Wings Over Scotland

In which WoS appears in a movie with Ricky Gervais!

Ish.

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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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Also incorporating: The Story So Far.

Turns out that this one just keeps on running.

Today's thrilling developments include WoSblog's new best friend Olin Coles, Executive Editor of "independent" "reviews" site Benchmark Reviews, being exposed for some fraudulent DMCA claims and for yet more instances of lying to to his innocent, trusting readership. Read on!

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WoSblog apologises for any inconvenience caused to would-be viewers this afternoon, when for several hours visitors to the site were confronted with the image below.

The blog's suspension for much of yesterday was the result of yet another desperate attempt by Olin Coles, the in-no-way brainless and cowardly owner of widely discredited "review" site Benchmark Reviews, to suppress the evidence of his site's not-at-all dishonest practices.

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Ooh, things just got even more interesting. Viewers following the mysterious tale of Benchmark Reviews and where their fully independent reviews come from will recall that WoSblog's shadowy agents tracked down the text of their glowing review of a $1200 office chair to the website of an online retailer called Smart Furniture. When asked, Smart Furniture asserted that the text was their own original work.

Since then, further developments have transpired. Read on!

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Ooh, this gets better and better. Viewers who've been following the thrilling story as it develops will recall the eerie similarity between the content of the Benchmarks Review feature on the Herman Miller Embody chair, and the advertising blurb for it on the site of retailer Smart Furniture.

We were a little curious about this, bearing in mind site owner Olin Coles' strident assertion that, apart from the belatedly-acknowledged passages copied from Herman Miller's press release, "the remaining 99.9% of the article is a fully independent review of a self-purchased product."

(Actually it's the remaining 93.6%, but let's not quibble.)

So inestimable Friend Of WoSblog John X dropped Smart Furniture a line.

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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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