"Certainly as delivered through mobile devices, contemporary AR imposes significant limits on your ability to derive information from the flow of streetlife. It’s not just the “I must look like a dork” implications of walking down the street with a mobile held visor-like before you, though those are surely present and significant. It’s that the city is already trying to tell you things, most of which are likely to be highly, even existentially salient to your experience of place. I can’t help but think that what you’re being offered through the tunnel vision of AR is starkly impoverished by comparison — and that’s even before we entertain the very high likelihood of that information’s being inaccurate, outdated, or commercial or otherwise exploitative in nature."

GameMaker-like tool for OSX and Windows – that outputs Flash games, built out of Flixel and Box2D. Niiice.

"Cole Phelps has no health bar, no ammo count, and no inventory. He doesn't write journal entries, and has no safe house or property. He doesn't eat, doesn't sleep, doesn't smoke or drink or sleep around or go out with his friends. I have seen nothing of his wife and children, his passions, his hates or his desires. He walks into a crime scene and barks his introductions like a dog, rude and abrasive; petulant and bullying. He carries himself like a child playing dress-up, weak-chinned, pale, and aimlessly angry. Cole Phelps is kind of a prick.

But when I look at what's going on around him, I can't really blame him. What to make of this Truman Show-esque existence, this vast, toothless city? If I were trapped in such a purgatorial nightmare, I'd probably behave badly, too." This is good, and expresses in poetic and critical terms one of the many reasons I just don't care about LA Noire.

"I have this colleague of mine who is an avid rock climber, and I’m trying to get him to play GIRP. He says that what I’m saying is like, “I’ve come up with this new formula of crack that’s ultra-addictive; why don’t you try this new crack I’ve cooked up?”" Wait, Bennett GIRP/QWOP Foddy was in *Cut Copy*?! Awesome.

"…another Monorail Society Exclusive!" The decision, you might have guessed, is turning down a monorail. Does sound great, though, and easy material for writing alternate-pasts.

"Unlike the movies that influence it, LA Noire takes place in a world where editing hasn't been invented yet." Really good writing from Tom Chick; this was perhaps my favourite quotation. I genuinely wonder how many people playing this game have never played a "proper" adventure game – be it an old Sierra point-and-click, or something from the Phoenix Wright/Hotel Dusk school. Chick's line about the matchbook is exactly the thing adventure gamers got fed up with in the *late nineteen-eighties*. We don't need the bad parts of Sierra coming back to haunt is.