For fans of innovation, the PlayStation 3's download service, PSN, has been a lovely thing. It has brought gamers things like "flOw" and "Everday Shooter."

And this Winter it will bring gamers an episodic sitcom game called "Rat Race."

On Tuesday, I interviewed comedian and head writer of the game Victor Varnado for MTV News. Turns out he's a bona fide gamer with some programming roots as well.

He says all the right things about "Rat Race" and the trick art of making a game funny. This game sounds like it has a chance to hit its mark. (Watch Varnao's stand-up here, if you want to see what his sense of humor is all about).

But what if you've already heard of "Rat Race," seen some clips from it on GameTrailers, and wondered why it wasn't funnier? From my story:

"Here's what really happened," said Varnado, who followed the reaction. "Some of the stuff that was leaked onto GameTrailers was some of the stuff meant for internal use, not something that was a finished product that would go out." He said some of the material was created to test the game's technology and didn't represent the finished product. "That isn't our best foot forward," he said. Only the video about the roach-bait commercial had gone through the proper approval process. And that one, he said, got the most positive response. "We'll make sure that what we put out next is something we've gone over and that we're proud of."

Read the rest of the story and find out what the first episode will be about in my full story at MTVNews.com.

Let's not waste too much time here. Hot on the heels of last month's "Zelda" edition of the N'Gai-Stephen Vs. Mode exchanges, we're launching a week-long discussion of "Portal."

If you've played the game, I think you may already be hooked. Why is this game so important? What should other developers copy from it? What's the likelihood that they will? What are the three lessons I think the game can teach the industry? What is the single best quality N'Gai has found in the game? Which of us finds a way to compare "Portal" to "True Crime"?

Read on below (or, if you want to view it in a different layout, go read it at N'Gai's "Level Up" blog). Be forewarned: THERE ARE "Portal" SPOILERS THROUGHOUT THIS POST

Some highlights:

Totilo: At the end of 2007, the accountants and the titans of the industry will look back and everyone outside of Take Two will say, "We need a… 'BioShock.'" They won't say they need a "Portal." Why?

Croal: Forget "American Gangster"; I wish that videogames had a sufficiently visible cultural profile that Jay-Z would create an entire album inspired by "Portal".

Come back to Multiplayer later in the week for Round Two.

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Ten months in the making, "I Love Lucy" and "Honeymooners" games are on the way. And we have video proof.

Now, don't tell me you don't know these shows. Sure MTV isn't for the old, but have we no sense of culture or history?

Last week I spoke to Steve Bergenholtz, CEO of newly announced game development company Beanbag Studios, about how he's managing to turn two of the most famous shows in television history into video games — casual PC and cell phone games.

So you get the license, and then what?I asked this before proposing a bus-racing "Honeymooners" bus-racing game, mind you.

Bergenholtz's answers, his comments on prospects of the game appearing on the Wii and a video of "The Honeymooners Bowling" follow...
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Which presidential candidate should Electronic Arts endorse? Who should Sony back?

Might Konami throw in for Hillary Clinton? Jaleco for Giuliani? (Hey, is Jaleco still around?)

I don't know. But Gamecock, the games publisher  determined to consistently perform the most eccentric publicity stunts, will announce today that they are backing Stephen Colbert for president.

It is just a stunt, of course, an extra flaming-car barrel roll added to Colbert's own stunt campain -- which has been, well, stunted.

With Colbert's efforts shot down in South Carolina, the Austin-based game publisher is encouraging the pretend-pundit to re-launch his campaign in the Lone Star State. Gamecock is offering its home office as a campaign headquarters.

In a statement, Gamecock CEO Mike Wilson explained the reason for the endorsement -- at least the joke reason...
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If you're played the "Phoenix Wright" Nintendo DS games you may have noticed that they're a little different.

Part throw-back to text-adventure games, part shining beacon of how funny games can still intentionally be.

Part rare video game coutroom drama, part case study in just how non-interactive a game can be.

Last week I e-mailed Capcom a bunch of questions about the series:

How do these games get made? How do they get so funny? Would they designers ever make a law game in which you only defend guilty people? What have lawyers said to you about these games? And so on...

I wrote up some of the answers in my MTV News GameFile column yesterday, but I found the interview so interesting that I'm posting the whole thing here. Some of the answers were quite brainy, much to my delight.

Two things jumped out at me in the interview. The first is series producer Minae Matsukawa's description of the relationship between the player and Phoenix Wright, the character they control.

We also wanted to betray the player’s feelings. The player may want Phoenix to do one thing, but he’ll do another, even after the player knows what’s really going on. Playing through an Ace Attorney game, you can see that Phoenix is one part the player, and one part his own character, Phoenix Wright. And when the player walks around, they solve the case both with and as Phoenix at the same time. In a way, this case set out to betray not only the player, but also the character Phoenix himself.

The other ties into a comment made by gamer Calvin Smith on a "Zelda" post I published yesterday. He lamented that "a lot of developers and gamers claim open-endedness as a virtue." When I asked Matsukawa about the common critique that the gameplay in "Phoenix Wright" is too linear, she said:

If we were to give players any more leeway ... the structure of the game would fundamentally change. We wouldn’t be able to tell a single story anymore if there were too many paths. Also, what we want the players to enjoy is not so much the solving of each riddle they come across them one at a time, but rather, the ability to use their logic to put together what happened as they collect the pieces of the larger puzzle, as it were, and that’s something that we feel is an important aspect of the game.

Food for thought. The full interview is below.

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(UPDATE: It was annouced that "Still Alive" will be made avalible as a playable song in "Rock Band")

Jonathan Coulton has written a song that is sung in a new video game. People are talking about it. People even want to download it.

That doesn’t happen very often.

Not to Jonathan Coulton video game songs -- of which only one exists.

Not to any songwriter's video game songs -- of which there really aren’t many.

I spoke to my fellow Brooklynite Coulton on the phone last week to find out more about "Still Alive," the song he wrote for the closing credits of the Valve-developed first-person-shooter puzzle game "Portal." The game has been the surprise hit of the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC combo pack called "The Orange Box."

Yes, "Portal" fans, you growing army. This post is about that song. (If you haven't played the game through yet, don't listen to it. It's full of spoilers.)

But before Coulton and I talked about his song and any future video game song work he might do, we tried to figure out his place in video-game-song history. You know, the video game history that has ... how many famous video game songs? I’m talking about songs with lyrics. Any?

We floundered.

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People hate video game cut-scenes. I see their point.

People skip video game cut-scenes. I can't do that. In fact, I've never done that. Surely I can't be the only one?

Years ago -- before it was in vogue to hate health bars and boss battles -- it was cool to complain about cut-scenes. The flashy, melodramatic movies that appeared betweenc chapters of gameplay undermined games by interrupting interactivity. They misrepresented the graphics in the games they were in. They told bad stories. They needed to be skipped, and, wouldn't you know that the worst kind of cut-scene was one that an A or X button couldn't eradicate in one tap.

People who made games knew gamers felt this way. They still do. Konami employees, for example, tell me about avid "Metal Gear Solid" fans who ignore every cut-scene. And a few weeks ago, at E3, "Simpsons" TV show and video game writer Matt Selman made his case to me for the cut-scenes in this fall's "Simpsons" EA game by acknowledging their universal notoriety:

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Over at MTVNews.com I recount the E3 demo I was given of EA's promising "The Simpsons Game." I'd love to tell you more about the story, but I've got some other posts to blog to you folks about. So here's a link.

And here's an excerpt:

"The game's creators let MTV News run a caped Bart through the "Shadow of the Colossal Donut" level, while a developer rolled a powered-up, spherical Homer with a second controller. Lard Lad stomped through a construction site, but Bart, with his trusty slingshot, was able to stop Lard Lad in his tracks. A hatch opened on the giant lad's back and started flashing.

"Suddenly, the game paused. Comic Book Guy appeared on-screen along with a line of text congratulating the player on finding one of 31 video game clichés tucked in the "Simpsons" adventure: the obvious weak point on the boss character. "It's the only game that can call out its own clichés," [creative director Jonathan] Knight said proudly."

Note that they will neither confirm nor deny Jack Thompson references in the game. But they will confirm that even EA itself is in for a serious skewering.