Well, that doesn't seem the sort of thing the Prime Minister should be getting behind, does it? But wait. There are more rib-ticklers where that came from.

The funniest one is probably this one:

…in which Boscott attempts to deny responsibility for the "Junglebook" post, claiming a hacked Twitter account. Fair enough, you might think. These things happen, but luckily his account appears to be under his control again, spewing out hundreds of anti-rioter tweets in recent days and gathering tens of thousands of followers.

Though oddly, rather than being about social justice or supporting the police, the profile claims to be mostly about "bad taste/offensive jokes" and "Adult Humour not 4 wimps". You might think that some would consider that description to fit the "Junglebook" line quite well, and that Boscott's denial of having posted it therefore smelt a bit fishy.

What you might think of doing then was going back through Boscott's tweets of the last few days, which are still there on the feed for anyone to see and which he doesn't appear to be denying responsibility for.

Hmm.

Right.

Uh-huh.

I see.

Short of material already?

Topical satire!

Well, at least it's not just the blacks, I guess.

It's nice to see that, a bit like Michael McIntyre, he's keen to promote other young up-and-coming comics too.

And it gets more mysterious – this sidesplitter is from the same date as the "Junglebook" tweet. Boscott is presumably in sole control of his Twitter account now. So why is this sort of thing, which we're told was someone else's handiwork, still here? What possible explanation could there be? Perhaps he just doesn't know how the "Delete this tweet" button works. Yes, that must be it.

Call me over-sensitive, but I'm not sure this guy leading a vast army of the Met's cheerleaders is going to be all that constructive over the days ahead in healing the nation's wounds. And I'm pretty certain it's not someone the Prime Minister of the country really ought to be singling out for praise.

But hey, I'm just some pinko liberal, what do I know?

EDIT: Boscott's Twitter profile has been hastily edited since this feature appeared, replacing his picture and the profile description. The before and after shots are below. Maybe he's finally started to work out how to try to cover his tracks after all. Just slightly too late there, Sean.

EDIT 2: Boscott's clearly panicking now. Within a couple of hours of this feature appearing and starting to go viral on Twitter, he's locked his tweets.

Unfortunately for him, he's still a step behind, thanks to ever-alert WoSland associate John X, who has helpfully saved and mirrored them for posterity. Nice try, Sean.

Riots: the underclass lash out (Daily Telegraph)

"Meanwhile, the view is gaining ground that social democracy, with its safety nets, its costly education and health care for all, is unsustainable in the bleak times ahead. The reality is that it is the only solution."

There is a context to London's riots that can't be ignored (The Guardian)

"Decades of individualism, competition and state-encouraged selfishness – combined with a systematic crushing of unions and the ever-increasing criminalisation of dissent – have made Britain one of the most unequal countries in the developed world."

Insane in the economic membrane (ABC Australia)

"And the Tea Party's right in one way: it's a religious, almost fundamentalist principle. You look after people. You don't punish them for the sins of men earning eighteen hundred dollars an hour for moving jobs overseas."

No riots here. Just quiet, ever-deeper misery (The Guardian)

"The promises both parties offered to those who 'worked hard and played by the rules' – of rising living standards, a secure retirement and a better life for their children – sound empty. Millions are living thwarted lives of quiet desperation, and cannot see a way to escape them."

Panic on the streets of London (Laurie Penny)

"Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."

Theresa May: We can cut police budgets without risking violent unrest (The Guardian)

"The British public don't simply resort to violent unrest in the face of challenging economic circumstances."

Nick Clegg warns of riots if Tories are elected (Sky News)

"This is Walthamstow, in East London, this is not Athens or any other Greek city."

Global economic Armageddon is nigh – so let's tax the rich (The Herald)

"In America and Britain, the story of the last 30 years has been the reversal of this democratisation of the economy. Income and wealth inequality has returned to the levels of the 1920s, with a tiny fraction of the super-rich taking a vast proportion of the wealth of the economy and investing it in stocks, houses and other speculative assets."

BBC News "interviews" Darcus Howe (YouTube)

(This one's not so much interesting as just an utter fucking disgrace. About as close as I've come to withholding my licence fee.)

When I grew up in Tottenham we stole sweets; now it's revenge shootings (Evening Standard)

"In the aftermath of the riots and the death of PC Blakelock, money was poured in to regenerate the area and the police made huge efforts to re-engage with the community"

The year we realised our democratically elected leaders can no longer protect us (The Guardian)

"It's striking that the targets have not been town halls or, say, Tory HQ – stormed by students last November – but branches of Dixons, Boots and Carphone Warehouse. If they are making a political statement, it is that politics does not matter."

Caring costs – but so do riots (The Independent)

"It's not one occasional attack on dignity, it's a repeated humiliation, being continuously dispossessed in a society rich with possession. Young, intelligent citizens of the ghetto seek an explanation for why they are at the receiving end of bleak Britain, condemned to a darkness where their humanity is not even valued enough to be helped. Savagery is a possibility within us all. Some of us have been lucky enough not to have to call upon it for survival"

The psychology of looting (The Guardian)

"Between these poles is a more pragmatic reading: this is what happens when people don't have anything, when they have their noses constantly rubbed in stuff they can't afford, and they have no reason ever to believe that they will be able to afford it."

Who are the rioters? Young men from poor areas… but that's not the full story (The Guardian)

"When incidents like this happen the authorities are fond of saying that troublemakers have been bussed in from outside. But there's none of that here. Neither is there any sign of the anti-globalisation or anarchist crowds. This is unadulterated, indigenous anger and ennui. It's a provocation, a test of will and a hamfisted two-finger salute to the authorities."

The other half says "Hey, maybe this means people will come to stop thinking that all online writing – in fact, any kind of writing – should be free", and that there might still be some hope of reversing the trend of the last decade or so and being able to make a living out of it.

My other half is pretty naive, it should be said. But it's always nice to have a little glimmer of hope, I guess.

We live in a time when the police – and especially the Metropolitan Police – will kill you for getting on a tube train or for just going about your normal everyday business somewhere in the loose vicinity of a protest march, so pointing a gun (or even something that might look a bit like one) at them would be pretty much the textbook definition of asking for it.

Inner-city youths who speak Jafaican and think they live in a gangsta-rap video aren't a demographic I have a lot of natural empathy with either. But the enormously predictable outpouring of handwringing ("blah blah never any excuse for rioting blah blah") about the violence that erupted in Tottenham at the weekend misses the point spectacularly, and plays right into the hands of those who are currently engaged in stealing our country from us.

The most remarkable aspect of the riots is how recently they were foretold. Just one week beforehand, the Guardian carried a piece on cuts in Haringey, the London borough which encompasses Tottenham. It spoke of how the Coalition government's swingeing axe on public services had resulted in the mass closure of youth clubs in the area (described by one academic as an "annihilation"), throwing thousands of already-disadvantaged and poor young people out onto the streets with nothing to do except cause trouble.

These cuts are only the beginning of the punishment of the poor for the crimes of the political and financial classes who have ruled the UK for the last three decades, and I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about the carnage that's about to befall the public sector – the chances are you can see it already in your own community, whether it's in the form of closed libraries or voluntary organisations who've packed up through the withdrawal of municipal funding or whatever.

The chilling thing about the Coalition's austerity measures, though, is that they're a one-way street. It doesn't need a cynic to see that the attack on public services is one the Tories have been waiting many years for an excuse and an opportunity to undertake. Even if they lead to an economic recovery – something that looks less and less likely with every passing moment – can you picture the day when George Osborne says "Okay, that's that all sorted out, now let's restore the funding to youth clubs in Tottenham", rather than, say, finally getting on with abolishing inheritance tax for the rich?

Politics in Britain used to operate like a pendulum, swinging from left to right on a roughly 10-year cycle that had its problems (like incoming governments spending their first couple of years undoing the actions of their predecessors) but at least ensured the country never lurched too far to either extreme. New Labour destroyed all that, and now the pendulum is broken and lopsided, tethered to the right of the spectrum. Everything we let the Coalition throw on the public-services bonfire now, we lose for a generation – or perhaps forever. Because who can we vote for who'll bring it back?

And in that situation, when the comfortable middle classes react with boilerplate rent-a-quote fury to the rioting of the disenfranchised, the only rational response is "What else are they supposed to do?"

Under the neoconservative capitalism practiced by both Tory and Labour governments over the last 30 years, the poor and working classes saw their position get steadily worse even when the economy was booming. Now that the economy is a disaster zone and the chickens of unlimited credit are coming home to roost with a vengeance, it's the poor who're going to bear the brunt of it. And if they don't want to accept that role meekly and obediently, what are their options?

Peaceful protest doesn't work. The best it can hope for is to be ignored, as when the biggest protest in national history – that against the war in Iraq – had precisely no effect on anything. At worst, the police will provoke violence with intimidatory tactics, use that violence to justify brutal reprisals, and the justice system will hand down draconian sentences for trivial offences and devote vast amounts of resources to vindictively prosecuting entirely non-violent action. Sometimes they'll even drag brain-damaged casualties to court to accuse them of damaging police truncheons with their heads.

So when democracy can't help you (or isn't interested in trying), and protesting peacefully achieves nothing except getting you kettled and beaten up and thrown in jail, what's left?

It seems unlikely that events in Tottenham this weekend were very closely linked to the death of Mark Duggan. If not him, some other spark would have lit the kindling. Britain is undergoing the final stages of The Great Division, a process started by Margaret Thatcher and enthusiastically continued by Tony Blair, whereby society was deliberately and knowingly divided once and for all into haves and have-nots, defined by property ownership.

The fate of the latter is to be forced further and further out of main population centres by rising rents and prices and cuts to housing benefits, condemned to get up at 5am every day and spend two hours travelling from their shared home to a no-rights service-sector McJob (or more than one, or if they're even unluckier a compulsory workfare placement) paying a sub-living wage, getting home at 9pm too exhausted to do anything but collapse in front of mind-numbing TV and look forward to another day of misery. Meanwhile, the property-owning majority (who manage to hold onto their jobs) will continue to sail through the global economic crisis largely unscathed, enjoying the benefits of record low interest rates as they pay off their mortgages.

If the left thinks the austerity drive will eventually unite the population in anger and sweep the Tories from power it's horribly mistaken, because these people will fight tooth and nail to stay in the upper tier, above the terrifying seething pits of poverty. The right-wing press has been feeding them poison about the poor for years – they're all welfare cheats, living on benefits in houses you couldn't afford – and they will damn the poor to hell to protect their own relative prosperity.

The kids in Tottenham can see their future. It's that of a neo-feudal slave-labour underclass, with rapidly-closing escape hatches that dwindle in number every day, and with what little they have now being taken away from them to feed the rich, because a capitalist economy only works – CAN only work – if the rich keep getting richer and the poor get poorer. (Next time you see someone on the news talking about "growth", that's what they mean.) Blair and Brown's perverted, sick mockery of Labour disguised the truth for a few years with borrowing, to finish Thatcher's work by ensuring the new middle class grew large enough to become self-perpetuating, but now even the pretend money has run out.

This wasn't like the tuition-fees protests, where people gathered from all over the country to make their voice heard in the centre of power, and where those who wanted to use the event to make trouble had plenty of time to plan it. This was people smashing up their own neighbourhood, and that's something you only do when you're desperate and out of options.

The poor have nobody to vote for. Nobody speaks for them in the halls of democracy. Their futures have been sold out from under them in the form of a crippling debt burden, PFI bills and unaffordable education (whether through tuition fees or the loss of EMAs). They have no reason to believe in a better tomorrow, and no means to influence it. They've been left to rot, and vilified as feckless scroungers into the bargain. Before you condemn them, answer this question: what do they have left but bottles and stones?

As ever, though, WoSland's nudging has managed to secure tangible and thrillingly awesome results where others merely flail around impotently.

This week saw the release of an update to the game, which retains the same brilliant engine but now also allows the player to have a single quick game for fun rather than forcing them through an entire career season at a time, with no means of exiting other than completely deleting and reinstalling the app.

There's a whole new front end on the latest version, which provides a "Practice" game at one of three difficulty levels (you can play as long as you want up to three sets) in addition to the full-season option. There's also now the option of a tidy exit from a Season game (you can leave any time between points, with the state of the game saved), and you can also reset a season in progress without deleting the whole app. And finally, you can now enter your name rather than being called "PLAYER" the whole way through.

With these simple improvements, Evolution Tennis has become one of the best tennis games we've ever played on any format. It's still going for just 69p, and in the interests of fair warning, if you own an iThing and don't buy it now, we're going to kill you in the face.

What the FUCK am I supposed to do with this, you fucking halfwits?

This, viewers, is the miserable, greedy, idiot face of business in Britain today. For maximum excellence in dental hygiene I also own one of these, which is (like the Oral-B toothbrush) powered by a rechargeable fixed battery rather than AAs or mains power. The makers of the Waterpik, however, have managed to make an important mental leap which has somehow eluded the drooling, grunting cretins at Oral-B.

The great epiphany they've had is that you don't necessarily have to charge the device in the same place you're going to be using it. The Waterpik, then, charges from a nice sensible three-pin mains plug (in the same non-retarded way that my hair clippers do). You plug it in, charge it up overnight or whenever, then you take it into the bathroom to use it. When it runs out after a couple of weeks of super-fun jet-flossing, you take it back out and you charge it up again. It's not rocket surgery.

Oral-B, on the other hand, seem unable to conceive a scenario where you would ever want to let your toothbrush out of the bathroom, even when you weren't actually brushing your teeth with it. As a result it comes with only a razor-type 2-pin charging plug, on an idiotically short lead. Now, I haven't been in everyone in the country's bathroom (despite my best efforts), but I'm going to go ahead and assume that at least a majority of shaver sockets are located in a similar place to mine, and could easily be more than two feet above a flat surface.

So HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO CHARGE MY FUCKING TOOTHBRUSH, YOU FUCKING MORONS? I can't leave it dangling in mid-fucking-air like The Innocent Derek Bentley, can I? Apart from just being ridiculous, it'd pull the plug out. I can't sit it on top of the shaving light because the shaving light's got a sloped surface, and with a tall, narrow thing balancing precariously on top of it the slightest breeze from the window is going to send it crashing to the ground and smashing to pieces on the hard tiled floor.

(Indeed, the instructions, which come on a ludicrous concertina-ed piece of paper two feet long and two inches wide, specifically say "Do not place or store the charger where it can fall or be pulled into a tub or sink".)

Maybe that's the idea. Maybe you want me to have to buy a new one every week. But at the price I paid for it, I'm not sure that it's entirely unreasonable of me to want to be able to actually use this one at least once, without going and forking out more money for some sort of adapter that you were too stingy to include in the box.

How many pence did you save by cheaping out and not putting one in, or at least making the cable a decent length? However much it was, the outcome is that those extra few pennies of profit mean I'll never buy any Oral-B product again as long as I live (including your posh new toothpaste which I'd been about to try), because on principle I don't like giving money to a bunch of dickheads so they can make my life difficult for no good reason.

What are you, Oral-B, stupid or something? Or what?

But that's only passingly what I want to talk about today.

Last month, Funland at the Trocadero closed down, leaving the whole of London – a city of eight million people – with just two substantial videogame arcades (the large Namco Station at Westminster, and Casino Leisure on Tottenham Court Road, which is small but extremely up-to-date).

Everywhere else in London you used to be able to play videogames has either closed down entirely (the old Namco Wonderpark off Piccadilly Circus, the long-lost Sega World – also at the Trocadero – the couple of large arcades on the south side of Oxford Street) or gone over to fruit machines. And the disturbing thing is that I only found out about it when someone directed me to this story that they'd read on their way to work.

Urban-centre games arcades have, of course, been steadily disappearing for years, not just in the UK. At one point well within living memory even a pretty small place like Bath supported three, but now has none, and I no longer know of any in Bristol either. You can still find them in some out-of-town retail parks like Cribbs Causeway, and at the seaside (though even there they're in steep decline), but in towns and cities the arcade is now all but dead.

The final blow was struck by Nintendo. Home consoles have been equal or superior to arcade games on the technical level since the Dreamcast, but even then the amusement parlours still had a USP for the keen gamer. While the audience for traditional stand-up cabinets withered down to the fighting-game hardcore, people still wanted to play several kinds of games that you had to go to arcades for – multiplayer linkups (primarily racing games), light-gun shooters (which enjoyed a bit of a renaissance when modern plasma and LCD TVs appeared that didn't support the likes of the G-Con) and physical games where you had to exercise more than your wrists.

As home gaming caught up with its graphical power, the arcade diversified and specialised. It filled up with inventive games like Namco's beautiful Prop Cycle, Konami's duck-and-dive motion-sensing cop-sim Police 24/7, and of course an endless parade of dancing and rhythm-action games utilising every imaginable kind of instrument.

(Many of these titles were translated to home systems, but with limited success – Dance Dance Revolution on a tatty, creased plastic mat sliding across your living-room carpet just doesn't cut it, and the price of the dedicated controllers made most of them niche products at best, bar a short-lived guitar-game boom built on gamers' embarrassing and indefensible fondness for dire 80s cheese-metal.)

Then the Wii arrived.

The online gaming of Xbox Live and to a lesser extent PSN had already robbed arcades of much of their social function. But it was the Wii that really sounded the death-knell, bringing all kinds of physical-motion gaming into the home in a big way – and crucially, this time all with the single basic controller.

Suddenly people who only gamed in arcades (scared off by the enormous complexity of the Xbox and PS3's controllers) could join in too, and the hassle of gathering a bunch of friends together, organising transport to some huge out-of-town megaplex and spending 50 quid at a time for a couple of hours of fun (games at £1 or £2 a credit for three minutes play, extortionate food and drink, plus the cost of petrol/fares) became massively less attractive. Why go to all that effort when you could just invite people round to your house instead, to play games even your gran could get to grips with?

Motion gaming at home exploded. The Wii crushed all-comers in the console market, proving that there was a far bigger market out there for playing games than the increasingly nerdy, ultra-conservative and tiresome "hardcore". It was such a success that Microsoft and Sony jumped on the bandwagon, and Kinect sold millions in its opening weeks despite a hefty price tag and dubious software support.

You know all this, of course. But the irony is that while the videogames media has dismissed and ignored arcade gaming as an irrelevant historical relic for years (the last publication to devote any coverage to it was the aptly-named Arcade, way back in the mid-1990s), current-generation videogaming as we know it was born in those neon-lit amusement centres on city streets.

And I'm not talking about the burgeoning neo-retro market that's been revitalised by digital distribution and brought us things like Pac-Man Championship DX, though that's notable in itself. The pioneering physical-motion games that led to the Wii, and from there to Kinect and Move (and arguably even the DS and iPhone) were a direct result of arcades innovating to compete with and distinguish themselves from the home console experience. Without them, where will the next paradigm shift come from?

And that, viewers, is why it's so shameful and dismal that the passing of Funland has gone unremarked in the videogame media. If you let the oak tree die because it's old, and don't even tell anyone about it, don't act surprised when you start to run out of acorns.

Then it's "Well, I was going to stop at 10 o'clock, but now it's five past and I've missed the start of the programme I was going to watch, so I might as well have 25 more minutes till the next one's on."

Next, you tell yourself "Oh, look, there's only one slot left on the high-score table – I'll just fill that before I quit." And eventually, a broken shell of hollow promises and addict's self-loathing, you're reduced to this: "Okay, my thumbs hurt so much I can no longer move right without crying out in pain. No more Raiden 3 tonight. After this game."

(This original version of this feature first appeared on WoS in December 2005. But for enormously tedious technical reasons the page now looks awful, so I figured I may as well shift it over here rather than laboriously fix the original, since I mentioned Raiden 3 yesterday and suddenly had to go and play it again. Plus we've already done 2007, so why not?)

There's already been one lengthy hagiography for a Raiden game on WoS, so your correspondent apologises in advance for the one that follows in a moment. But hey, it's Christmas. Raiden 3 is this reviewer's Game Of 2005, and Heaven knows, in one of the poorest years in videogaming memory we could all do with something to feel good about. But first, let's get something disturbing out of the way.

This sequel's been a long time in coming. Raiden 2 was released in arcades in 1993, and the Japan-only semi-follow-up Raiden DX appeared on the PS1 in 1997. (In between, the series took a diversion down the "Raiden Fighters" line, a trilogy of games featuring some elements from the two originals but actually more closely resembling Psikyo's "Strikers 1945" titles in terms of gameplay, and which Raiden aficionados rightly don't regard as true parts of the Raiden canon.)

And the first things you notice are that in the intervening eight years, (a) not very much seems to have changed, and (b) one of the things that HAS changed is a huge and catastrophically-wrong butchering of the previous game's most iconic and loved feature.

In the entire historic catalogue of videogaming offensive armament, across all game genres and styles, it's doubtful that there's ever been a more fun, more popular weapon – or one less in need of mucking about with – than Raiden 2's famous "Toothpaste Laser". A wide, snaking whip of pinky-purple plasma, the remorseless, twisting death beam darted its way around the screen seeking out any enemies it could find and locking limpet-like onto them until they succumbed to its lethal energy.

It could handle scores of targets at once, contorting itself into elaborate and beautiful loops and bends and freeing the player to concentrate simply on staying alive, knowing that his attacking force was in safe hands. It delighted bystanders with its spectacular acrobatics, and gave even novices the feeling that they were wreaking heroic havoc on the hideous hordes of whoever it is that you're actually fighting anyway. (Raiden doesn't bother with even the most cursory backstory.)

And now it's gone.

The half-arsed wavy line you see above is the most dramatic extent of Raiden 3's wholly-inadequate replacement for the Toothpaste Laser. Swaying across the screen in much the same way, but crucially lacking the lock-on capability of its predecessor, the new weapon is a waste of space.

Duck over to the left to avoid a squadron of attacking enemies on the right, and where the Toothpaste Laser would have wiped out all the bad guys for you while you dodged their fire, the Crap Green Laser comes with you, diligently concentrating its powerful beam uselessly into the gaping voids of empty space in the direction you're moving, and away from the very thing that's causing you to flee in the first place.

The replacement of the Toothpaste Laser with this abomination that you'll never willingly employ in play is beyond a reasonable doubt one of the most inexplicably stupid design decisions in videogaming history, and it's frankly a miracle that despite this mind-numbing dumbness, Raiden 3 somehow still manages to be utterly brilliant.

The reason for that is probably that, Toothpaste Laser aside, Raiden 3 doesn't mess around with a proven formula. This is absolutely classic-style Raiden, leaving the Raiden Fighters misadventure behind (they're not bad games, they're just not Raiden) and reverting to the core gameplay values that made the series such a hit in the first place. And for newcomers to the franchise, or less alert viewers, it's probably worth explaining what those values are.

Raiden isn't like most modern shmups. There's no "bullet hell" here, no screens full of geometric snowstorms of enemy fire through which you have to pilot a ship with a "hit box" that's actually only one pixel square. Unlike the baddies of Giga Wing or Mars Matrix or Espgaluda, enemies in Raiden games don't just unleash a monstrous barrage of shots and hope vaguely that you blunder into one.

These guys might only fire a couple of bullets, but they fire them right at you, with an assassin's precision and a sniper's economy. And it's that smart, aware opposition that sets Raiden apart from pretty much every other shooting game on the market. Let's expand on how that works, shall we?

Raiden's enemies (like much else about the game) are actually descended from Namco's 1982 classic Xevious. For almost the first time in the history of shoot-'em-ups, Xevious' baddies didn't just follow preset attack patterns – they reacted intelligently to what you did. If you moved menacingly towards a wave of incoming fighters, they'd try to swerve out of your way.

If you failed to kill them all, they wouldn't just cruise past and disappear – the survivors would swoop back round and harass you from behind. Shooting sparingly but relentlessly at your current position so you couldn't stay still for a second, the Xevious forces would herd you into a corner until you had nowhere left to run from the unerring hail of fire.

And so it is here. More often than you'll believe possible, and humiliatingly early in proceedings, your ship will be blown out of the sky in Raiden 3 when there are no more than half-a-dozen enemy bullets on the screen. You'll stare in baffled consternation, unable to accept that you could have fallen victim to such a feeble onslaught from such cannon-fodder opponents. You must have blinked. The d-pad must have momentarily failed. The bullet must have been hidden by an explosion or something.

But it wasn't. Raiden 3's bad guys killed you because they were smarter than you. With unfailing aim, they shot at where you were, and like an idiot you didn't get out of the way. But you won't fall for it next time. Next time you'll be ready, and you'll get them. Oh yeah. You'll show 'em. You'll show 'em good.

You won't, of course. You'll fail, again and again and again, and you'll keep coming back for more punishment, because your failure is always your own fault. The enemy attacks are so sparse, so obviously avoidable (unlike in a bullet-hell game, where you often can't see how you COULD have survived), that clearly all you need to do is concentrate more. How hard can it be?

But the genius of Raiden 3 is that while it looks like you've got the baddies massively outgunned – with your colossally powerful laser, your deadly homing missiles, and the scores and scores of bullets your Vulcan cannon spews out with every press of the fire button – the simple, terrible truth is that the maths is on the enemy's side.

Don't panic, viewers – we're not going to go too far into the science bit. But suffice to say that in a finite manoeuvring space, a strategy of bisecting that space with "lines" (representing the trajectory of an enemy bullet) which are aimed directly at the target is a remarkably efficient one (compared, that is, to even a 50-times-bigger spray of non-aimed fire).

In a typical bullet-hell shmup, you can survive for a long time simply by constantly alternating your movement slightly left and slightly right. Try that in Raiden and – because moving back in the direction you've just come from will almost certainly result in a fatal collision with the bullet that was just fired at that spot – you'll last about five seconds. Not only can you never sit still, then, but you can never go back where you've just been.

Combine that with enemy craft that react to your movements rather than just following a pre-programmed movement course, and a few larger enemies which do fire in preset patterns (to some extent, and nothing like as severe as the ones in bullet-hell shmups), just to mix things up and disturb your rhythm, and you've got a recipe for extreme danger.

This, ultimately, is the heart of what makes the Raiden games different to the bullet-hell shooters – in most of those, the majority of each level is merely a prelude to the showpiece showdown with the boss, populated by easy-meat drones who are only really there to give you points, drop power-ups and provide a comforting respite from the jaw-dropping, screen-filling geometric-death-flower assaults of the bosses.

Raiden 3's bosses, while they get increasingly fearsome as the game progresses, aren't actually much tougher than the levels that precede them – indeed, by focusing all the danger on a single source, in some respects they're a welcome relief from the constant-attack-from-all-sides of the rest of the level. (The guardian of Mission Two, for example, can be despatched in no more than about 15 seconds, and is substantially less terrifying that what you've just had to go through to reach it.)

In Raiden 3, every single enemy is actively, directly, fervently trying to kill you, every one of them poses a genuine threat to your existence, and that means that every single second is a life-or-death battle. It's intense, man.

At this point into the review, having described the core gameplay mechanic that identifies Raiden with its predecessors and separates it from most other shooting games, we probably ought to make some mention of the rest of the structure which that mechanic fits into. (We're old-fashioned like that, right?)

In most respects this is pure old-school Raiden – seven levels, split between land, sea and space, all populated by the same fairly narrow selection of enemy craft, comprising tanks, planes, warships and ground installations. You fly the classic Mark II fighter plane (the bewildering choice of up to 14 radically different types of ship from the Raiden Fighters game is consigned to history) with three basic weapons and three missile attacks (the traditional powerful non-guided missiles and less-powerful homing ones are joined this time by a handy new "Radar" missile that's a sort of halfway house – it homes in a bit, and is between the other two in explosive power) backed up by an all-obliterating smart-bomb.

There are a couple of important changes, though, and like Gradius V (a game Raiden 3's designers clearly took notice of in more ways than one) they're changes in favour of the player. Firstly, this is – at last! – a Raiden game which comes with rapid continuous autofire as standard on all weapons, so there's no more painful perpetual pummelling of the fire button.

Secondly, you no longer start out with a feeble pop-gun firing only a couple of weak bullets – your initial Vulcan cannon is the equivalent of the original Raiden's one powered up about four times, pumping out a quite formidable three-way spread of fire from the word go. And most significantly of all – finally fixing one of the most annoying quirks of the original games – your weapons' power levels are now interchangeable. What?

Previously, if you powered-up your "red" Vulcan and then collected (say) a blue laser icon, your weapon switched to the laser without increasing in power. If you then picked up another red icon, you switched back to the Vulcan at its "stored" power up level – that is, you'd collected two power-up icons and ended up back where you started, without the collection of two power-ups actually increasing your offensive strength at all.

Raiden 3, though, doesn't care what weapons you happen to be using – as far as it's concerned, a power-up is a power-up. So if you've got the Vulcan cannon at Strength 1, then pick up a blue icon, two green ones and a red, you'll now have a Vulcan cannon at Strength 5. Result!

As with Gradius V's allowing you to pick up your Options when you die, this simple change makes a massive impact on the gameplay. Previously, losing a single ship in a Raiden game often meant you were effectively scuppered. Amidst the deadly hail of fire that had taken you down in the first place, it was so difficult a task to retrieve the power-ups left behind in the wreckage – in such a way as to not waste most of their value by collecting different colours and simply swapping weapons without powering them up, that is – that many players would lose all their remaining lives within seconds of losing the first one as they braved the barrage of bullets while waiting for the power-up to cycle to the right colour.

Now, though, you know that by simply grabbing everything as quickly as possible, you'll end up with a fairly beefy weapon no matter what. There's still skill to be employed – in making sure you get the right colour last, and so end up with your weapon of choice – but you've got much more of a fighting chance of recovering your game after your first death than you used to.

(There's one final change which similarly reduces the game's complexities of timing. In earlier games, the "medals" left behind by some destroyed enemies had a complicated points-value equation depending on when you collected them. Here that's gone, replaced by a straightforward score, in addition to the bonus you get for your medals at the end of each level.

Really hardcore players might bemoan this change, but it makes for a much purer game. You lose all your accumulated medals every time you die, so it's still a risk to go for them if you want to maximise your end-of-level bonus. There's a new way for the hardcore to show off anyway, which we'll get to shortly. Thanks for holding. Your call is important to us.)

Raiden 3 borrows from Gradius V in its credits system too. You start off with a measly three credits, with which you'll be doing well to see much into Mission Two. But as you rack up play time, the game slowly awards you extra credits. It's a genius system, which gets round the problem of many shmups being devalued by players being able to continue through to the end on their first go, and hence gives the game meaning.

(With infinite credits, of course, being killed is no more than a minor inconvenience. With a limited supply of credits and therefore lives, every ship you lose hurts you.)

So it's unfortunate that Raiden 3 undermines it with what looks like a clumsy oversight – in order that steelier viewers can avoid temptation, I'll discuss it in a spoiler space (highlight the text to read it, if you must):

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If you play at the lower difficulty levels, including "Practice" where none of the enemies are allowed to shoot at you, you'll still be awarded Free Play for beating the final boss.
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The incrementing-credits system lends Raiden a lot of its addictive appeal, because even when you're playing badly you know you're making "progress", by earning yourself more credits for the next attempt. But at heart this is a high-score game, and it's compelling even once you've fought your way to the end. The most fun way to play is simply to get as far as possible on one credit, but the home port of Raiden 3 also adds a Score Attack mode, in which you can play individual levels (each one unlocked after you've beaten it in the normal game) for max points.

Maximising scores is achieved not via the complicated medal-collection of the previous games, but by using the new score-multiplier feature. The points value of each enemy is determined by how quickly after its appearance you destroy it – blowing something up the instant it appears on the screen is worth double points, with the multiplier decreasing closer to 1.0 the longer the enemy survives.

To help you out, beating levels in the normal games also unlocks demonstration videos of the CPU achieving the maximum score in that level, from which you can learn while watching in dismayed awe. Cutely, though, you can also save replays of your own best attempts at each level, so you can see yourself edge closer to the CPU's model score.

(The final unlockable gameplay feature, while we're here, is a Boss Rush mode, obtained by beating the whole game. It does exactly what it says on the tin – one big tough level, all bosses, no cannon fodder. You can also unlock the usual "Gallery" modes and so on, where you can zoom in on and rotate around the 3D models of all the craft in the game, if that's the sort of thing you enjoy.)

Raiden 3 also finds time in its busy schedule of nailing your guts to the wall to gently mock the gimmicky scoring mechanics of other, less pure, shmups. Games like Psyvariar make much play of the "buzz" feature, where you have to deliberately fly as close as possible to enemy fire in order to boost the power of your own weapons for the best possible score. Brush up against enemy bullets here and you'll notice the same grating, metallic scraping noise. You will, however, score no extra points and obtain no other benefits, and since all the enemies are firing at the same target, you'll probably get yourself killed into the bargain.

"Why would you want to deliberately get near lethal enemy bullets?", Raiden 3 seems to be admonishing the hapless player with irritated contempt. "What are you, stupid or something?"

We should probably wrap the review up now, not least because your reporter's trigger finger is starting to itch again. (And also because I want to have another try at the twisted, evil "Double" mode, in which you play a two-player game by yourself, controlling one ship with each analogue stick and using the shoulder buttons for firing and bombing.

Thankfully, Double mode has a separate high-score table, as do Boss Rush and Score Attack modes, although disappointingly each mode has only one table encompassing all difficulty settings. It does at least indicate which difficulty level was used alongside each score, though.) Blah blah blah the graphics are nice, blah blah blah typical Japanese-rock soundtrack that you'll either like or you won't, but actually you'll barely notice that it's even there. Blah.

Raiden 3 is the WoS Game Of The Year not because it's "retro" (it isn't, unless good game design is now a historical curio), not because it's bigger or prettier or has more polygons or unlockables than anything else, not because it's got an expensive licenced soundtrack and real player names, not because it's a realistic simulation of anything, not because it's full of muscular black guys swearing and stabbing each other, and not because it lets you "pimp" your "ride" with fancy hubcaps, a big bass speaker, go-faster stripes and the vehicular equivalent of embarrassing tattoos.

It's the WoSland Game Of The Year 2005 because it's a videogame that remembers it's a videogame. Lord knows there are precious few of those coming out these days, and we should clutch such ones as there are dearly to our chests, especially when they're this good. It isn't trying to be a movie, it isn't trying to create an online community, it isn't trying to be part of a lifestyle choice, and most importantly of all it doesn't have any fucking orcs in it.

Raiden 3 came out on a budget label, but the cheapest copy we could find on Amazon now was £60, so WoSland is comfortable suggesting that you might want to have a look around for the Japan-only PC version on your favourite ("Legal digital distribution network" – Old Jokes Ed), where you might also find some helpful installation instructions. (The game itself is mostly in English.)

Like 2004's Outrun 2 and Gradius V, Raiden 3 is happy to be a videogame, without feeling the need to masquerade as or piggyback on some other, more "respectable", form of culture. It's not football, it's not music, it's not a film, it's not a Star Trek convention where you can go to meet other pathetic nerds. It's you against the bad guys, with a laser gun and impossible odds – just the way you like it. Be proud of your culture. Enjoy videogames.

Can anyone think of a single really good shmup in the entire history of gaming that's ever been created by an English-speaking developer?

For the avoidance of doubt, I'm talking about shmups in the most traditional sense – horizontal or vertical forced scrollers, none of your arena-based affairs. I mean your classic arcade titles in the mould of Flying Shark and Scramble, that kind of thing.

I've got nothing. Every single great shmup I've been able to think of was made in Japan.  The only thing that even got a bit close was Defender, from all the way back in 1980, but with its free movement that doesn't really fit the genre. It's really an arena shooter, just with restricted firing directions.

All the big-name series, certainly, come from Japan. Gradius/Nemesis/Salamander/Parodius? Japanese. R-Type? Japanese. Raiden? Japanese. Giga Wing, Shikigami, Psyvariar, Darius, 194X, Strikers 1945 – all Japanese. Everything by Cave/Raizing/Eighting, obviously.

And no matter how far back I went, and even if I picked out single games that weren't part of a long line, the story was the same. Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga, from Treasure? As Japanese as it gets. Twin Cobra, from 1987? Japanese (Toaplan). Tiger Heli, 1985? Japanese (Taito). Vanguard, 1981? Japanese (SNK). And so on, seemingly for all eternity.

I've given up for now. I don't know why people whose first language is English – a designation encompassing hundreds of millions of the world's population – would be somehow genetically or culturally unable to craft a successful and popular scrolling shoot-'em-up, especially with three decades of tried-and-tested examples to draw on. But it seems they can't.

The best I could come up with in an afternoon, even with my legendarily encyclopaedic gaming knowledge, was Banshee for the CD32, which isn't all that good. (And turned out to be Danish anyway – see below. Even extending the criteria to the entire Western hemisphere only brought me that and Apidya for the Amiga, both from 20 years ago.) Can you set me right? Anyone?

The first person to say "Xenon 2" gets a lifetime IP ban.