"Tambour is a musical game about attacking and countering with rhythm." Really nice: definitely musical, interesting balancing mechanics, and I love the range of inputs. Also it looks good, which helps.

This is beyond brilliant. Not because it's More Hard Fun From The Maker Of QWOP, but because it's actually easier than QWOP, and it tickles exactly the same part of my brain that bouldering itself tickled, and it makes brilliant use of finger-gymnastics and the keyboard, and it's marvellous, really. I just want to go home and play it all night.

Jonathan Blow's game prototypes; some interesting stuff here, especially in the READMEs.

"A computer mystery/romance set five minutes into the future of 1988." Looks jolly good.

"this is good level design." A lovely dissection of a couple of screens from Super Mario Land; detailed, spot-on, carefuly analysis from Anna Anthropy. Amazing what you can do with four types of block.

"I hate the deep breath I have to take before asking if anyone remembers Jumping Flash or Rescue On Fractalus. I hate being the geeky bore who’s more interested in talking about games from twenty years ago than about BioShock 2 or GTA 5. But even more I hate the waste of modern game development, of watching talented teams burn time and energy reinventing wheels previously perfected by men now in their 60s."

This is ridiculous.

Kenta Cho's making stuff on wondfl, in ActionScript. This example is ASCII-based bulletty goodness.

"This is a lexicon of terms relating to John Horton Conway's Game of Life." Very comprehensive, with lots of examples.

"In this extensive interview, Yasuhara outlines his carefully constructed theories of fun and game design, including the differences between American and Japanese audiences, with illustrated documents." Lots of nice things in here, including a section on "tidying up".

"Each world has a specific mechanic and overlapping rarely occurs between world mechanics. Instead, the player is given just enough objects on the screen to solve the puzzle with the limited tools available. By being able to concentrate on one mindset of solving the puzzle, eventually the solutions make themselves apparent." A nice Manveer Heir piece on why the puzzles themselves in Braid are good: because the game creates complexity out of limited tools, rather than throwing every mechanic in all the time.

"In I-Fluid you will experience our everyday life from the eyes of…a drop of water!" Stunningly beautiful physics-oriented Windows puzzle game. Makes me want to buy a PC right now.

"Too often, developers only test their features and don’t go outside that box. [...] when you are in scoring mode, you’ll take the time to check out all the new features to see what you can break to score big." Rules for turning QA into a game.

"The thing about Harmonix is that even though they strive to bring total non-musicians closer to music, they still mark a clear boundary between playing music and not." A much better explanation of this than I tend to give; lovely article.

Awesome: you're a tank. You can't die, but you are the weapon - so you ricochet around the screen from explosions trying to bump into enemies. As you level up, you increase the *number of enemies* which makes big combos easier. Silly, addictive, fun.

More Ferry Halim, and it's a wonderful little one-button game. Also, the music is as good as ever, except it's cheery rather than heartbreaking, which helps.

One-button game that won the NLGD gamesdev rally. Looks interesting, and Michiel was a lovely chap.

"Trism uses the touchscreen to manipulate the triangles on the screen, but in a really smart twist, the blocks will fall down in a different way, depending on which direction you're tilting the phone". Wonderful. Watch the video, and try not to grin.

"If you're a parent, I would be [concerned] about the conflation between consumption and consumerism and citizenship (in virtual worlds)... our kids are being taught that to be a good citizen of this world you got to buy the right stuff." Sadly, yes.

Technically hardcore, dense paper explaining how the Dungeon Siege environment was constructed without a loading screen. Word of the day: "frustrum". Interesting stuff in here. Now, how to apply it?

Dirty Dancing... PC game? What the hell? I curse the rise of the minigame-as-acceptable-product.

An online version of Slitherlink. Wonderful puzzle game; very addictive.

A nice look at some common stumbling blocks in IF

"Grammar Fascist is a game for everyone who has ever despaired at the pitiful standard of writing displayed on Internet forums. It's a game for everyone who's ever wanted to get in touch with their inner intellectual snob. It's a game for anyone who's eve

Fantastic: a bit of plastic you put over your DualShock2 controller to turn it into *reins*. Affordance a-gogo

Interesting picture. Interesting concepts - and way more interesting than the prototype PSX controllers...

Hurrah! It's Star Control 2!

Really useful article from Bungie on how Halo2 stats are calculated.

Process your Halo2 stats from RSS in... Excel 2003. Only works in that. But the idea's so good...