The world isn't perfect. Indeed, in this day and age it feels less perfect than ever. We're locked into an era where we're ruled by blonde egomaniacs, so undeserving of power. Injustice and inequality is rife, teenagers with autism are attacked by those in government, simply for trying to hold them to account, and our planet is choking on mankind's hubris.

We feel so powerless, numbed to the daily shocks.

Cynicism in the face of all this is, perhaps, understandable. Every day brings more bad news; abuses of power, environmental collapse, unsavoury revelations about those we might've once idolised... and we're all feeling battered and worn down. 

It's perhaps best summed up by the word Weltzschmerz - meaning "world pain" - coined by the German author Jean Paul Richter, to describe a weary melancholy at that imperfection of the world. John Steinbeck referred to it in The Winter of Our Discontent, where he called it "Welshrats", for some reason.

Though it'd be easy to think that this was a relatively new term, Richter first used it in 1810, suggesting that - as bad as things might seem now - we're not the first generation to believe that the world could, and should, be better than it is.

Indeed, so coloured have we become by this all-consuming Weltschmerz that it's hard to notice when something comes along that seems to be pretty darn perfect. 

Step forwards Apple Arcade. 

I'm a bit off games at the minute. Do you ever go through periods where games just don't interest you, where it all just seems such an unimportant waste of time?

​I've been dipping in and out of Untitled Goose Game and Link's Awakening on my Switch, and there are some new games on the Oculus Quest that I'll probably - possibly - have a crack at this weekend, but the thought of writing about them on here fills me with ennui.

Worse still, I've got Borderlands 3 sitting in its shrink-wrap, and can't face booting it up... and I've still not played Rage 2. The size of them is part of what's putting me off, but the familiarity is also a factor. I think I'm just a bit over open worlds, and sci-fi, and apocalyptic settings. I can't muster the enthusiasm to engage with them.

​They don't seem to matter to me at the moment. It feels like an endless procession of identikit games and sequels, and I need a bit of air before I indulge in another. 

It's not something I'm overly concerned about. I get this from time to time, and I know the cycle will come around again where I'm chomping at the sausage to write about games again, and losing an entire weekend playing them. Something will be released which gets me excited about their potential, and I'll find it impossible not to talk about them.

A larger part of my issue is - and I'm going to try hard for this not to become a "Please give me your sympathy" whinge - but I've had a really tough year. The toughest year I've had for the best part of a decade, and when a lot of real-world stuff happens, games somehow seem less important to me.

​I guess it puts it all into perspective. Games, unlike more passive forms of entertainment, require more of me than I'm able to give right now.

There seems to be an endless supply of terrible video game cover art. Sometimes it's not the art itself which is the issue, but the logos, or some of the choices made in the layout.

Here, displaying the full spectrum of awfulness, are another ten of the worst, most questionable, game covers of yore. 

Guest Review by Super Bad Advice

Beep boop…hello, Madam! Mobile phones are both a wonder of the modern world, but also a total pain in the frenulum when you either get a call at the worst possible time or need to make/receive one but can’t. 
 
For example, I once got a really important call about a house we were trying to buy that I absolutely had to take, but with the worst possible timing my phone had rung while I was in the ‘smallest room’. That’s right – I was doing a poo in the airing cupboard! Again!
 
Normally, my phone ringing while I was indisposed wouldn’t be a problem and I’d do what anyone would: send it to voicemail, use the loo, and return the call. But I knew this call was time-sensitive and if I didn’t take it we could lose the house, so it had to be there and then.
 
And of course, it just so happened that ‘there’ and ‘then’ I was getting over a dose of food poisoning, so lavatorial visits were a lot more high-stake events than usual.
 
Thus, I ended up spending a wretched half-hour attempting to discuss my mortgage with a very polite but somewhat bemused solicitor, with me frantically muting things on and off mid-conversation – under the utterly rubbish cover story I’d concocted in a panic of my neighbour doing loud DIY – to spare them hearing as much as possible of what they’d probably have described as someone repeatedly half-filling a balloon with gravy, then the rest air, then letting it ‘razz off’ into a bin. 
 
Still, these days the country is so strewn with mobile masts it’s starting to resemble the face of that bloke from the 1980s horror film Hellraiser. So while calls at a bad time will always happen, at least not getting a signal when you need it is an increasingly unlikely thing.
 
Wander out into the sticks, though, and you can still find yourself in a ‘dead zone’ bereft of reception – usually just when you need it most, too. And that’s essentially the premise of the delightful A Short Hike. 

"GOOSE! How low can you go?"

​When the trailer for Untitled Goose Game dropped however long ago, it created quite a storm.

"It's a lovely morning in the village... and you are a horrible goose" we were told, and it was perfect.

​We all wanted that game. We all wanted to be that goose. 

Because somehow we do think of geese as horrible don't we? The trailer spoke to something primal within all of us. Geese live without consequences. They don't have to pay taxes. They don't have to worry about upsetting someone. They do what they want, when they want.

And somehow we just know that all geese are massive dickheads, and couldn't care less who knows it. I mean, they honk, for pity's sake. What use is honking other than to startle people? That's why car horns honk. They don't trill or chirp. Honking is an aggressive noise, and geese must surely have been given the ability to honk because they are intended to be nature's arseholes. 

Don't we all, on some level, want to live the goose life? 

Well now we can.

Guest review by SUPER BAD ADVICE

There's a widely-held theory that, every so often, it’s healthy for people to get out of their ‘comfort zones’. Challenge yourself. Do something different. Stretch your boundaries.
 
But here’s an alternative take: this idea is a right pile of honking dog eggs. Comfort zones are nice precisely *because* they’re comfortable, and being comfortable is ace. Would you attempt to sleep on a pile of bricks while a clown wearing nothing but a soiled pink leotard does squat thrusts over you and think “ooh, what a lovely change from my comfy bed! I’m really growing as a person!”? 
 
Unless you’re a titanic pervert, clearly this: no.

Anyway, if there are 2 genres of game I really couldn’t care less about, it’s football sims and resource management/world building type sims: they are my own personal ‘squatty the clown’, getting his crotch all up in my comfort zone. I know some people lap them up, but to me the latter have all the appeal and excitement of filling in a tax return. And the former?
 
Well, as far as I’m concerned, the zenith of amusement you could eke from a footie sim was reached in about 2004 – this being the pre-licencing cheapskate days when players in some games came set with stupid fake names such as “Devid Bockham” and “Fronk Lumphard”, but if you wanted you could amend them to correct them all.
 
You know: if you were a colossal dullard.

Whenever a real bad thing happens in America, the chubby finger of blame is often wafted in the direction of video games.

Indeed, President Donald Covefefe-Plenty-Of-Oil-Everybody-Loves-Me Trump did just this recently, in the wake of the shootings in Texas and Ohio which left 31 people dead in the space of 24 hours.

You know, rather than attributing it to something like, oh I dunno, America's absurdly relaxed gun laws and the radicalisation of disenfranchised young men by a culture and an administration which allows white supremacy to flourish unchecked.

Since the series first debuted in 1992, Mortal Kombat - famed for its gory, over-the-top, finishing moves, such as freezing an opponent in a block of ice and shattering them, or using telekinetic abilities to pull an enemy's entrails out through their mouth, or dismembering somebody with a sharp hat - has often been linked to real-world acts of violence. 

The franchise has been at the centre of various studies into the psychological effects of gaming violence, and was named during the infamous 1993 US Congressional hearing, which led to increased industry regulation. Consequently, various incarnations of the series have been banned around the world, and the latest instalment, Mortal Kombat 11, is unavailable in China, Japan, Indonesia, and Ukraine. 

Her are six times Mortal Kombat - a game in which it is possible to swallow a fellow combatant whole, and spit out their bones, or inflate their head like a balloon - was linked to real-life awfulness.

Did you know that the working name for the Amiga CD32 was "Spellbound"? "Toilet-bound" would've been more appropriate!!!!!!

Isn't that funny? Yes. Yes it is.

The Amiga CD32 was a last rattle of the tin for Commodore; a half-buttocked, ill-considered, attempt to get a palsied finger-hold in the burgeoning CD console market.

Though technically it was the first 32-bit CD games console, that's a bit like praising the first moon landing attempt by a four year-old in his homemade, diarrhoea-powered, cardboard space rocket.

The CD32 was hobbled by a hastily-assembled internal load of wretched old mess, a terrible controller that had all the aesthetic appeal of a particularly difficult maths equation, Commodore's astigmatic management - which lead to the machine being discontinued after just eight months and the company going bankrupt - and the continued wilful ignorance of the Amiga's audience, who boasted the collective awareness of the Pompeii resident who opened a flammable trousers shop the morning Vesuvius erupted. 

Oddly, in 1995 - the year following the official end of both the console, and all things Amiga - the CD32 gained a sort of vague half-life as an arcade system, courtesy of Milanese company CD Express, the result of a licensing deal struck prior to Commodore's dismal termination.

Nine arcade games in total were released using the CD32 hardware (which was, even later, used inside a handful of fruit machines - Leprechaun's Luck, Hawaiian Delight and Mister Magic - by an entirely different company).

And here they are; here are some of those games that I mentioned.