Before I smash my Mac over your head

1. Automatically resizing my browser window

I realise you’re proud of your creation and restricting it to the absolute boundaries of my monitor is, frankly, an insult to your amazing talents. Clearly, if all was well with the world, your website would somehow be the latest man-made object to be visible from space.

But here’s the thing: when you resize my browser window, which, I hasten to add, I’ve sized exactly how I want it, it makes me want to claw your eyes out with a rusty spoon. It’s probably something you haven’t considered, but I’m actually quite capable of dragging a window-resize widget.

2. Background music

Look, I know that you’re ‘down with da kidz’, and keep abreast of every trend, niche and passing fad in the music industry, and I fully understand that your tastes are impeccable. But when I visit your website and you force me to listen to an infinitely repeating five-second loop of compressed, painfully in-vogue dance music, it makes me want to come round to your house at three in the morning and play Captain Beefheart through your letterbox. And when you don’t provide any option for turning said music off, you instantly confirm yourself as the person who’ll be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.

3. Making Flash equivalents to HTML

It might have escaped your notice, but HTML actually works rather well. You might think that making something in Flash when it could just as easily have been made in HTML ensures you retain your ‘web designer of the future’ crown, but it really doesn’t. It just makes you look like an idiot, and compels users to want to kill you when instead of getting their usual and extremely useful context menu upon right-clicking, they get Flash Player’s one instead.

4. Rebuilding pages on every load

Yes, your animation skills are unparalleled and make the combined forces of Pixar, Aardman and DreamWorks green with envy. And I know that you’re extremely proud of your logo spanging around the screen and your navigation items arriving one by one, like the cool kids showing up half an hour late at a party. The thing is, while I don’t mind seeing this once (well, actually I do mind, but it doesn’t make me want to hurt you), seeing it every single time I access a new page on your website makes me want to take a cheese grater to your gums.

5. Long loading times

This will be perhaps the biggest eye-opener of them all to you, but the reason I’m paying out for broadband, and the reason I consider broadband to be such an exciting technology, is because it makes things faster. When I used to have a Commodore 64, I hated it when things took ages to load. When I had a dial-up modem, I hated it when things took ages to download. Newsflash: I still hate it when things take ages to download.

When you think the web is ‘a bit like television’, or that I think your work is so great I’m willing to wait five minutes just to get a glimpse of it, or assume I have a web connection so fast that it would make government agencies weep and average routers melt under the sheer strain, it’s pretty clear reality has left your little world, and that you should just give up and spend the rest of your life in a dark corner working yourself into a sexual frenzy about just how big you can make multimedia files for web interfaces these days. But just leave me the hell alone while you’re doing it.

• New Red Dwarf rumours were true: a making-of, a two-part special, and a ‘clip show with a serious difference’ – http://tinyurl.com/3zrpcs #
• Authors who release complex apps with no documentation whatsoever need a slap. Clips guys, I’m looking at you. http://tinyurl.com/4s9xog #
• My latest for Cult of Mac: I’m a PC – and I’m desperate for people to like me (on the new Microsoft ads): http://tinyurl.com/4bx96j #

Alternatively: just stop. Right now

Sometimes, you just can’t go back. Games built solely around engrossing gameplay (Pac-Man) or a core of fantastic gameplay but with added fantastic visual effects (Defender) still engage today. But for some genres, notably racing, it’s all about thrills driven by visual excitement. And if there’s one thing lacking in early 1980s C64 racers, it’s visual excitement. And thrills. (OK, two things.)

Back in the day, Pitstop II wowed. Its split-screen enabled two players to battle it out head-to-head (well, tyre-to-tyre), or for Billy no-mates to take on computer opponents. As the name suggests, Epyx were rather excited about the pitstop component, which enabled you to refuel and change worn tyres.

On playing the game now, it’s almost impossible to see it as anything other than a relic. The graphics are dull, the sound mind-numbingly tedious, and the gameplay shockingly boring. The pitstop, supposedly a high-point, is absurd in its sluggishness and just gets in the way. When it boils down to it, Pitstop II is merely a split-screen Pole Position, with an unwanted extra ‘scene’. The thing is, Pole Position is actually more fun.

Pitstop II is available now on Virtual Console for 500 Wii points (£3.50ish). You’ll also need some rose-tinted glasses, however, and those cost extra.

This is the news! Rising fuel costs slash pit team personnel!

• I hated how Mostly Harmless ended, but a non-Douglas Adams Hitchhiker’s book (even by Eoin Colfer)? No thanks. http://tinyurl.com/64h5xh #
• Album View in iTunes 8 has some odd flaws (no random album play, as far as I can see), but it’s really got me playing albums again. Nice. #

We’ve got an emergency here

Chase HQ is like injecting the 1980s into your eyeballs. Take one very 1980s sports car (a black Porsche), a duo of American cops (one black, one white, just like in Miami Vice), sprinkle on a dash of OutRun, and bake for 40 minutes. Er, and then inject, obv., otherwise the opening line doesn’t work.

The game is great and a still somewhat rare concept: drive fast, catch your adversary and then ram their car into submission. It makes you want to wear a pastel suit, hum Crockett’s Theme and Bruce Springsteen, and grow a mullet. OK, maybe not, but it is a lot of fun, even in these days of from-every-angle pile-ups in Burnout 947.

Unfortunately, Chase HQ on Virtual Console starkly illustrates one of the platform’s major shortcomings compared to XBLA: instead of using the still rather nifty arcade original, you’re lumbered with the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 conversion. To continue our needle theme, this version is rather like injecting battery acid into your eyeballs.

The graphics are dreadful, flickery and lack animation. The controls are all over the shop. And the gameplay is less fun than kissing a rabid weasel. Even the dire NES and Master System versions would have been a step up from this, and the CPC and Spectrum releases were (and still are) miles ahead of this shambles. Avoid.

Chase HQ is available now on Virtual Console for 500 Wii points (£3.50ish), if you fancy wasting your money.

‘Criminals here,’ it says by the arrow, but the real criminals are the ones charging for this garbage. Oh yes.