Oh dear.

No, seriously. Oh dear.

Sony’s decided to fight back against iOS gaming (having lost a huge chunk of handheld marketshare to Apple), and it’s doing so by spraying bullshit at you from your television.

The above two links both lead to the appalling advert Sony’s running. If you don’t care to watch it (and I won’t blame you if that’s the case, since it might make you want to punch things—such as whoever came up with the idea and whoever signed it off, along with your screen, JUST TO STOP THE PAIN), here’s what happens:

Moron on a bike says “Dear PSP, check out this sweet game I got”, holding up a device that doesn’t at all look like an iPhone and yet has graphics worse than any iOS game I’ve ever seen. (And, believe me, I’ve written enough ‘best 10 free iPhone game’ articles now to have seen dozens of very bad iPhone games.) SCREEN PUNCH #1!

Hip kid on a bus (you can tell he’s hip, because he wears his hat in a manner that makes it look like it’s sliding off his head—COOL!) says “That ain’t built for big-boy games”, “That’s built for texting your grandma and calling your girl”. SCREEN PUNCH #2!

It’s pretty clear at this point that hip kid, who is, apparently ‘Marcus Rivers, Deputy of Great Game Deals’, is clearly a colossal idiot. If you have an iPhone, chances are you like convergence. You like being able to ‘text your grandma’ and ‘call your girl’; but you also like the fact it does a whole bunch of stuff other than just playing games, although it does that rather well, too, and there are tens of thousands to choose from.

The thing is, I seem to remember a certain other device was once heralded as the King of Convergence. I’m pretty sure it was by Sony and called the PS… something.

Anyway, on with the ad!

Hip kid shoves a PSP into the camera, and yells that for only $9.99, you could be playing THIS! and THIS! and THIS! At this point, I nearly set fire to all my iOS devices before realising that for more than even the most expensive high-end iOS games, hip kid was telling me I could instead buy aged, budget PSP titles! Hurrah! (Incidentally, THIS!, THIS! and THIS! turn out to be GENERIC-O-RACER, RUBBISH-O-QUIZ GAME and CARTOON GOLF GAME. Man, if only the App Store was full of racing games, quiz games and the likes of Let’s Golf!) SCREEN PUNCH #3!

Moron on a bike now gets confused and excited, and hip kid makes everyone’s built-in ‘black person stereotype detection device’ explode in a mixture of overload, fury and SCREEN PUNCH #4! Presumably, Sony’s marketing is aiming to snare dim people who’ve teleported in from the early 1980s.

“Step your game up,” concludes the advert (rather obnoxiously trademarking the phrase). It’s advice Sony should itself take to heart, rather than spewing garbage about the competition. Amusingly, the final logo is Sony’s own, with ‘make believe’ under it. It may as well say ‘away with the fairies’ or ‘WE HAVE TOTALLY LOST IT! PLEASE SEND HELP RIGHT AWAY! NYYYAAAHHHH!’

CrunchGear reports on the Axon Logic Hackintosh tablet, with the headline ‘Axon Logic Hackintosh Tablet May Just Out-iPad The iPad’. So, how’s this device planning on doing this? Well, it’s been “designed from the ground up to be compatible with any Darwin OS”, which means it’ll support (unofficially, natch) Mac OS X.

So, CrunchGear says this will beat the iPad by using Mac OS X, an operating system not designed for touch. Furthermore, the touchscreen is resistive, so wave bye to multitouch. Wow, that really sounds like it’ll out-iPad the iPad to me!

Quick tip to everyone in the journo game: the way to out-iPad the iPad is to make something better and more usable than the iPad, so stop reporting otherwise. Don’t just get all excited by a spec list, because the vast majority of users don’t care. Get excited by a system that is more intuitive, and that is better designed for touch. By all means advocate something more powerful for advanced tasks, or with USB ports, or with a card reader welded to it. But ensure the device is better from a usability and user-experience standpoint; don’t just prattle on about a desktop operating system glued to something vaguely resembling an iPad and call it an ‘iPad killer’.

I’m a retrogamer at heart. Although I do now and again enjoy modern games, most of those that bite are old-fashioned in many ways. This is probably why I’m such a big fan of iOS as a gaming platform—it’s like the 1980s all over again (low prices, tons of novelty in games, individuals putting out what they want to rather than what focus groups ask for).

However, it’s interesting to see that ticking all the boxes isn’t always enough. A case in point is Earth Defender, a 59p game I downloaded for almost certain inclusion in an article I’m currently writing about cheapo iPod games. The grabs on the game’s App Store page looked great—screens full of swooping neon ships. The gameplay looked like it mashed together Missile Command and Galaxian. What could go wrong?

Plenty, as it turns out. Earth Defender isn’t bad, but it’s also not great. The levels are too long and become a little tedious. And the game’s far too easy—I would have completed it on my first go had the game not erased my supposedly saved game. As it was, I completed it the first time I seriously tried to.

The irony is that Earth Defender therefore, despite being a retro title at heart, ends up being more like modern titles I dislike: dull and repetitive but inoffensive gameplay, with a layer of gloss overlaid.

For daily iPhone/iPad/iPod touch app and game reviews, follow @iphonetiny on Twitter, or bookmark iphonetiny.com.

I read ZDNet’s article on RearType a couple of days ago, but it’s remained in my mind, right next to a 500-metre-tall neon sign that says, in all-caps, WHAT THE HELL WERE THEY THINKING?

I’m all for innovation, and I fully understand that some people hate software-based keyboards on tablets, but Microsoft Research’s answer is to split the keyboard and put it on the back of the device. Never mind that this will require a ton more retraining and muscle memory shifts than using a virtual keyboard; never mind the fact that it will cause RSI sufferers to scream and non-RSI sufferers to become RSI sufferers and then scream; never mind that this makes the device itself unwieldy, ugly, and also forces it to be used in a specific orientation (unlike, say, the iPad, which doesn’t care which way up it is).

I was half expecting the white paper to be dated April 1, and the introductory text to be “fooled you, idiot-face”, but, no, it’s dated September 2010, which is presumably the same date every single person involved in the project took leave of their senses.

On Every time someone buys a Mac, Steve Jobs drowns a kitten, ‘blair’ commented: “It is amusing that they refer to it as PC vs Mac, rather than Windows vs Mac, as if they own the PC world. I own a PC, but it runs Linux, not rubbish Windows.”

This nicely highlights one of the problems Microsoft has when trying to fight Apple. Apple owns everything, so it can advertise a complete solution. Because Microsoft is peddling software, it can’t. That’s presumably the main reason why Apple’s website has loads of pictures of shiny computers running its software, and Microsoft’s equivalent has a strange woman who looks like she wants to leap out of the screen and bite off your nose.

That said, it’s curious that Microsoft offers this many screen grabs of Windows 7 on its anti-Mac page: none at all. Words are all very well, but showing why you think your stuff is best makes more sense, unless, of course, your arguments stop holding up when you try to do so.