Wings Over Scotland

The PSP? Hwurgh! What is it good for?

Absolutely some things! Say it again!

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Alert WoS viewers, who may find much of the text of this review oddly familiar (but do read on, for all is not quite as it seems), will already be aware of my range of views on the history of SNK’s Metal Slug series. From a hugely refreshing beginning, the franchise rapidly degenerated into a cynical cash-milking business punting out lazy and increasingly inferior titles with ever-growing rapidity and desperation.

The nadir actually arrived fairly early, with the abysmal Metal Slug 3, and there have been a few flickers of hope – like the inventive Neo Geo Pocket spinoffs (now excitingly playable via emulation on PSP, finally solving the problem of the NGP’s murky un-backlit screen and awkward controls) and the aforelinked GBA title, which came up with many of the ideas that have been more fully fleshed out in this latest release.

But mostly the announcement of a new addition to the Metal Slug family has been occasion only for some sad reflections on the latest half-arsed indignities to be inflicted on a once-proud name in the name of a quick profit. Metal Slug XX is a step back in the right direction.

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It’s good to know that Sony still has one market-leading piece of highly efficient and productive hardware on its books. The ailing megacorporation seems to expend most of its effort these days launching acres of cretinous lying drivel into the ever-compliant media, blaming anyone but itself for the catalogue of ineptitude that has beset the company over the last few years.

The space of that single hardware generation has seen Sony’s games division crash from being the overwhelming market leader by a factor of 6:1 over the nearest opposition (the PS2 has sold around 140 million units worldwide compared to the original Xbox’s pitiful 25 million and just 21 million for the Gamecube) to a dismal last place in every field of operation it competes in.

The company’s products populate the Blue Square Football Conference of the videogaming leagues – the PS3 is still making basically no inroads into the Xbox 360’s lead and gazing far off into the distance at the dust trail of the Wii in the mainstream market, and the PSP has been humiliated by the DS and now the iPhone and iPod in the handheld field. But who’s responsible for the latter catastrophe? You’ll never guess in a million years.

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or how one record changed my whole life.

(To enjoy this feature TO THE EXTREME!, install the excellent Spotify and click the song titles to hear the songs. Failing that, I’ll just have to try to paint you a picture of some sounds, but made with words instead of paint.)

In the heady atmosphere of 1985-1986, I never thought I’d live to see the day when The Jesus And Mary Chain – musical revolutionaries, performers of shambolic 20-minute sets of hellish white noise and inebriated chaos, banned from Student Unions across the country because of their concerts’ tendency to end in (sort-of) riots, scruffy council-estate urchins from the industrial wastelands of West Central Scotland – would be having their music celebrated and given away free with copies of The Times.

I guess if you’re right, and if you wait patiently enough, the world sometimes comes round to your way of thinking eventually.

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I’ve never trusted straight men who don’t like football. Something just isn’t wired up right in there.

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Which is why they’ll never get another penny of my money. There is no greedier games company in existence, perhaps no more nakedly greedy corporation on Earth.

The other day I finally lost patience waiting for Namco to release an update to iPhone Ms Pac-Man (which hasn’t worked since OS 3.1) or answer any support queries about it, and emailed Apple.

Widely regarded as an extremely grasping company themselves, Apple nonetheless replied within 24 hours refunding the purchase price of the game in full, which is customer relations at what ought to be the elementary bare minimum.

(Actually it’s a little better than minimum – the game doesn’t get remotely deleted in the event of a refund and is still on my iPod, so if Namco ever do bother their backsides to make it work again, I effectively get a freebie in compensation for all of the considerable inconvenience that I went to in trying to get it to run – repeatedly deleting and reinstalling, rebooting, even doing a complete six-hour system restore.)

Nintendo take a rather different approach.

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Whatever it is that makes me love football, it’s not the commonly-cited feeling of community, because I’ve never really had that. When I was young I was pretty much the only gay (“Aberdeen fan”) in the village (“town of 20,000 people”) – the vast majority of people in central Scotland support the vile twin icons of bigotry Rangers or Celtic, or (if they have no interest in Irish history) to a much lesser extent Hearts and an even lesser extent Hibs.

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No.2 – Earth Defence Force 2017

Yep, it’s so good I actually played it twice, which as alert WoSblog readers will realise is a substantial accolade in itself, so it seems only proper that it takes the No.2 slot as well.

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Yeah, bit behind schedule on this one. Sorry. You know how it is.

No.3 – Earth Defence Force 2017

EDF2017 pretty much killed static-console gaming for me. Apart from Super Mario Galaxy (which exists in a separate category to pretty much all other videogames), it’s the last game for any of the mainstream formats that I’ve invested any significant amount of time in, because nothing’s ever been this much fun again.

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Alert WoS viewers will have seen this a while ago, but as it’s my all-time favourite piece of videogames-related art it’s worth repeating for the hundreds of new readers of WoSblog. Once you’ve grasped what it is you won’t expect that you’re going to watch all nine minutes of it. But you will.

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WoSland is planning a two-person weekday trip to London soon. A simple enough undertaking, right?

But of course it isn't. Ever since the UK's railways were privatised by lovable Mrs Thatcher, it's a well-documented fact that (a) we have the most expensive rail network on Earth, and (b) trying to find out the best and cheapest way to travel between any two points is an insane labyrinthine nightmare of routes, operators, countless different ticket types and "magic stations" – places in the middle of your journey where for no obvious reason you can mysteriously slash the price of your ticket by pretending to make your journey in multiple stages, even though you never actually get off the train or even change seats.

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