See, you've spent all this time
wanking around arguing over singletons instead of writing games!
Cas

Damn straight - if you're the one writing your code and only you or a small team have to interoperate, there's no point in worrying too much about the philosophical (or even practical) problems with globals, statics, singletons, etc. If you eff up, you can
always change stuff after the fact without breaking other people's code.
This is a freedom that most "good code" advice assumes you don't have, because a) these books tend to be written by people dealing with far more substantial and publicly-used codebases (Bloch (for instance) is a master, but let's be honest, nobody here is writing code for the audience that he's writing for), and b) the books are generally aimed at people doing enterprise work where the ability to add or alter functionality without changing existing code is crucial.
For game designers these things shouldn't matter very much at all (unless you're writing a general library), because codebases should almost always be independent per-game and don't need to be publicly exposed. You probably
don't need a singleton because you can just decide for yourself that you're just going to create one of the offending object, but on the other hand you
don't need to avoid the pattern if it feels like the best way to go, because you can deal with the ways that it sucks by holding yourself to a similar mental contract.
You'd probably be shocked to see the internal state of many games that you know and love. What's important is not how it's written, it's how it plays and
how long it took to write - nobody's maintaining these things after they're released, you've got to get it right the first time (well, unless you're dealing with something massive like an MMO, but that's venturing into EE-level scope, so it's a different ballgame). If you can cut corners and stay within spec, by all means do it. All the Flash game developers do, and to be frank, I suspect they're putting out a lot more content per-developer than we are!