"It’s easy to roll your eyes at the people who look at an Xbox 360 controller or Dual Shock and say it’s too complicated. “Left 4 Dead” proves there are hardcore experiences — not just Wii and DS games — that can draw them in…but the controller remains a challenge that won’t be easily overcome." I'd never roll my eyes; modern pads are very complicated, and twin-stick move/shoot is one of the hardest skills to acquire. Still, a nice piece of commentary on what learning to use a controller looks like, and a healthy reminder.

"So when I play Fallout 3, and I think this is probably true for most people who are over forty, some part of me is always wondering if this is what it really would have been like. Not in terms of enemies, but in the way that humans banded together into small groups to create enough order to survive." Bill Harris on a perspective on Fallout 3 that I'll never have.

Click "CM Gallery". Watch. In order to illustrate the xiao's ability to not only take but also print photographs, Takara Tomy really pushed their anthropomorphic metaphor to the limits.

"Yes, it's true that at no time while playing Prince of Persia did I feel any of the frustration that I felt on a regular basis in Mirror's Edge. But neither did I ever feel the joy of doing something right, of stringing together a perfect series of vaults and wall-runs and feeling like it was based on my own skill. Can one exist without the other? Is it impossible to create joy without difficulty? I don't know. But Prince of Persia lost something significant." I'm a bit worried about the new Prince, especially having read this; the challenge/reward balance is hugely important to it as a series, especially since the marvellous Sands of Time. Also, more worryingly: are developers shying away from letting players fail any more?

"The Facebook Republican Army, based on Brighton's tough Whitehawk estate, looks for parties on Facebook. The gang boasts it travels nationwide – and has even bought its own coach." Oh boy.

"As the about page says, if you live exactly 6 minutes from Sunset Tunnel East Portal, 8 minutes from Duboce and Church, and 10 minutes from Church Station you may find it useful too." Bespoke tools for yourself that might happen to be useful to others. I like this a lot.

"The Firefox add-on "Pirates of the Amazon" inserts a "download 4 free" button on Amazon, which links to corresponding Piratebay BitTorrents. The add-on lowers the technical barrier to enable anyone to choose between "add to shopping cart" or "download 4 free". Are you a pirate?" Almost certainly not the first example; perhaps one of the best realised.

"That's how I got here. How long will it be before someone builds a raft and sets sail in space? Bill Gates has over fifty billion dollars. What if Richard Garriott had fifty billion dollars? If he wanted to, would that be enough money to build a rocket to get him into space, and a self-sustaining environment in which he could live? Would he want to sail away and never come back? … No matter what happened in our future, [whoever built that raft] would forever be the first. A thousand years from now, people would remember his name." Bill Harris is awesome.

"Take a break from your computer! Download, print and build your own pinhole camera. Follow the instructions and enjoy!" Beautiful.

I love Jeff Bridges as a photographer, and his pictures from the Iron Man set are no exception.

"Mathematically speaking, “Napoleon Dynamite” is a very significant problem for the Netflix Prize. Amazingly, Bertoni has deduced that this single movie is causing 15 percent of his remaining error rate; or to put it another way, if Bertoni could anticipate whether you’d like “Napoleon Dynamite” as accurately as he can for other movies, this feat alone would bring him 15 percent of the way to winning the $1 million prize."

"In a detailed technical feature with sample code, Team Bondi programmer Claus Höfele delves into the practical steps for your users to get gameplay footage automagically uploaded online." Good that this stuff is being published. This kind of stuff really isn't that difficult; the hard bit is recording footage from your game or framebuffer; the rest of the process is trivial, and hopefully coverage on sites like Gamasutra will help publicise this kind of interaction.

"The point in pointing out these numbers, since we’re throwing out analogies to films and videogame innovation, is that it seems that no matter how well a movie is interpreted as “innovative” by a reviewer, the truest mark of success lies in its ability to inure itself with the consumer." No. Commercial success is just one kind of success, and films like Eraserhead have had a far greater impact on young filmmakers than any amount of box-office smashes. The real rarities are films such as the Godfather or Citizen Kane, which manage to be box-office smashes and innovative masterpiece.

"Anytime I hear the alpha futurist-y featurists get all excited about some kind of idea for how the new ubicomp networked world will be so much more simpler and seamless and bug-free, I want to punch someone in the eye. They sound like a 5 year old who whines that they want a pink pony for their birthday." Julian has ubicomp fail.

Satoru Iwata interviews the product designer and producer behind the Wii Fit balance board. There's some interesting stuff on the prototyping process on the second and third page of the interview.

That they are. Got to love the type on these.

"Cosmovox is a unique and innovative musical instrument for the iPhone and iPod touch." Nearly a theremin. Nearly.

"Tim, or perhaps T.J. (we were at the pudding stage), began talking about the experience of editing Cliffhanger (the edition we were going to print), and about some of the material that had to be changed or cast away – characters’ names, a lesbian sex scene, the ending itself – and we wondered whether, in a born-digital text, these sloughed-off palimpsests acquired an existence of their own, beyond the shadows of an HFS hard drive; in a library run by Veet Voojagig, perhaps." Picador publish both the final version of the book in print – and the urtext as a separate digital product. Fun.

"The time comes again. Here’s the first five pages from the first issues of PHONOGRAM: THE SINGLES CLUB. Not only that, but we include seven sample B-side pages, plus a little introduction about what they’re all about, like." Looking jolly good, and am rather excited by the B-sides.

Wonderful pastiches of popular US newstand titles to promote the new season of Dexter. The New Yorker pastiche is particularly superb.