The biggest show on Earth

It's generally accepted by most sane people that if you want to make money out of something – particularly if it's something that costs almost nothing to physically produce -  you sell it cheap. The mainstream videogames industry is almost alone in continuing to resist this reality.

Some premium titles push that already-horrendous sum up by as much as another £10, plus there are numerous comedy "Special Editions" aimed at the super-gullible, charging as much as £30 or £40 more for discs or books full of screenshots, or little plastic toys.

Now, of course, there's another way.

When more is less, part 2

This ought to be the enormously endearing tale of a cheery wee monkey in a spacesuit making the universe a cleaner and happier place. Instead, yet again, it's the story of some idiots. SAD FACE.

       
Space Monkey (currently on free promo, so try it for yourself) is a cute little action game of the sort the App Store does so well, except not done so well. But the things that ruin it aren't restricted to Apple's world-enslaving handhelds, and are all too common.

Angry Birds and the Magic Equation

As someone occasionally mystified by the rubbish that people buy on "grown-up" consoles, I find the App Store a much more rational place. I can account logically for the success of almost every big hit in the Top 50 – Fruit Ninja and Flight Control and Flick Kick Football are brilliant games, FIFA and Tiger Woods enormous franchises with 20-year histories, Peggle and The Secret Of Monkey Island are excellent conversions of classic titles sold for a tiny fraction of what they cost on other platforms, and so on.

Even Doodle Jump can be explained away (despite the presence of numerous near-identical but superior games) by a combination of fortuitous timing and commendably-frequent and substantial updates bolstering an unspectacular but still pretty enjoyable game.

But as for the year-long chokehold exerted on the top of the charts by Angry Birds, I just don't get it.

A Christmas miracle

Sometime back in the 1990s, some idiot somewhere decided that games should stop being fun, and become more like work. That is, having paid (at that time) £40+ for a shiny new game, you were only allowed to play a tiny fraction of it until the developers felt you'd "earned" the right to "unlock" bits of it that for no good reason you weren't allowed to access from the off.

(Never mind that you'd already "earned" that right by GOING OUT AND DOING A REAL JOB TO MAKE THE MONEY YOU BOUGHT THE BASTARD THING WITH IN THE FIRST PLACE.)

Fortunately, somewhere around 2001 everyone got completely sick of the idea of being made to plough through hours of gruelling, joyless slog in order to be allowed to enjoy the games they'd bought, all those developers were happily beaten to death with jagged rocks, and the ugly blight of "unlocking" was banished forever amid scenes of great celebration across the land.

A juicy orange at the bottom of the stocking

Recently, in the absence of anything very exciting new to play, I spent a lot of time with one of my very first iPod favourites. Pole Position Remix is a game riddled with flaws, and in the light of some of the stuff we're about to discuss its normal £1.79 price point is extremely optimistic.

Over the Christmas period, though, Namco have given it one of its frequent 59p promos, and IF you're prepared to put in a couple of hours of gruelling unlocking work – which I'm by no means saying you should – you'll find something rather splendid hidden away idiotically at the end of it.

Why I love the modern age

Because I never thought I'd ever see this again:

There are two reasons I'm incredibly happy about suddenly and unexpectedly rediscovering it – as I just have – of which the first is the less important.

I am better than you

…at the super-fun Crystal Dash (free today, in iPod and iPad flavours).

If anyone can beat 321 points in Rush mode today, I will send them 50p.

Previously true thing now re-true

Driver's on sale for 59p again, in case you missed it when it was free.

The controls work exceptionally well, it's an all-round superb port, and unless you hate Driver itself (for which there are several legitimate justifications), the iOS version is a stunning bargain. That is all.

Real Racing 2 in 45 words

Ooh! Pretty graphics, great performance even on old hardware, real-life cars, 15 opponents on track, surprisingly good CPU competitiveness. Let's play!

Race. Grind, grind, grind, unlock new track. Grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, unlock new track. Grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, quit.

Fuck all that gameplay shit, what's the box like?

The funny thing about WoSblog's recent Gran Turismo 5 piece (at the time of writing by far the most-read individual post in WB history, although the various Benchmark Reviews bits added together outstrip it by miles as the single most popular topic), is that everyone took it as being mostly an attack on Eurogamer, which was never really the intention.

This is, though.