A milestone

Why I'm not excited about the PSP2

After yesterday's piece, an awful lot of very irritable fanboy types have been angrily demanding to know what my problem is with the PSP2. I rather thought the feature had explained that in some detail, but I appreciate that kids today have very limited attention spans, so in short, it's essentially this:

(Image to scale. The NGP is also exactly twice as thick as the iPhone.)

If I want to play games on the move, I want a machine I don't need a luggage trolley to carry around (especially once I've added a phone and a camera). And if I want to play PS3-type games, I have a PS3.

NGP: the 10 questions nobody's asking

Because videogames journalism is embarrassingly bad.

Sony finally show off PSP2 (pic: actual size)

Two touchscreens, two cameras, two analogue pads, d-pad, eight buttons, accelerometer and gyroscope, four-hour battery life and allegedly PS3-quality games (presumably at PS3-game prices). And of course, it's Sony.

So, anyone prepared to bet on anything below £329?

War has never been so much (nude) fun

The Pickford Brothers' turn-based two-player strategy game Naked War is now completely free to download and play. (Previously, if I remember rightly, it was free to download but you had to pay for moves.)

I love turn-based strategy (I've been dying for a good email TBS since Hasbro shut off the Email X-Com servers, the despicable cunts) but I absolutely loathe subscription-based or pay-per-play games (outside of an arcade), so I never actually got round to giving Naked War a try. In the light of this splendid development, I plan to put that right very soon.

Fun For Free, Crap For Cash

Or "Games which are hopelessly flawed, but still entertaining in a slightly rubbish sort of way as long as you didn't have to spend any money on them".

Today's temporarily-tolerated title: Chop Chop Soccer.

Things you'll never read again #2

Boardgames are brilliant fun, offering gameplay that’s been tried and tested over years or often decades, but are usually handled terribly on consoles.

Seeking some justification for running on powerful electric machinery and costing twice as much as buying the physical version from a toyshop, they frequently swamp the gameplay in pointless bells, whistles and cutscenes (which the player has to instantly turn off so that a single game of Monopoly doesn’t last 14 hours), as well as imposing an unwavering rigidity of rules.

Things you'll never read again

Now THIS is how you make a puzzle game.

Inexplicably never seen on a home format before this DS version (with the exception of a single Wonder Swan release with bafflingly bad controls for a system with two d-pads), Slitherlink is in fact, like the mighty Picross, merely one of a variety of generic names for a type of popular pen-and-paper puzzle.

Your task is to draw a single continuous line around a grid of numbers, such that every number is bordered by the line on exactly the specified number of sides.  (If you don't quite follow that, a look at the screenshot above should make the objective a bit clearer.)

This single simple rule results in the creation of the best logic puzzle this reporter's ever encountered.

Oh wow, the 3DS is going to be expensive

So after all the hype, Nintendo didn't announce a launch price for the European 3DS at all. I think it's safe to assume that that means it's going to come in at the higher end of everyone's predictions, and Nintendo are too chicken to take the blame for a handheld costing more than the PS3.

After all, if it was going to pleasantly surprise everyone and sell for under £200, don't you think they'd have wanted to take the credit and make a big song and dance about it?

EDIT: £229 it is, then.

It was 20 years ago today

Christ, that's frightening.