Christmas, it’s proving all but impossible for Unionists to keep a lid on their glee.
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Tags: misinformation
Category
analysis, comment, scottish politics, stats
There’s only one person on Earth currently more hated by The Sun than Russell Brand (against whom it runs a substantial attack piece roughly every other day), and that’s Vladimir Putin. So the paper’s been almost as delighted by the recently plummeting oil price as Scottish Labour and Tory MSP Murdo Fraser, because it can revel in the trouble the collapse causes Putin.
Today its main politics lead is a full-on gloat about the dreadful state Russia is in at the moment, giving up half a page to an eye-catching graphic.
It must be hoping people don’t look at those numbers too closely.
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Category
analysis, media, world
Hang on a minute. We just got yet another begging email from Labour.
Those vacancies sound familiar. The amount, not so much. £87,500?
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Category
comment, scottish politics, uk politics
The argument that seat projections based on current opinion polling give the SNP (based on uniform swing) a wildly unrealistic number of seats seems at first glance to be compelling. More than two dozen current Labour seats have five-figure majorities, and several are higher than 20,000. Taken individually every single one represents a mammoth task, and capturing the bulk of them looks an absurd dream.
We’re deeply sceptical ourselves about the predictions giving the SNP 40 or more seats, partly for that reason and partly because the lesson of 2011 – when the Nats somehow pulled off a 30-point poll shift in around six weeks – shows how foolish it is to call a febrile-looking election that’s still the best part of five months away.
So we’re not going to be doing that. We’re not making any forecasts here. Rather, we were interested in taking a look at how it could happen, and how First Past The Post, for so long the SNP’s mortal enemy, could next year become a powerful ally.
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analysis, psephology, scottish politics, uk politics
