"Left 4k Dead was made by Markus Persson, for the 2009 Java 4k Competition. The entire game is less than 4kb." Impressive, and even a bit fun.
"Mirror's Edge is not a perfect game, perhaps, but it is something more important: it is an interesting game. It can be played and experienced on its own terms, for its own sake, if players would only allow themselves to take a single videogame specimen at face value rather than as yet another data point on the endless trudge toward realistic perfection." Ian Bogost taking a considered approach to Mirror's Edge.
"'Why do you build your own computers?' Gloria asked earlier this week. 'Why don't you buy just buy one that's already built?' ... It's because computers are fire... If I was a caveman (I'd be dead, because I can't see clearly two feet in front of myself without glasses, but that's not the point), I wouldn't go to the guy who discovered fire and ask if I get a light off his torch. I might let him explain the process--documentation, as it were--but then I'd go off, hold the torch backwards, cut myself with the flint, and generally do it wrong."
This appears to be some kind of 3D-tinged mind-mapping software; Flatblack were behind the rotoscoped look of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly; this is clearly an interesting digression for them.
The Offworld 20 "...isn't just a list of independently made and under-appreciated games, it's a list of the games that celebrate what makes Offworld Offworld: the beautiful and the bizarre, and the games trying to push the medium forward and give us something we've never seen before, in whatever incremental way." Smashing. I love Offworld already, and this is a lovely list.
"Monopoly, in spite being the classiest of all board games, unfortunately is packaged just as boringly and uncreatively as every other garbage board game on the shelves. So, I decided to repackage it... turning the class up to 11." Very pretty, but I miss the original typeface: the 30s-style sans-serif was very important to the tone.
"...my feeling is that the barriers to verismilitude in video games aren't technological-- lighting effects, texture work, mocapping-- but /technical/. They're matters of technique, mastering the extant toolset in order to produce the novelistic details that make for the feeling of authentic transport. Game design doesn't need a better camera, or a holodeck. What it requires is old-fashioned artistry and imaginativeness, an obsessive and nerdish Flaubert who will come along and show us how games work."
"...it’s become apparent to me that social software is a medium turns all communication into a self-representation game whose ultimate goal is popularity."
"I am a terrible gaming evangelist. Every time I think I’m onto something my mind’s invaded by Marcus Fenix and his sweaty, homoerotic pecs, by Cloud and his implausible sword and cod-philosophy and, most poignantly, by me, in my pajamas aged nine playing Tetris on the toilet and by me, in my pajamas aged twenty-nine, playing Tetris on the toilet." And Simon powers straight into /my/ favourite games writing of 2008. Bravo.