Indie developer Cliff Harris is on the verge of releasing a brand new game and is feeling a little bit nervous. With life simulator Kudos 2 set to hit shelves on Wednesday, Cliff weighs up the pros and cons of being indie and tries not to stress himself to death.

Guest columnist Cliff Harris is upset this week, lamenting the decline of truly free-form, sandbox gaming on the PC. When did real sandbox games like Sim City become unfashionable and get replaced with linear FPS games? Why won't someone give us back our sand?

Google surprised just about all of us in the bit-tech office when it announced Chrome - its first foray into the browser market. Tim Smalley has been playing around with the first beta for a few days and has some thoughts on the browser's direction.

Continuing after his recent piracy survey, Cliff Harris wants to ask you a question about how happy games make you and whether choice is always a good thing. Cliff outlines a new pricing model for games based on how happy they make players.

Are all games that phone-home to a publishers server inherently bad? Isn't it possible that in some case copy-protection can be a good thing that can help game design? Cliff Harris ponders how the software that traps us could also be used to free us.

Why is it that different countries seem to produce such different games and what does this mean for the games industry? In a world where Japanese RPGs are a large enough part of the market to have their own acronym, what can the western world bring to the table?