From Iain Tait’s Trend Predictions For 2010. Spot on, I say, and a good thing, too.

Commentary is and should be disparate - to attempt to contain all relevant discussion in the tidy comments list below the original article is just pissing in the wind. And the good stuff is so often dislocated from the source, anyway - I rarely comment on posts, but often talk about them elsewhere.

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• A short history of Team Fortress 2 updates - Smart Tom Francis looks at how Valve has built on its Team Fortress multiplayer shooter since release in 2007 with a raft of character abilities which have fundamentally changed the way the game plays (two of which Francis came up with himself, more or less).

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• Troy Gilbert deconstructs Zelda movement mechanics - Superbly techy, this. Game developer Troy Gilbert looks at the pixel-by-pixel technique The Legend Of Zelda uses to stop Link getting caught on the scenery. It reveals Miyamoto's lovely bit of clever trickery to, as Gilbert says, ensure "the player’s desire is successfully expressed in the gameworld, regardless of the potentially pedantic ways of the computer."

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London design agency Berg has released a video presenting its fascinating proposal, made for magazine publisher Bonnier, for a tablet interface for magazines. Everyone’s doing it these days - Time Inc. released a video showing a prototype for Sports Illustrated, while a video of Conde Nast’s Wired tablet app appeared at Wired promotional event last month. All in preparation for the rumoured appearance of Apple’s 10-inch tablet in January.

It’s all at once fascinating, exciting and scary for paper magazine producers like me.

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• Playful - Anyone else going to this on Friday? With many of London's technorati there, it promises to be a fun do.

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• Lou's Pseudo 3d Page - One of the things that delights me most about videogames are the little hacks that transform pixels into worlds, and in olden times, emulating 3D space was one, big, glorious hack. My favourite: background raster effects. Drool.
• Is the Magazine Dead? « Jimmy Wales - "The death of the traditional magazine has come about because people are demanding more information, of better quality, and faster," says Wales, touting Wikia's new print-on-demand service. Better quality, eh? Really? Or do they just lap up fast and, most importantly, free information?
• Small Worlds - It's a special game, Small Worlds. As much as I'm often annoyed by intentionally lo-fi pixel graphics like this (I find them retro-fetishistic and a put-off to people who don't hungrily treasure games' mythically wonderful past), here they're gloriously expressive, as Mike Nowak says.

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I’ve read a couple of wonderful comics lately, Christophe Blain’s Isaac The Pirate (thanks, Aaron), and Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha (thanks, Rich).

You’ll probably be aware of Tezuka already - he’s the man that helped to kickstart manga and anime in Japan in the 50s with Astro Boy and other such fusions of Disney and earlier Japanese visual arts, like kibyōshi. Blain’s not so familiar to British shores, but he’s a stalwart of the French comic scene, having worked on the Dungeon series.

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Every game should have a photo mode. Not just the ability to grab a screenshot but to be able to manipulate it and add effects. Wipeout HD’s photo mode is great. Instantly available from the pause screen, it only allows three simple camera types - trackside, cockpit and rotating around the ship - but has a suite of motion blur, exposure and depth of field effects that are lovely to play with.

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You can smell films that are based on plays a mile off. It must be difficult to take a story made for the stage and perform it in front of a camera without theatre’s static nature and wordiness making itself obvious. It’s certainly a clear part of Rope, Hitchcock’s 1948 flick about Nietzschean Ivy League gays attempting to commit the perfect murder. The film is great fun, mixing high tension with a sharp sense of humour, and as such comes highly recommended.

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This is a post from my old blog, circa early 2006. It was probably its most successful in terms of readers (a modest claim, to be honest) and how pleased I was with it, and it also generated some angry responses, accusing me of petty, bourgeois narrow mindedness. That wasn’t my intention at all, of course - I just kinda thought that there was a a new generation of people that had forgotten, or had never experienced, true boredom in a world increasingly tuned to providing continuous partial attention. Self-indulgent it may be, but here it is again - now with footnotes!

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