Wings Over Scotland

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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The content industry has a long and shameful history of spurious figures when it comes to the subject of intellectual-property piracy. This much we already knew. But the most recent set of “statistics” on the economic cost of piracy – which have, of course, been seized on and repeated unquestioningly by the press – may have set some sort of record.

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There’s been something of a Biblical flood of the-end-of-civilisation movies in recent years. From 2007’s 28 Weeks Later (zombie plague) and I Am Legend (cancer cure gone wrong) to Charlie Brooker’s harrowing alleged comedy Dead Set (another zombie plague), the BBC’s remake of Survivors (lethal virus pandemic) and the same broadcaster’s re-remake of The Day Of The Triffids (er, homicidal walking plants), 2009 mega-budget effects-fest 2012 (the classic “solar flares cause planet to boil from the inside”), and right up to this year’s The Road (unnamed catastrophic event), the cultural world is suddenly alive with the mass culling of humanity. Hurrah!

The one avenue for the obliteration of mankind that hasn’t been explored for a while is the classic nuclear holocaust, even though – or possibly because – an increasingly aggressive and powerful Russia has been rattling its sabre on the world stage for the first time in two decades. However, with the imminent The Book Of Eli making reference to a war that leaves the planet a ravaged wasteland, it looks like the atomic menace is back, Back, BACK! Which got WoSland thinking – what's the bleakest nuclear holocaust movie ever?

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As the writer of the Definitive series of games histories for Retro Gamer, the bane of my life is websites repeating stuff they found somewhere else and didn’t bother to check. Because if the original “fact” isn’t actually true, the weight of repetition quickly causes it to become accepted as the truth anyway, and you end up with a load of cobblers becoming the official historical record, at least until I have to come along and fix it, usually by playing the game(s) all the way to the bloody end myself.

(I suppose I shouldn’t complain, as if it didn’t happen so much Retro Gamer’s first feature on R-Type wouldn’t have been SO full of glaring errors that I couldn’t stop myself writing them an angry letter about it, and thereby managing to secure the Definitive gig in the first place, which has been quite a nice little earner.)

And printing rubbish about games can still be dangerous even if you think you’re really obviously joking, as this picture I recently found lurking on my hard drive proves:

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I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that a person's view on Love And Monsters is the single most telling indicator of their personality – specifically, the personality aspect of whether they're a soulless cretin or not.

L&M is by most measures the oddest episode of Doctor Who since the show's reinvention in 2005. Written by series producer Russell T Davies, it's an episode in which he appears to deliberately burden himself with as many handicaps as possible.

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For off-topic chat. Duh.