Today’s consoles are cheap. Seriously. Over at Stuff, I remark how the Neo Geo Super Pocket finally gives me the console I could never afford as a kid. The starting point for this column was remembering that my first true gaming love, the C64, cost 400 quid back in the early 1980s. That’s the equivalent of £1400 today. Blimey. Anyway, the new Super Pocket is fab – and at pocket-money prices. Grab one.

Frankie Goes To Hollywood is 40. Not the band, which formed in 1980, but the game. Rocking up just after the band’s peak, Ocean’s title – which gaming legend Julian Rignall reminisced about on Bluesky – could so easily have been a half-arsed piece of junk to satisfy a license. But creator Denton Designs went above and beyond, crafting a unique mix of adventuring, mini-games and strategy that was years ahead of its time, and still in many ways stands up today.

The basic premise finds you exploring nondescript terrace houses, looking for clues to solve puzzles. In an era of text adventures, this foreshadowed Lucasfilm point-and-click games. If you found a tape, you could insert it into a VHS deck and start a mini-game. There were ten in all. Some were topical, such as Reagan and Gorbachev spitting at each other in a surreal take on those old Wild West shooter games. Some were surreal. One was disarmingly beautiful. 

There was so much more too, from a murder mystery to solve to a cat to feed. The extreme to the mundane. All to create a game about a pop band. If nothing else, Frankie Goes To Hollywood – on the 8-bit platforms that had 64k or under to play with – serves as a fantastic reminder of the magic that can happen when dev teams go above and beyond. Watch a video of the C64 version.

Accessibility and Apple: dizziness edition. I’m still concerned about the dev betas and how they’ll be this September. So I wrote about it, outlining Apple’s approach to vestibular accessibility (better than most, but still falling short), and responded to the three types of feedback I usually receive for these posts.

Also, I still hate Liquid Glass. We’re weeks into beta season now, and to me it still looks like a knock-off Android skin. It’s the first Apple OS I vehemently dislike to the degree I don’t want to use it. But on the Android thing, a thought struck me. I have the Android 16 beta on my Pixel, and this is the first time I’ve found I like Android’s visual design a whole lot more than the iPhone’s, but also where I’ve been frustrated about shortcomings in the flexibility and customization of Android compared to iPhone. Notably (and I know Android folks may disagree), I much prefer iOS widgets. And Control Centre is still far ahead of Quick Settings. I’m not saying the two operating systems have ‘switched places’; but it is interesting that Apple is no longer the obvious leader in terms of design, and Android isn’t always out front regarding flexibility.

Want to write on an iPhone? Probably not. But it’s a device millions of people always have on them. So when inspiration does strike, use the tips in my updated writing toolkit.

Social media is a mess. So here are some of my favourite iPhone apps to help you consolidate social media and your wider reading.

Why is Mail still in the Dark Ages? This column looks at the current Apple operating system betas, does a happy dance in the direction of Phone and Messages triaging spam, and then asks why Mail is so pitiful at doing the same.

Dark Nebula joins my iPhone classics series. I always loved this game, which is like if Bounder and Marble Madness had a baby. I’d love to see an updated version of it and the sequel on Apple Arcade. HINT HINT ETC.