I always thought Alessi were a pretty grotesque design company, making expensive objects that bastardise functionality and beauty. The classic: Starck’s Juicy Salif, an orange squeezer that appears to reinvent the way we extract juice from citrus fruit with elegance and simplicity, and which makes a whole fucking mess of it. And what’s this? Here I am beguiled by founder Alberto Alessi in a new interview with The Guardian. He calls Alessi customers ‘design victims’ (“Design victims are very important to our business model”) and calls another Starck project, the Hot Bertaa kettle, “a complete fiasco”, going on to say something amazing:

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Fugazi have been archiving and making available to buy live recordings of their about-a-billion gigs, which is such a fantastic project, partly for the fact the whole thing plays so true to their attitude. Done themselves, and in this context: There is a lot to be excited about in the ways we produce and consume music in 2014, but it’s often difficult to decipher where the music ends and the contextual media structures around it begin.

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Soon after we moved to Bath in 2007, my wife started up her own cake making company called Baby Cakes. It’s turned out to be rather successful! Her cakes have been featured in American Vogue, she’s Stork margarine’s official baking expert and has judged national cake competitions, and she’s left a trail of many happy customers behind her. Anyway, my small part in it is that I made her website. Actually I’ve made three of them now.

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Dyad is a lovely game, and I reviewed it for PC Gamer. There aren’t many games that can be described as beautiful, but Dyad is one of them. Spinning together a mesmerising blend of music and image with tight and ever-shifting game rules, it’s one of the most beguiling and uplifting games I’ve experienced. And that’s speaking as a Rez obsessive. → Read in full at PC Gamer

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AGES ago, I reviewed for PC Gamer Ubisoft’s standalone offshoot of Far Cry 3. Blood Dragon is an odd game, engineered to achieve multiple aims: to get the internet LOLing at its 80s action game stylings; to reuse as much of FC3’s graphical assets as possible; and to somehow fit into Far Cry’s Heart of Darkness-y pondering of the nature of masculinity and unfettered violence. It kind of works! At least in the sense that chops away anything that gets in the way of running, leaping, driving and firing guns.

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I wrote my first piece for Eurogamer on a fantastic puzzle game called Sokobond a couple of weeks ago. I don’t actually like puzzle games very much. Their typically stringent demands and lack of flexibility to explore their mechanics bores me. Sokobond is completely different. To me, the best puzzle games feel like they’ve been discovered, not designed. Like they’ve always been there, waiting for someone to come along and uncover them.

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I find the concept of Valve making a gaming PC for the living room fascinating for many reasons. There’s the drama in a software company trying to come to grips with making hardware. There’s Valve’s determination to also introduce a new controller paradigm, which could be amazing. And there’s the chance to witness in a public forum Valve grapple with the choices between making something sufficiently cheap, quiet, small and powerful, each factor jostling against the other.

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I wrote about finding the beauty in GTAV through its details, cos the details are what I’ve always loved GTA for. And then I took selfie photos of them, just because it seemed fitting. I wish I could’ve invested about an extra week of time into finding these details, but I kept getting into scrapes while I explored. There’s so much more to find – and love – in the margins of this incredible game.

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A while back I built on a post I wrote here about Crusader Kings II for Edge. It’s a game I can never seem to find enough time to play, but it certainly deserves it. Crusader Kings II isn’t a standard PC strategy game. Sure, it’s played from a map view and there are tables of stats to lose yourself in, there’s gold, Piety and Prestige to be collected, and tech upgrades to build.

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In full grump mode, for Edge I moaned about the current focus on reviving 1990s games and properties. Obviously it got the usual accusations of being joyless, but c’mon. Do we really want to be playing Superfrog HD? …the 90s revivalism of which Knightmare is part is everywhere today. There’s The Bitmap Brothers’ evidently meticulous upcoming remake of The Chaos Engine. There’s Wayforward’s evidently meticulous upcoming remake of DuckTales. There’s the rising spectre of The Pickford Brothers’ Plok, too, which has just re-emerged as a webcomic that surely means it’s about to return full-formed as a brand old game.

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