"The demo of Dante's Inferno provided absolutely the stupidest gaming experience I think I have had since possibly Ultimate Combat Mission on the Spectrum +2. I don't think God of War can meaningfully compete, because… well, because it isn't based on one of the most famous works of literature produced in the last thousand years. Dorothy L Sayers translated it, for God's sake. Kratos never really had to get past anything more culturally embedded than Clash of the Titans." Dan has been playing Dante's Inferno, and the end result is this lovely post, about classics, and living stories, and Just Plain Stupid Games. It's very good. "…there's nothing to stop an incredibly silly game being a very enjoyable game, but there's something about the abandon with which Inferno is being used art direction for a slash-em-up that is killing the joy of it a bit for me"

"In this piece, each of the departments involved in making a videogame are examined and accused of one particular vice. In making these assessments, the assumption behind each is that the purpose of the videogames industry is to make games that players want to play, and not to make the games that developers want to play." It is good, and I'm looking forward to the second part.

"…as developers, we need to deal more honestly with the disparity between our reach and our grasp – which is to say, what we tell ourselves our games are about, versus what they are actually about. History will see this decade as the period when games struggled with their destiny in this way." 2K Marin's JP LeBreton with a smart, insightful take on the road ahead for games design, and the many positive steps being taken along it (and: a decent commentary on the "shooting people" issue).

"With limited influence, unlimited hands in the pie, a low barrier to critique, and the perception of triviality, frontend engineers are the janitors of software development. Rather than cleaning up trash, the boulder they toil beneath is skew: the distance between team member's conceptions of a project." This really feels very familiar: it's the most under-appreciated art in the stack of software development, and the one that takes the brunt of the crap.

"Best of all, for impatient gamers the developer plans to conceal load screens with a mini-game where players can connect a USB keyboard and write an undergraduate thesis on the illustrations of Gustave Dore." Seriously, this already sounds much better than the Redwood Shores version…

Farbs quit 2K Australia. This is his resignation note. It's fun, and not in any way mean.

More on the phenomenon that is Ken Fighter Ken.

This is a pretty accurate explanation of the state of the majority of SF4 online. It's also quite funny, and is the reason the phrase "Flowchart Ken", used to described a particular kind of player, is already entering the SF4 Lexicon.

"Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again." Ryanair's social media strategy is pretty much on-brand, it seems.

'A morose-looking guy stood at the bar talking to his friends, wearing a Flashbang Studios t-shirt. Emily leaned across the bar next to him, and shouted giddily over the music: "hey, I like that developer."' A lovely piece of speculative writing from Duncan Fyfe.

A first, rather long, post on the S&W Blog, in which I talk to Jack about a project he's been working on for a while.

"This summer will you be, or not be? It's Resident Evil meets House of the Dead, IN DENMARK." Epic Eegra thread taking the Dante's Inferno-shaped ball and running a very, very long way with it.

Full version, no out! The beta was lovely, so I'm looking forward to this a lot.

"[Wrestle Jam is] completely playable. There was an intro screen, character select, win / loss conditions, opponent AI, eight different attacks," Furino explained. "It was as close to a genuine old-school wrestling game as I could make it in the time allowed. I even mapped an old Nintendo controller to the input system so they could play it that way." Gosh, that's lovely, if not totally unexpected from Arronofsky. Lovely interview, too.

"The first viewings of Dante's Inferno suggest the action adventure will be very similar to God of War… enemies can be smashed into the air and juggled around using simple combos that mix light and heavy attacks. Magical abilities will also feature, and fallen enemies will spill health and magic orbs that replenish respective status bars." Oh Jesus, please make it stop.

The reason CakePHP has issues connecting to MySQL database on OSX 10.5 is because its database adaptor is explicitly looking for the default mysql socket defined in your php.ini. If you fix that, everything works. The critical adjective, if you ever search for this again, is the "OSX" part.

"A modern tale about caring, mending and letting-go, drawn with letters and punctuation marks." Oh! This is just beautiful – a short story about a girl, and a snail, composed entirely out of type.

"Not what I had in mind at all." George Oates on how her firing from Flickr played out, which was pretty horrific as it turned out – she was on the other side of the world, presenting on behalf of the firm. I am really not sure what Yahoo! hope to gain from many of their recent redundancies, and least of all this one.

"You want to hear some gluttons eternally force-fed cake and chocolate milk? I don’t know what else XBox Live microtransactions were made for, broseph. " Hardcasual, I love you.