The Sunday Papers

Jim's moving house. You can tell, because if you lean your ear in the direction of Bath, you can hear the screaming. So he's asked me to compile this week's Sunday Papers. But don't worry, I've learned the ul and li tags, so it should all be fine.

• One of the rules of gaming is that if you wait enough years, eventually people will tell you about the disasters. Not Rockstar. But despite this, gaming's best investigative journalist, Simon Parkin, set out to discover what actually led to Rockstar's "Hot Coffee" fiasco eight years ago. "Now, sex was the “natural” progression, as he put it to Kolbe, an essential topic for games to cover if they were to claim the creative freedom afforded literature and cinema. Obscuring sex from the world of GTA: San Andreas would be a betrayal of vision, a self-moderating disservice to the game, to the entire medium."
• Daniel C. Starkey writes a moving piece about his remarkable mother, and how he has inextricably connected her to his Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect games. "When I finished the final game, I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t really want to talk about it much. I needed time to figure out why I felt the way I did and why this ending in particular was so hard for me to really understand. I think I got it now, though. Finally."
• Sometimes I think The Sunday Papers could just be links to Nightmare Mode - it really is a fantastic site for intelligent gaming discussion. This piece by Cara Ellison, Romero's Wives, follows on from the #1ReasonWhy conversation.
• What's inside Peter Molyneux's Curiosity cube? Madness, if Pocket Gamer's diary is anything to go by. "Put bees on it, Molyneux. Put bees on it, man. I put bees on it, so why can't you? Bees."
• City Of Heroes demolished the streets of Paragon last week. Alec lamented the lost of his character, The Entomologist, here. I really haven't paused to allow myself to think about the loss of mine, Nitefall - she was the first self-created character I ever cared about, and it feels... it feels just awful that the code behind her existence no longer exists. Brrr, don't want to think about it. But Richard Cobbett has, chronicling the last few hours of the wonderful MMO for Eurogamer.
• Jim forgot to include this final part of Ian Bogost's Persuasive Games series last week. So here it is now. "The sensation of being split between the television and the handheld computer feels strange and awkward. But isn't this precisely how all of us feel today, all the time? Torn between the lush absorption of newly cinematic television and the lo-fi repetition of streams of text and image on our mobile phones and tablets?"
• There's been a bit of fuss about the generic, unrepresentative cover art reveal for BioShock: Infinite. A game that many are hoping will be something unique has gone with a grumpy man holding a gun. Wired's take is certainly coming from one that does its best to ignore any complexity as to why people are frustrated, but in speaking to Ken Levine they get some interesting answers. "My salad dressing. If there’s a new salad dressing coming out, I would have no idea. I use salad dressing; I don’t read Salad Dressing Weekly. I don’t care who makes it, I don’t know any of the personalities in the salad dressing business."

Music this week comes from the jumpiest of all the jumpy bands - Math The Band. It's a new one!