Also in today's links: crocodile deaths, sugar highs, and the pleasures of video games.

Ah, irony. When we predicted that 2009 would be a year of innovation for the video game business, who knew it would start by pushing the boundaries of silliness? As a visit to the Gaming Showcase pavilion at last week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) proved though, chuckles were in no short supply.

Welcome to 2009. We have seen the future of gaming, and it looks a lot like its for your mother, grandfather and ADD-afflicted pals. Cheerfully, there's still hope for hardcore PC and console enthusiasts. It just doesn’t come in a shiny, shrink-wrapped retail box.

Tick, tick, tick... No matter how often you glance up from that quarterly sales forecast, it still seems like an eternity until 5 o'clock. But with today's increasingly sophisticated free online games, it's easy to kill time and torpedo productivity faster than you can say "TPS report." Recent highlights include the addition of 3D graphics, head-to-head cooperative or competitive multiplayer options and even digitized speech--boosting titles' addictiveness and geek cred alike. Just fire up your favorite Web browser and surf to the following five sites for instant mouse-waggling thrills.

Meet today's hottest new star. He's short and balding, but has an infectious wit and smile that can light up any red carpet. Come to think of it, he looks a lot like me. My rapid rise to celebrity came courtesy of You're in the Movies (Xbox 360), which inserts video from a USB camera into faux film trailers.

The first gamers were not the trendy young teens of today. Bad skin and thick rimmed glasses were practically mandatory for anyone intent on owning an Atari 2600. Perhaps it was the lack of real women in their lives, or maybe the rise of porn videos and lad mags in an increasingly hypersexualized media landscape, that led early programmers to quickly create female video game characters as roughly pixelated, highly sensualized sex objects. Whatever it was, that was only the beginning...

Ah, irony. A couple months ago we were celebrating breakthroughs in hyper-realistic video games. Now paying $60 seems extravagant for a single blockbuster title. But what about enjoying 10 downloadable alternatives for the same price? Faster connections, increasingly intuitive interfaces and ballooning value-priced software catalogues haven't just made digital game purchasing fiscally wise. They've also rendered it addictively simple.

For sentimental types—or just those needing a break from the corporate treadmill—Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Diwali are reason enough to cheer. But for gamers overwhelmed by the year-end tsunami of new titles, we’re declaring a new national holiday: December. Even 31 days isn’t enough to work your way through all the new releases. So to make the most of your month (or however much time you can get free) we recommend starting with these five games that blend the high tech with high adrenaline.

Shots ring out. Sirens split the air. Sunlight streaming on the city's rooftops, you race towards freedom, breath exploding in your lungs, footsteps pounding on the concrete. Suddenly, you've nowhere left to run. Without thinking, you leap. And for the first time ever, in 3D adventure Mirror's Edge (PC/PS3/Xbox 360), you'll discover how the gymnastic maneuver pans out directly through its heroine's eyes.

Like most savvy sci-fi gaming fans, I spent the past weekend channeling my inner Mad Max with a new copy of Fallout, clearing its stunning post-apocalyptic wastelands of ravenous mutant and bloodthirsty raider alike. I’m not talking about the newly released third series installment for computers and next-gen consoles. Rather, thanks to new online distribution service Good Old Games, I’ve been revisiting the original desktop legend instead.

Games are beginning to exploit the computational muscle of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 to generate characters and environments that follow the rules of reality, not just preset sequences.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but they neglected to mention that it’s also a crushing chokehold on the windpipe of creativity. Nowhere is this fact of life more apparent than in this fall’s lineup of upcoming and recently released video games. Look a little closer and you’ll realize—with a few exceptions—that it’s not just this season’s selection of pixelly diversions that suffer from a general lack of originality; it’s a long-running ailment endemic to the entire video game industry.