On the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, around 800 miles from the North Pole - where Father Christmas lives FFS!!!!!! - is a vault, extending deep into a sandstone mountain, encased in a layer of permafrost. Inside that vault is a Noah's Ark of seeds - a failsafe in the event of a global crisis that might threaten the world's genetic diversity, and the very survival of the human race. 

Millions of seeds, from every country in the world, are stored at a temperature of -18 degrees centigrade, representing 13,000 years of agricultural history. Primarily funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and various governments, the seed vault has already been used to replenish genebanks that have been devastated by war and catastrophe. 

Svalbard - specifically the town of Longyearbyen, where the seed bank is located - was chosen due to the area's lack of tectonic activity, and its permafrost. Were the vault's refrigeration units to fail, the area's low annual temperature would keep the seeds below freezing for at least 200 years, with some grains potentially viable for thousands of years. 

Except... the vault is now under threat, courtesy of global warming.

In 2016, it experienced an unusual amount of water leaking inside, due to higher than average temperatures, and today the story has broken that Longyearbyen - the northern-most town in the world - is warming faster than any other settlement on earth; 3.7-degrees centigrade since it was founded in 1900, roughly three times the global average. 

Ironically, one of the threats the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was designed to protect the seeds from is climate change.

"What does any of this have to do with video games?", I hear you sob. 

This: if gaming, as many of us are predicting, is skulking towards more of an on-demand, cloud-based, future... then we're going to need our own global games vault.

Preferably one with an entrance as cool as the one at Svalbard and with, like, holograms and shit. 

Frankly, I miss the cover artwork on old games. They might not have been as slick as their slick, modern, digital counterparts, but at least they had character, and a certain homespun charm.

Well, to a point... as this gallery should attest. 

You should be familiar with the drill by now: a load of old games covers, and a load of unnecessary sarcasm. It's not rocket science.

In its short life, Cinemaware released some of the best looking Amiga games of all time, including Defender of the Crown, Wings, and It Came From The Desert. But just what happened to this legendary games studio? Digitiser reveals the full story...

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Another week, and another technology giant has announced its plans to construct an enormous, impossible-to-avoid, pipeline, that's going to pump raw gaming slurry direct into our unwitting, slack-jawed faces.

This time it's Apple - a behemoth of unprecedented girth - whose traditional hardware-based origins are showing the first indications of decrepitude.

Thus, it is taking a sideways step away from hardware, and backing original, exclusive, content, announcing Apple TV+ (a content repackaging thing driven by human curators and algorithms, that's more Amazon Prime than Netflix), Apple News+ (doesn't matter what it is; everyone was too distracted by the man in the Clockwork Orange jumpsuit), and Apple Arcade (an ad-free, subscription service, that'll boast 100 exclusive games at launch). 

Apple has been rumoured to be launching all of these things for a while, but the timing of Apple Arcade - a week after the unnecessarily controversial reveal of Google's Stadia - makes it significant.

Unlike Stadia, Apple's service will require you to download the games, and both are launching this autumn, albeit aimed seemingly at very different audiences. 

Hey, remember last week when I wrote an article about feeling a bit dissilusioned with written Digi, and bemoaning that this site has never grown in the four-and-a-bit years it's been in existence, and loads of people gave me really annoying unsolicited advice about what I was doing wrong, like they knew the inside of my head better than I do, while failing to understand that the issue was to do with my thinking rather than an issue requiring a practical solution, or something?

Yeah, well, as you'll have seen, the writing of that piece did its job in terms of releasing the big brown blockage I'd been clenching onto, as you've had a ton of written content since then, and I'm feeling much more cheery about everything.

Not least because I looked at the stats of the site again, and realised I'd been looking in the wrong place. Surprise: they're actually pretty healthy...!

Oh noooo!!!

So, all is well. The YouTube channel grows steadily (nudging ever closer to 13,000 subscribers), new Patrons continue to fund what we're trying to do, for which I thank them with all five of my loins, and we slide ever closer towards doing a follow-up to Digitiser The Show.

Yes: a follow-up. We're no longer thinking of this as Series 2, but something slightly, but significantly, different. Current working title is Digitiser Retro Legends.

What does this mean? I'll let you know once I've sorted out the bloody rewards for series 1.

Now? Letterssssssss...

​If you'd like to appear here, or you've something you'd like me to give some attention to in our occasional Plug Zone, or you've got a picture of a bin you wish to share, please send your filthy emails to this place here: digitiser2000@gmail.com​

Because there's nothing like doubling down on a conviction in the face of idiotic opposition... here we go again, kids!

Yesterday, I got a lot of angry people telling me how wrong I was about Google's Stadia. Some were quite frightfully rude, and - tellingly - most of the ones who were arsey with me on Twitter didn't even follow me on there. 

The thing is... it's water off a duck's back. I've been here before. You're not going to convince me otherwise of this, however aggressively you disagree with me, because the coming advent of cloud-based gaming, and the death of traditional consoles, isn't something I think is going to happen. It's something I know is already happening.

I started writing about games just as home computing was being superseded by 16-bit consoles. When Digitiser launched, we chose not to cover the Amiga because... well... what was the point? It was clearly going to be dead within a year or two. As legend records, Amiga owners were furious. They tried to get us fired, they started petitions... they flooded us with calls and letters.

None of it made a blind bit of difference to the Amiga market's inevitable and hilarious demise a year or so later.

I don't want to say I told you so... but I told you so. On the 10th of January this year, in fact.

I'm the most awesome guy ever!!!!!!

To be honest, it's not even that undeniable fact about me being awesome, but more that I've generally had - across 26 years of writing about games - a pretty good sense of things. My tastes in gaming lean towards the more mainstream end of things, see. I've learned that if I like or dislike the idea of something... the majority tend to be feeling the same. I'm fundamentally quite lazy in terms of how I consume my entertainment, and I suspect most people are the same. 

Inevitably, when I predicted the imminent mainstream arrival of cloud-based gaming, I was told I was wrong, that the world isn't ready, that consoles were going to be around forever, and... blah blah.

Well, Google appears to disagree with you.

Its new Stadia platform - which you surely don't need me to recap here, but it's a cloud-based gaming system that will work on essentially any screen, and the only hardware Google will sell is a joypad - was announced yesterday at a Game Designers Conference Keynote.

The timing of this is really quite pertinent, because I had an update earlier this week about the new Atari VCS console - which I backed mostly because I thought it'd be funny - and as I was reading how it has been delayed because they're making the hardware EVEN BETTER... I couldn't escape the sense that what they're trying to achieve is ultimately futile.

I don't think anybody is expecting this VCS thing to be able to compete with Sony and Microsoft, but the succession of bigger and better hardware feels old fashioned now. With the leap between the previous generation of consoles and the current one being virtually imperceptible to most people, it feels like that part of gaming history belongs in the past. 

Biffo and Larry Bundy Jr take a look at the Treamcast - a rare portable Sega Dreamcast, and attempt a little play on Crazy Taxi!

Suffice to say, video games don't have the greatest reputation for successfully making the jump to live action. From the travesty that was the Super Mario Bros. movie, to the early impressions of the forthcoming Sonic The Hedgehog films, you'd think they'd have given up by now.

Indeed, wisdom would suggest that video games would have greater success with animation, but the legacy - as suggested by these 10 American cartoon series - proves otherwise...

So, I was playing Far Cry New Dawn, and a non-player character died. This was a significant death. It marked the end of one chapter of the story. There was a funeral. Other characters were all sad and that. 

And I didn't have a clue who the dead guy was.

More pertinently, I didn't care. In fact, I just got annoyed that they were telling me that this was a major turning point in the game, rather than giving me what I needed to feel it. 

Contrast this with Red Dead Redemption 2. In that, when a certain character died, I felt genuine sadness. Likewise that bit in The Last of Us, when Joel (spoilers) gets impaled on a bit of rebar. In both those cases I didn't want anything bad to happen to those characters. It was a shock, and I was shocked that I was shocked, because I'm so used to not caring what happens to video game characters.  

In New Dawn, the dead character's deadness was preceded by him being tortured. Clearly, the creators of the game felt this would heighten the tragedy when he was then shot in the face. Indeed, my character was so enraged by this, that he turned into a sort of Incredible Hulk, and started punching the dead characters' murderers. All out of my control, of course. 

But... I didn't know who he was, I didn't know a thing about him, I didn't understand why it was being treated as a major turning point in the story. I felt nothing, other than a bit of confusion, and impatience, because I wanted to get back to the gameplay.

And I'll tell you why this is: cut-scenes. All of Far Cry New Dawn's storytelling is done via cutscenes, and the examples above, both good and bad, have finally gotten to the core of why I've disliked cutscenes ever since they started becoming a thing.

In a break from our usual programming, Biffo, Gannon, Octav1us and Larry Bundy Jr ask themselves the question: why do they do YouTube? The honesty of their answers may surprise you...

The Man's Daddy returns with more of his hilarious comedy jokes, and even shares some of his summer holiday slides!

Something Sony is often credited for is helping gaming grow up. When it launched the PlayStation, it set itself apart from Sega and Nintendo, with advertising that was grittierr, darker, and more obscure. 

As the PlayStation family grew, so did the self-conscious edginess of its advertising. Nowhere was this more true than Europe, where PlayStation ads would go out of their way to court controversy - bringing its own reward by sparking moral indignation and public outrage. 

Here's a gallery featuring some of Sony Europe's most baffling attempts to shock.