"Established by rock band They Might Be Giants (TMBG), Dial-A-Song consisted of an answering machine with a tape of the band playing various songs. The machine played one track at a time, ranging from demos and uncompleted work to fake advertisements the band had created… Due to the nature of an answering machine, only one caller could listen to the current song at any given time. This had been noted as creating a special bond between the song and the person calling as it is playing just for them… John Linnell stated in an interview in early 2008 that Dial-A-Song had died of a technical crash, and that the internet had taken over where the machine left off." How did I not know this? There is nothing about this that is not brilliant.

"This Prince of Persia is many things good and bad, but for me, it has been one of the more enthralling experiences provided by a video game. It eschews frustrating, punishing gameplay tropes, and instead follows a hugely unpopular and successful (at its aim) path: it aims to create a continuous, enjoyable, flowing experience, one unhindered by the mechanical, artificial traditions of “achievement” and “fun” that so many games cling to."

"Murphy was also rumored to have been attempting to supply his castmates with pain pills. When asked about the rumors, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, playing “The Tank” in the film, said, “Eddie was just achievement-boosting. Anything else is a rumor, plain and simple.”" Hardcasual, again, I love you.

Jaw-droppling good. More on this soon, but in a nutshell: you have about a week, and it's incredible. Do not ignore the queues inside it, either: they are all for excellent things.

"My crystal ball tells me you will hear music – great classic rock tunes – and you will believe, truly believe, that you are playing that music on your toy guitar. And you will feel, truly feel, that you are cool. A hero of the guitar." Lovely.

"It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties."

"XP is adapted to a context where motivation is expensive and change is cheap. Interaction design (at least how Cooper explains it) is adapted to a context where motivation is cheap and change is expensive. It should be obvious that contexts of both kinds can exist in the world: there are situations where it's easy to return to previous decisions and modify them (software, for one), and there are other situations where it's not (e.g. buildings, dams)."

Freddie25 plays the Wind Waker theme, on a selection of instruments, as a Christmas treat for you. It's delightful, and the bit when the nine-part vocals come in is lovely. Proper good, this.

"..some tweets were destined for fail." – or, at least, not for public consumption. Oh dear.

For each of the 25 days leading to Christmas, Paul and Storm have done one of their Randy Newman theme-songs. Twenty-five pastiches of Short People, for your pleasure. Die Hard, The Godfather, and the Big Lebowski are stand-outs.

"I'm not sure if I have made it clear about how much I want a Sega Genesis for Christmas. I have developed a way that the gift of a Sega Genesis for me will not only benefit me with many hours of enjoyment, but it will also benefit you with many clean bathrooms, clean rooms, and meaningful hugs." Chris Baker finds the evidence of how (he thinks) he managed to get a Sega Genesis for Christmas in 1992. At least they'd stopped shipping Altered Beast with it by then.

"Here's the most important thing to understand about the mass market for videogames: these players – the ones who aren't even remotely interested in the kind of videogames the hobbyists want to play – have very specific tastes, and when something takes off with them it continues to sell, and sell, and sell. But these players don't buy many titles – when they find the game they want, they generally just keep playing that."

"A dude by the name of Phoebus has posted a collection of his research on Left 4 Dead's infected and weapon damage statistics over on the official Steam forums. I think that it'll be of great interest for any serious player of the game to delve into this information." There's a question over their accuracy, but there's still a decent amount of detail here, and the details on tail-off of weapon damage is useful to know. Also a relief to have the hellacious friendly-fire damage on Expert confirmed.

Fascinating to watch some of the body shapes – the hunched run, and in particular the the saut du chat – carry through to modern Parkour; that which is practical has always been so. As with all parkour: parts of it are beautiful, parts of it entertaining, and parts of it superhuman.

"Bourne wraps cities, autobahns, ferries and train terminuses around him as the ultimate body-armour, in ways that Old Etonians could never even dream of." More on this topic from Jones; still think there's something we're not quite hitting yet, but it's all good stuff.

Stack lets you subscribe to a selection of independent magazines; you choose how many you want a year, and they send you a selection. A really nice idea, although it'll be interesting to see them broaden their horizons a bit.

"Program recipes should not only generate valid output, but be easy to prepare and delicious." Chef is a programming language where the programs are also valid (if strange) recipes. The syntax description is proper crazy; gives Homespring a run for its money, easily, in the realm of metaphorical programming languages that embrace their metaphor.

"This recipe prints the immortal words "Hello world!", in a basically brute force way. It also makes a lot of food for one person."

"The problem with remakes and ports for the critic, especially those of old beloved games, is emotional baggage. It's difficult to give a cold, measured critique of something you've loved since childhood. How can you give an objective appraisal when every time you hear the game's start-up melody your mind soaks happy in memories of warm endless school holidays, and that delicious, pure, all-encompassing escapism unique to children who play videogames? This game's story is also a part of my story, so it's impossible to get much distance between the two." A lovely paragraph in Simon's review of the DS Chrono Trigger re-release.

"Auditorium is about the process of discovery and play. There are no right or wrong answers; there are many ways to solve every puzzle." Sounds gorgeous; looks beautiful. So much loveliness.

Weird; point-and-click adventures, but where each command requires the artist draw a new image. A lot of it seems pre-determined, but there's obviously slow evolution at work. The game is _released_ frame by frame, though, which is interesting.

"So that’s what I would like: software you can live with. Software that feels like music." Contextual software.

It's not Tetris, but it's something like it. This game is getting worryingly essential.

"Japanese PSN member RRR30000 has managed to recreate classic shoot-em up gameplay within the game, using a spaceship sticker and massive amounts of free time." Just. Incredible. The enemies-on-sticks have a vast amount of charm, too. I don't think I can escape buying the PS3 this demands, sadly.

"The original page, which sadly has since then disappered from the face of the earth, was all about this hidden "demon face" in one of Aphex Twin's tracks, #2 (the long formula) on "Windowlicker". This face was supposed to be viewable with a spectrograph program, so I decided to try it myself." Some fun – and somewhat impressive – decoding of hidden imagery on IDM cds. The Venetian Snares cats are particiuarly great.

Well, as long as they ban every other imported phrase. Stupid as this is, I think the comment that it's "the linguistic equivalent of ethnic cleansing" is a bit of an absurd, and somewhat insensitive, overstatement.

"Dante's Inferno, the poem, explores the Christian afterlife, as Dante traipses through nine circles of Hell to get to Purgatory and eventually Heaven. EA will apparently interpret this as fighting supernatural baddies." Oh bloody hell.

Some really beautiful in-house design from Criterion here.

"We’re just topping it off with the last few drops of smooth liquid goo, but the Mac version of World of Goo is running beautifully, and should be out this week!" Very excited.

"Japan-o-glitch + Interactive Flash graphics = D.V.D. (x OMG)." Wow.