OK, Google’s Chrome browser just officially became scary/magnicent. It’s been able to run a few games – like Plants vs Zombies – in a browser window for a while now, but the excellent Bastion has just been added, marking a serious step up in what’s technologically possible. The game starts playing in seconds of adding it, it looks just like the standard version as far as I can tell, runs smoothly and scales to your screen/window size. Oh, and you can play a free demo then pay to unlock the full thing right away if you like. It’s achieved via something called Native Client, which basically allows a new level of graphicsology. Yes, that’s the official explanation. The important bit is that it doesn’t require any plugins – it just works. As long as you have Chrome, anyway.

Obviously we’re a long way short of running Battlefield 3 in a browser, but if I was the Microsontendo guys I’d be pretty damn worried right now. Who needs bespoke, closed hardware when this is possible?