I don't know how to feel about this. Other than it feeling like the second slap in the face I got this week.

"You have helped us to understand local crime and police the area more effectively".

Er... really? Oh good! Lovey! Glad to have been of service, guys! Hurrah!

Presumably, because I took it upon myself to get pounded in the head so selflessly, they now know that the CCTV camera right where it happened wasn't working, so it can be fixed. And I'm sure they'll check there are DNA swabs in their kit next time, like there were supposed to be.

And now maybe they'll set up patrols along one of the two major roads into town, in the middle of the day, on the off-chance that some random mental might have a pop at some other poor bugger while they're sat in their car with their family. 

Perhaps I could help in some other way? Maybe I could stand on some street corners wearing a sandwich board reading "Please mug me", or wander through one of the rougher parts of town blowing a vuvuzela at 4am.

Since I got attacked on Tuesday I've been pretty sanguine about what happened. The police, the NHS, were great on the day. I felt looked after and protected. It felt like they were going to do something, that they'd pull out all the stops. One of the police even described my attack as "vile", which I loved.

Plus, I've been blessed by the messages I've received. You've all been very sweet - far beyond what I feel I deserve. I don't think I've got any last emotional damage - I'm not scared to leave the house, or anything. I don't have PTSD, and I'm not wallowing in pity, and I've slept well.

Alright, I'm frustrated that I still can't see properly out of my right eye, and that I look as if someone has pranked me with a joke telescope. Frankly, I know full well that it could've been far worse.

Of course I was talking about Pokemon Go when it happened. The entire world revolves around that ruddy game now.

​We were heading into town - myself in the driving seat, my better half next to me, two of my step-daughters, and my middle daughter in the back - to grab some lunch. The windows were down, because the aircon had packed up in my ageing Vauxhall Zafira, following its MOT in April. 

My daughter had just noticed that the local comic shop had a PokéStop attached to it. We were stationary in traffic, waiting for the lights to change - the same lights I'd sat at thousands of times.

I was talking about how I felt guilty that I hadn't been in the shop for over five years, after I started buying my comics online, and how she could forget it if she thought I was going in there to look for Squirtles...

And that's when some guy decided to launch himself through the window at me.

Hi all. Just a quick apology to anyone who was hoping to see me at Retro Revival Solstice on Saturday.

Unfortunately, I was quite seriously attacked out of the blue today by some random nut in the street, and ended up in hospital. I've currently got no vision in my right eye, and I'm basically bed-bound for the next few days at least. 

Consequently, I'm not going to be able to make it to Walsall at the weekend. There's still going to be a great line-up of guests, and if you're interested in tickets you can still buy them here.

If you bought tickets purely because I was going to be there, drop us a line at digitiser2000@gmail.com with a photo/scan of your tickets, and we'll try and sort you out with freebies for the Digifest in October.

Again, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but these were pretty extreme circumstances, which couldn't have been predicted. And no - before you ask - it wasn't Dino Dini what done it.

​BIFFO.

So, I went to see that new Ghostbusters film. You know: the one that brought a ton of racist abuse down on one of its stars, in what might've been the most unusual movie marketing campaign since Jennifer Lawrence starved to death in a toilet to promote The Hunger Games. 

It was alright. I mean, y'know, it's basically fine. I even laughed a couple of times. Everyone I went with enjoyed it too. Really, that's all you can ask for from a film.

It's not a patch on the original classic, of course - I had no real sense of who the characters actually were beyond a handful of personality quirks, and it didn't feel real or grounded in the way the first one did. Its faults, misogynists - you bunch of inexplicable weirdos - had nothing to do with the main characters being women. 

I appear to have made a terrible miscalculation.

​You see, there's a new Sonic The Hedgehog game in the works. You might've seen the trailer for it - Sonic Mania, they're calling it, rather insensitively; Sonic Mania is a genuine psychological condition suffered by trumpeters, whereupon they repeatedly fill up their bell (that's the end of a trumpet) with pecans, and blow them into their bandleader's face.

Still, Sonic Mania is defiantly retro, 2D with a 16-bit aesthetic; it even features the classic look for Sonic. He's round and dumpy, and there isn't a try-hard wrist/ankle bandage or bandana in sight. It's clear that Sega has listened, and will be delivering exactly what every Sonic fan has been asking for.

Which is this: an old-school, side-on, Sonic the Hedgehog game, that looks as if it could've been released for the Mega Drive. It appears to be everything, in fact, that I've demanded whenever I've written about Sonic and Sega's woeful mismanagement of the character.

Unfortunately, I watched the trailer and I just felt a bit sad, and disappointed... and then I felt a bit guilty. Because they appear to have finally done exactly what I thought I wanted from a Sonic the Hedgehog game... and actually... it's probably not what I want at all. What I want is something that I'm never going to get, no matter what Sega does.

I know, right? It's like a three year old who complains she's hungry, and then when you make her a sandwich she doesn't eat it, because "it tastes funny".

You don't need me to recap the past few weeks of Pokemon Go news. Let's face it, everyone's writing about it, because it's good for the clicksies. Even so, that cynical barb aside, it is a massive story - Pokemon Go is singlehandedly reversing Nintendo's fortunes, and, I suspect, pointing the way forward for gaming.

Now get this: the thing you have to know about me is that I'm always right. It's terrifying how right I am. Literally; I lay awake at night screaming in fear.

I've never been wrong about anything, and Pokemon Go might be the thing that I have been the most right about. And I was right about it in the face of all the so-called experts and games journos backing another horse altogether. 

Specifically, a bad, blind horse, whose minge had been bunged up with a kettle. Nobody wants to ride a horse like that, but nooooo... they were all "Oh, this horse is the future of horsing around!", while the rest of us were standing there all like "Er... what? Have you seen what's up its minge?"

​"Cup of hot water (or whatever this is), anyone?"

It's so hot. So very hot. It's so hot that your clothes have melted right off your bodies, and your cat has melted, and dribbled down the drain, and your hair has melted.

But wait... that sound... could it be? It is! It is the sound of ten ice cream vans simultaneously playing a tinkling rendition of Greensleeves, as they pour into your cul-de-sac. The question is... which mobile ice cream vendor will you accept an ice cream from? Hurry now - they won't last long in this heat!

Sadly, most contemporary video game cover art strives to be as bland and unmemorable as possible. Consequently, bad box art seems like a thing of the past. 

Fortunately, the past still exists in our minds and online. Here we trawl both to bring you another selection of terrible vintage box art.

Kids love staring at glowing rectangles don't they? And so do adults, since we're little more than tall children, who have been battered and numbed into a loose semblance of conformity by the sledgehammer of society.

Heck, since touchscreen tablets became ubiquitous, there has even been scary talk of them rewriting our very biology. You might have even tried to pinch and zoom on a magazine or newspaper article, or tried tapping on a headline using a dormouse sternum.

Now get this freaky claim: the touchscreen tablet has been with us for thousands of years. Yes indeed; you are quite right to exclaim "Wha... wha... whaaaaaa?!"

Admittedly, they didn't work originally like an iPad does - the ancient Minoans used wet clay tablets, which they scrawled upon using a reed stylus, before leaving them to dry in the sun. Consequently, it's hard not to wonder whether the rectangle-and-stylus combination was hardwired into us long before the iPad and Palm Pilot came along.

In the 60s and 70s the idea of using screens for entertainment started to gain in popularity. Obviously, we had the rise of video games - but what of the other forms of early tablet-based entertainment (by which we don't mean recreational pharmaceuticals)? Here we list just ten, which suggest that maybe the iPad isn't that new an idea after all...