Sundays are a day for organising hook ups with brothers and sisters in arms. Can I arrange two meals with friends in a day? It seems unlikely. So instead of even trying that stuff, let’s just compile a particularly bountiful list of intelligent game pieces from across the week while trying to avoid linking to the free single Art Goes Pop gave me for attending a gig on Monday.
- Probably the big talking piece in serious videogames this week. The Rapeplay debate continues to cross over to the mainstream with ally-of-RPS Leigh Alexander’s even-handed piece on it for serious-big-boy site Slate. Which gets picked up all over the place. Leigh adds some thoughts on the whole situation here.
- Tangentially connected, CNET on whether the videogame industry is losing the PR battle. Primarily, noting the industry has always done very little to stand up to those who want to demonise gaming, both in terms of the impact to health and morality. I think I agree with this one, and the don’t-cause-a-fuss-isms is increasingly embarrassing. There’s certainly developers I wonder whether I can be bothered defending when they don’t do so themselves.
- Actually, Lady Alexander’s done good this week – she picks up one of my perennial talking points (in pubs, rather than in writing – I’ve never really took a proper swing at it in text). That games actually hold more in common with music than – say – films. Of course, this is all metaphor, but looking at it through that filter reveals truths about games which other paradigms leave unexamined.
- I’m delaying my Bioshock post until I’ve actually read the articles in question – and less Game Informer, but rather PC GAMER UK’s because Tom Francis is writing it. He knows Bioshock about as well as he does Galactic Civilizations, and I trust him to have asked the right questions and interpret the answers the in the right way. God, I’m such a terrible elitist. Anyway, until then, here’s someone who’s actually got scans to support what they’re saying in the thread, so at least you can have a good moan about what’s actually in the game.
- Internet theory-bod Clay Shirky writes about the fundamental doom of the newspaper press and what happens now. Long, but with a striking clarity and worth thinking about. Especially for those reading who still work in print. How much of this applies to videogame print? In the US? In the UK? Just think.
- Simon Byron writes for Develop about Metacritic. At the moment, he’s off on a stag do to celebrate Dave McCarthy leaving other women alone. He’s probably drunk. He wasn’t drunk when he wrote this, and he skewers the system brutally and funnily.
- We’ve done pretty much no coverage of Sins of a Solar Empire’s add-on Emergence. Why? We were probably sleeping. Anyway, Tom Chick takes up the slack with a hefty interview with Ironclad’s Blair Fraser about the problems of adding the turtle back to a game in space. Amongst other stuff.
- Point/Counterpoint. Point: Edge’s Age Of Steam article charts the origins of Valve’s delivery service, believe in a continuing dominance and makes a really good pun in the title. Counterpoint: Stardock’s Brad Wardell wonders why they believe early lead equals permanent and continuing dominance, but doesn’t make a pun.
- Actually, while we’re over on Edge, why Poland, China and Brazil matter. Growth of new markets and moneterization, probably.
- A big ol’ feature on Fear in games over at the ever-unfortunately-named Four Fat Chicks.
- Wired on why Peggle crossed over to hardcore gamers and turned other casual fans off. Apparently.
- Phil Cameron (aka Poisoned Sponge) makes the jump from amateur to pro with his interview with Flashbang on their Blurst-plans for GameSetWatch. Go you. Meanwhile, Simon Carless just bangs out another off the cuff piece of brilliance when he notes that indie coverage in mainstream venues is actually an enormously important part of the development of the form.
- Rob Hale on ways to make your AI appear smarter in his continuing experiments in games-design blogging. He’ll get his GDC speech soon enough. Which does make me wonder why I never get invited to speak at Develop. I bet Owain hates me. Sad face.
- Stinky Munchkins – Release the Lions. What a lovely gift.
Failed.
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Matt W – have you considered that when we are old we will turn into grumpy old men? While we may not be calling for a ban on games outright, we will be angrily complaining that the shit the kids are playing is bad and not like the real games we had when we were kids.
We’ll probably get all worried about how neurovenously holo-optic gaming is causing space cancer.
“have you considered that when we are old we will turn into grumpy old men? While we may not be calling for a ban on games outright, we will be angrily complaining that the shit the kids are playing is bad and not like the real games we had when we were kids.”
From reading comments threads, I suspect we haven’t got long to wait.
KG
I like games!
I think the concept of AAA games and massive budgets is putting a strain on the release of games that are “special” like wot der used to be. Then again there were an awful lot of crap games made around the same time as the System Shocks and the PS:Ts and the Thiefs of this world, so maybe people just remember the good ones. I still think the best of “then” is better than the best of “recently” however. It’s probably just me but I haven’t felt that same spark of pure genius in a game I’ve played since the likes of the aformentioned or the original Half Life.
That’s not to say there aren’t excellent games being released and every now and then one comes pretty close.
@AndrewC, not only that, but there’ll also be some new-fangled thing that we can’t even guess at right now that the kids will all be doing, and we’ll disapprove of that just as strongly as current grumpy old men are disapproving of video games, forgetting in our advanced years that we went through exactly the same pointless argument from the other side when we were younger. Seems to be the way of things, unfortunately.
Hell, there’ll probably be a government campaign suggesting that kids should stop doing [new-fangled thing] and go back to playing video games instead.
Oh god I hate [new-fangled thing]. Especially since Ken Levine left.
Late game Saint’s Row 2 gleefully knocks anything that ‘then’ offered into a cocked hat – now is best.
Jim: “PCG UK’s peak readership was over 80k, around the time of the Quake III review.”
Can I take a stab at who wrote that?
It wasn’t. It was Pierce.
KG
Ah, OK. Yeah, I guess Jim got the job after Q3 came out, if I remember my This Gaming Life correctly.
On the Death of Print Journalism thing – I think there’s a lot to be said for quality. I stopped buying an Australian PC gaming mag because they – in my opinion – became more about hyping big games and big names rather then giving interesting and well written opinions on PC gaming.
I find Eurogamer and RPS to be vastly more relevant to my interests – even as an essentially pure PC gamer (I have a DS too for teh trains), a specialist mainstream magazine was less relevant then the combined might of a well written general gaming site and a PC enthusiast blog.
For the record, the Rocky tanked because it was horribly run for a long time, not because of declining standards or the death of newsprint. It doesn’t matter how good your product is if you can’t make any money from it, and the management ensured that was the case for the Rocky.