"The walkthrough posted by Lee Beng Hai belongs in a “best games writing” list somewhere, not so much for the prose, but for the depth of his coverage and the gratitude I feel for it, like he’s the first guy in my tribe to wander into the jungle and come back with all his limbs." Chris Dahlen on why nobody's writing about Demon's Souls, but everybody's playing it. (Also: "It’s not “flow”, because flow implies progress; it’s more like tantric sex with a slide rule" is a brilliant analogy).

"Clarity is a Splunk like web interface for your server log files. It supports searching (using grep) as well as trailing log files. It has been written using the event based architecture based on EventMachine and so allows real-time search of very large log files. If you hit the browser Stop button it will also kill the grep / tail utility."

"a JavaScript GameBoy Emulator" Blimey.

"Every family, it seems, has its own set of words for describing particular Lego pieces. No one uses the official names. “Dad, please could you pass me that Brick 2×2?” No. In our house, it’ll always be: “Dad, please could you pass me that four-er?”" So true. I'm trying to recall our own nomenclature.

Great interview with Lantz, expanding on his "games aren't media" angle and some other interesting points on aesthetics; totally marred by Michaël Samyn's trolling of a comment thread (on his *own* company's blog). Still, read the top half!

"The first Godfather game had a stealth mission in which you sneaked into the Hollywood producer's house and put the horse's head under his covers. You might expect that in The Godfather II, you have to sneak out onto Lake Tahoe to assassinate Fredo. Close. Instead, you have to sneak into Cuba to garrote a bunch of soldiers whose backs are conveniently turned and then you assassinate Fidel Castro. I did not make that up." Oh jesus.

"…the 1996 target date for Project Atlantis and the GBA's 2001 release is quite a gap. Why the delay? My guess is: Pokémon. Game Freak's socially-driven cockfighting RPG was an unexpected end-of-life hit for the Game Boy, and its out-of-left-field success added years to the fading system's life. The popularity of Pokémon might actually have been the first time Nintendo realized that technology and profitability don't go hand-in-hand." That's an interesting way of looking at it. (Also: an interesting piece on the Nintendo super-portable that never was).

"POWERFUL MASTERS FROM THE FUTURE WITH THE STRENGTH OF A HORSE AND THE MIND OF A MAN" Ther are no more words, really.

This is not good. And the worst part: "Hundreds of public bodies and quangos, including local councils, will also be able to access the data to investigate flytipping and other less serious crimes." It's not the police having this that's the big worry; it's the incompetent lower echelons of civil service. who shouldn't need this.

I'd forgotten Corewar: another programming game, even more abstract than CRobots, and slightly more arcane. This Gama piece provides a nice primer to the game, its history, and its tactics.