They don't, they don't speak for us

So the debates are over. We've heard at great length from three right-wing politicians, offering us three slightly different flavours of right-wing policies. No alternative voices were permitted.

And the really troubling thing about this election is that that means NOBODY is speaking for the majority of the British population. It almost certainly means that nobody is speaking for you. Which, you might think, is a pretty odd way to be running a supposed democracy.

Immigrants to UK not welcome

Next time, it could be your voice that's silenced. Remember, Cameron and Brown didn't want the Lib Dems to be allowed in the debates either.

Kenny Dalglish for Prime Minister?

One of the most striking things about the current election is the BBC's total abandonment of even a pretence at impartiality with regard to the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales (and other smaller parties like UKIP too), which is most obviously visible in the Corporation's determined exclusion of them from the defining theatre of the campaign – the leaders' debates.

In the light of protests pointing out that excluding what Ofcom defines as "main parties" in Scotland and Wales during an election is against broadcasting regulations, the BBC (and ITV and Sky, although the latter subsequently broke ranks – see above) hastily rebranded the programmes as "Prime Ministerial debates", and insisted that they were only for the politicians contesting the keys to 10 Downing Street.

The gigantic irony, of course, is that it looks increasingly as if NONE of the participants in the debates will actually be the next Prime Minister.

WoSblog Gaming Challenge No.3

This is also going free in the App Store today (and today only), so you've got no excuses. Remember, an exciting actual prize awaits the WoSblog Leaderboard Champion at the end of the year!

Challenge Game 3, and our first iPod challenge title, is Koan – "a fast-paced game of pure strategy against the clock".

Tell me I'm not the only one

…who thinks this would make a great stamp.

Super Turbo Action Pig is today's finest App Store promo freebie. It's a version of the classic Chopper one-button helicopter game, except this time you're a swashbuckling pig on a revenge mission against an evil butcher.

Why the unemployed are the new paedophiles

Clue: it's not because they like having sex with children.

It's because, along with the war in Afghanistan, they're one of the only two major campaigning issues on which there isn't even a manufactured illusion of disagreement between the three main parties standing in the General Election of 2010. Everyone is singing in perfect harmony from the same hymn sheet on this one: the unemployed are dangerous and despicable criminals.

Exciting copyright experiment

*excitement not guaranteed

There aren't many "Lite" games (ie free demos of paid apps) on the App Store that are lastingly entertaining in their own right, but until recently Pac-Man Lite was one of them. In fact, in some ways I actually like it better than the full game, which might be why Namco recently destroyed it.

When making billions of dollars is bad

"Just as gold prospectors scorched the earth behind them, so have developers on the App Store critically damaged the ecosystem in which they operate" 

I don't know about you, viewers, but I'm getting really, really tired of  listening to complete arsewits in the idiot games industry bitch about how low prices in the App Store are damaging to game developers.

The unheard voice

I like this:

Much like Afghanistan, none of the London parties speak for the UK electorate on this important issue. Which is, y'know, kinda strange. You'd think wars and spending scores of billions of pounds on pointless weapons in a recession would be just the sort of thing that would come up during an election as points of contention. But maybe I'm missing something.

Pac-Man found on moon

After all that politics, let's lighten the mood a little and get back to the happy world of videogames.

It's not our own Moon, but Mimas, one of the satellites of Saturn. As a gas planet, of course, Saturn makes a pretty good "ghost". But Pac's going to need a pretty big power pill if he's going to take it down.