Soon to be gathering dust

Namco hates you. That’s the only conclusion I can reasonably draw from the company’s decision to release Namco Museum DS in its current form. Although not quite as stingy as previous Namco collections for Nintendo hand-helds, you still only get eight games for your dosh, and one of those is The Tower of Druaga. Plus, most of the rest are the usual suspects that get churned out time and time again, including Pac-Man, Xevious and Galaga. Considering the recent Namco Museum: 50th Anniversary Arcade Collection featured well over a dozen titles, DS owners would be right in feeling short-changed.

As is typical of Namco compilations, the ports are pretty good, and the interface is one of the best I’ve seen on a DS-based compilation. The game screen can be rotated, to avoid squish-o-vision, and geeks can muck about with dip switches ad-nauseum. There’s also a surreal and unsettling ‘music box’, where characters from the featured titles dance like maniacs to tunes and sound effects from the compilation’s games.

This collection’s saving grace is undoubtedly Pac-Man VS., a four-player wireless effort that is roughly the videogame equivalent of tag crossed with Pac-Man. Three players become the ghosts, while the fourth controls Pac-Man. If a ghost is successful in grabbing the jaundiced pill-popper, the relevant player assumes that role, and the first person to amass a points target is crowned king of retroville.

Sadly, though, it’s not enough. Namco has a massive back catalogue to draw from, and against the 15-game feast that is Konami Arcade Classics, Namco’s effort feels comparatively pale and shallow, despite the polish and multiplayer Pac-Man shenanigans.

Namco Museum is available now for Nintendo DS for the princely sum of 25 quid. Wait a few months and it’ll inevitably end up in the bargain bins, whereupon it’ll actually be worth the money.

Another one from the archives, and perhaps my favourite: Why the new iMac sucks. This was published on the original version of Revert to Saved, way back in February 2002 (the ‘iMac’ in the article refers to the desk-lamp model), and met with an interesting response, almost taking down my web-hosting account, due to the number of hits it got.

The context of the piece was that, at the time, anything Apple did got slammed by lazy journalists, so I thought it would be fun to satirise this. Unfortunately, a rather large group of Mac users didn’t really understand the concept of satire.

While I’m well aware that Mac users can be sensitive, even I wasn’t expecting the deluge of email I got, including the prize gem “you are a biased computer nerd who cannot accept that most people don’t give a s—— about all the lame insider c—— that you talked about when you reviewed the imac [sic]” and helpfully finishing off with the wonderfully friendly line “you are an idiot and it makes me laugh”.

So, here’s the original article in all its glory—see if you can spot other things I got flamed for. This time, of course, no-one has any excuse for missing that this is satire, although I’ll bet I get at least one angry message from a militant Mac user who reads half the title and furiously fires off an email to me via their new USB-port-challenged MacBook Air.

A totally informed and unbiased account from our leading technical expert, Phil Clive Lover. ©ZealotDumbassNet.com

I watched the MacExpo webcast (and even bore the sickening player that is QuickTime—why Apple can’t use the excellent Windows Media Player like the rest of us is beyond me). I saw Steve Jobs strut around the stage like an over-excited chicken in his ‘oh so cool’ black sweater that made me want to vomit—twice. But then I cheered up, because he announced the ‘new iMac’ and I saw that Apple—so long a thorn in the side of proper PC users everywhere—is finally doomed.

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Or: When a business’s driver awakes after being asleep at the wheel

It must be pretty harsh when you find out that you’re totally irrelevant, not least when this is down to being superseded by something about a billion times better. I guess that’s how it feels to be Friends Reunited, who last night sent me some exciting news—their words, not mine.

Now, spam usually puts me in a bad mood, so “this news had better be truly exciting,” I thought. Otherwise, I’d have to say something sarcastic about it on my blog, obviously. So, what was this news, which was, as you’ll recall, exciting? It was this: Friends Reunited is now free (and, apparently, “much more sociable”, although I don’t recall the organisation being particularly aloof before).

Now, if I were a big ol’ dumb-head, I’d be thinking that Friends Reunited was being wonderful, and enabling people to get in touch for free, rekindling old friendships (and, presumably, reigniting old feuds). The thing is, I, like pretty much everyone else I know, abandoned Friends Reunited long ago, leaping over to Facebook, which just happens to have been free from the start and, wisely, has stayed that way.

It’s sad to see a supposedly older, wiser company in the field somehow miss the boat so spectacularly, and Friends Reunited’s latest attempt to not only stop the ship from sinking, but also prevent it from bursting into flames on the way down, smacks of desperation. It’s like when Netscape finally twigged about two years too late that, in the face of massive competition from Internet Explorer, it might be a good idea to stop charging for Navigator, what with a superior and free equivalent being available.

Still, it’s good to see that the money made during Friends Reunited’s time as a paid-for site hasn’t gone to waste. The new Friends Reunited tour is narrated by Martin Clunes. This alone should, clearly, be enough to make the entire world ditch Facebook immediately.

Back in the dim and distant past, there was a publication called Practical Web Design. (Some might argue that there still is, but PWD is now a rebadged .net, for reasons far too long, boring and complicated to go into.) I regularly contributed to the magazine, which was, as its moniker suggests, heavily practical and all about web design. To finish each issue on a lighter note, I penned a humorous , ‘ranty’ and inconsistently capitalised column called ‘Web design matters’.

Despite these columns now being about three years old, many of them remain scarily relevant, and so because most people out there will have never seen them, and because my brain’s melted in the heat, thereby stopping me from writing something new today (bar this introduction, obv.), here’s a first dip into the archives, from issue 22 of Practical Web Design, which was unleashed on the world in October 2005. Judging by how many websites now inundate users with stupid noises, it appears that this particular column was digested and thoroughly ignored by many hundreds of awkward and contrary web designers the world over.

(Note: if any publisher wants to resurrect ‘Web design matters’ for their publication, drop me a line.)

As the old saying goes, ‘noise annoys’, but, as Craig Grannell discovers, that’s just how advertisers on the internet want it

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Or: The Penultimate Penultimate Ninja

Games these days often fall foul of the ‘gloss’ criticism—they’re very pretty, but peel away this superficial layer and they play about as well as a CD that’s been attacked by a knife-wielding maniac. But this isn’t new—in fact, even the odd 8-bit title suffered from this problem, and The Last Ninja is a case in point.

I remember the first time I played the isometric ninja ‘epic’, spurred on by reviewers falling over themselves to fawn over System 3 and heap awards and praise on the game itself. First impressions were good: the music was lovely, and the graphics were quite nice. However, as soon as I started playing, that creeping feeling set in, and I soon realised there was a slight problem: the game was rubbish. The environment was limited and the fights were borderline canned and extremely dull. Too many sections in the game demanded pixel-perfect jumps of the type Jet Set Willy had been slammed for a couple of years previously.

Two decades later and The Last Ninja has landed on Virtual Console with a splat, offering newcomers the chance to guide Armakuni (that’s the ninja) through a half-dozen or so tedious isometric levels, on his way to defeat the evil shogun, a process made even more hateful by the fact that the game’s even more fiddly to control on the Wii. The graphics aren’t that pretty these days either, but at least the music’s still good.

So: two stars for the excellent soundtrack, and minus fifty billion for the crappy controls and rubbish gameplay. Unfortunately, Revert to Saved’s rating system only goes down to 1/5, so that’ll have to do.

The Last Ninja is available now on Virtual Console for 500 Wii points (£3.50ish). Alternatively, hurl three pound coins and a 50-pence piece at a violent drunk and have him beat you up—you’ll have a much more satisfying experience.