What's New? (11th May, 2007)

Let's all take a moment. Resist, for once, the urge to squander it. Embrace it. It's an important time. This week - the last 24 hours, for some - has seen the passing of a great leader, a man so principled that he looked beyond the obvious and forged a path of great controversy; a man who gave his life to the lubrication of our hopes and dreams, and rarely splashed himself messily on the carpet of defeat in the throes of his selfless devotion; a man who, when you think about, ran towards the fire more often than a squadron of grounded moths.

Goodbye, Spider-Man.

Put it this way: if a picture paints a thousand words, then it follows that a 140-minute film hitting us with 60 frames every second is good for about 504 million. That's a lot of words. So it's an amazing testament to the epic dreadfulness of Spider-Man 3 that none of them is even vaguely printable. The first two films were widely considered spectacular, emotional roller-coasters; part 3 is like having to pay to tie your shoelaces on a zebra crossing in the middle of Le Mans - objects that are moving too quickly to focus on are speeding expensively toward your backside and all you can do is hand over your money and imagine what it would be like if someone gave you 258 million dollars to spend on coke.

But then Uncle Ben wouldn't want us living with revenge in our hearts. Because if Spider-Man has taught us nothing else (and if you've ever seen an episode of Dawson's Creek, he hasn't), it's that revenge is like a poison, which can take us over and turn us into something ugly before we've even had time to glance at our watches and wonder what else we could have done with £7.50. Fortunately today's focus is on a picture's relationship not with words but with numbers, or rather it's on the manner in which numbers paint a picture in Nintendo's smashing new DS game - and What's New's official best way to make up for other people's abuse of the great responsibility that comes with great power of-the-week - Picross DS.

We know being told how puzzle games work is boring, because we're boring and we tell you, so instead you should just bear in mind that logic puzzles are ace, this is one of the best, and it's knocked Slitherlink and Puzzle Quest out of our cartridge slots. The Japanese version had an entire game's worth of downloadable content available for free, too, so you'll be brilliantly served, even if it could have done with a few more 5x5 puzzles to ease in newcomers. And if that's not enough to divert your cash away from discovering which fishnets Parker's breaking out for the most cinematically disappointing quasi-beastial love pentagon since Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Sherpa, then Dave's review of the Japanese version - perfectly playable with a bit of Googling for menu translations - surely is. He's right about the interface though.

Or, if you're inclined, there's Electronic Arts' latest attempt to demonstrate that the square peg of real-time strategy really does fit snugly into Microsoft's hole: Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars on Xbox 360. With a demo on Live Marketplace, you don't need us to convince you, which is handy, because when I tried to download it my Xbox fell off the TV stand breaking the hard disk in the process. Of course, other websites might take that as a sign, but then if we were other websites we'd probably stop spending so much on hosting, bandwidth, and the legal fees that give me free run of the 100 metres surrounding Keeley Hawes pending any successful appeals I've not been told about, so why not get on down to that Internet and smother yourself in Tiberium? Right now, it's the only way to be sure - unless Kristan's done his review, in which case you can dust off and nuke your orbits from elsewhere.

All of which leaves us with little to do except board the exit prompt, set minions to "work", and disappear for a long weekend. I'm off to Seattle next week to meet one of the PC's best developers, so if you're lucky I won't bother to do anything else between now and then and you'll get to read about it on my return. Or you'll combat my indifference with your own, and we can stop this madness once and for all. Either way, that's it. Goodbye, Spider-Man - at least you never invaded a sovereign state without a UN mandate.