"Houdini received this sort of letter every day, but Clayton Hutton's was different. Clayton Hutton was different. By accepting his challenge – by promising Clayton Hutton the considerable sum of £100 if the packing case in question defeated him – Houdini set in motion a strange chain of events that would, in a wonderfully mad and circuitous manner, impact the course of a vast global conflict that was at the time still 26 years away." Somebody please commission Christian to write a book? Soon? Thanks! (This is great).

"…the whole thing comes to a head with the Louvre, the only building in the game with four culture slots and a truly dazzling theming bonus if you can match the specific criteria. Offering massive boosts to your stats, the Louvre is essentially the headshot of the cultural world." The overhauls to the cultural victory in the forthcoming Civ V expansion sound great. Also: the way Christian writes about it is great.

"We drove about for another hour or two after that, and by this point dad was hooked. Not hooked on L.A. Noire's narrative, perhaps, or caught up in the complex chains of missions, but hooked on the city, on the fascinating, insightful job that Rockstar had done in stitching the past together. Even though I can't actually drive, and the car we were in wasn't a real car anyway, I had a strong sense that I was in the front seat, turning the wheel beneath my hands, and he was riding low in the back, face pressed to the glass. Role reversal. It happens to all fathers and sons eventually, I guess. Why shouldn't it happen because of games?" Chris Donlan takes his Dad – who grew up in late-40s/early-50s LA – on a tour of LA Noire's Los Angeles, and what happens is a remarkable piece of virtual psychogeography. Perhaps my favourite piece of games writing this year.

"At the moment, however, the prevailing wisdom seems to be that audiences have to be tricked into buying digital toys. Toys have to be disguised as something else. They don't yet have the framework of expectations around them that allows people to decide whether the proposition is worth it on its own or not, whatever that phrase really means. They're yet to feel entirely legitimate." Lots of lovely stuff in Christian's article here, but this stood out particularly: having to disguise toys to sell them to current expectations and the current marketplace.

"Melville’s searing, wayward novel about obsession and the nature of evil becomes a twin-stick shooter for consoles. The twist? The playing field is 5000 miles wide, and there’s only one enemy." Christian is brilliant. (I'm pretty sure my links are full of 'Christian is brilliant' annotations)

"Or, in a diffirent formulation of the legendary author of Sim games Will Wright, "Playing the game is a continuous loop between the user (viewing the outcomes and inputting decisions) and the computer (calculating outcomes and displaying them back to the user). The user is trying to build a mental model of the computer model.""

"Nine hours in, with no end to the fetching and photographing and fishing and flower-watering in sight, I suggested to one of my nieces, who was playing the game with me (the whole thing's drop-in co-op friendly), that maybe collecting three pepper pots to make Monstro the Whale sneeze was not so very different to collecting three sets of banners for the Toon Town election. It turns out that, from the perspective of a six-year-old, it's entirely different, and I clearly understand little about whales and even less about elections." A marvellous, marvellous piece of writing from Christian (again).