Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Sundays for waking up in Luton. Luton? Really? Yes. Luton is actually nicer than you remember. At least 67% nicer. I mean it. Anyway, Lutons aside, it’s time for some words on videogames and things.

• PopSci on Sniper Elite V2′s gory killcam: “And that’s part of the what makes Sniper Elite V2 so interesting. It is easily the most graphic, violent video game I’ve ever seen, but the violence is relatively realistic, not cartoony. The game has the dubious honor of humanizing Nazis more than any of the scores of WWII-era games, films, and books that came before it: these are not anonymous targets, dispatched from far away with the tug of the R-trigger: once you see testicles exploded, fingers severed, an artery slashed open by the force of your bullet, that you shot, from your own gun, you feel the effects of your actions in a way I didn’t expect. The original idea might well have been to create the most extreme, violent period shooter ever made. Blood! Guts! X-rays! But the effect is the complete opposite. You’re not yanking a cartoon ninja’s spine out of his body with your bare hands, or stabbing a shrieking purple alien with a glowing light-sword. You’re killing people. And that’s a messy business.”

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Sundays are for sleeping it off. Later, you realise you didn’t manage to round up a collection of excellent game-related links and writing from the previous week. Gods no! What can be done about it? Well, you can publish it the next day. Phew!

• Brainy Gamer talk about the “wholesome cacophony” of the ongoing “dumbness” debate within games commentary: “If Theater is high art in an echo chamber, and video games are low art in a cacophony, I’ll take the cacophony. The great video game conversation is happening 24/7 worldwide – rants, fanboys, and flamewars included. It’s a wholesome cacophony and an irrepressible sign of life.” And that’s pretty much my take, too. Thanks, Internet. Keep making lots of noise. Related, here’s their list of smart games.

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Sundays aren’t often for sun, as the name would suggest, but on the rare occasion when the beams of atomic light do make it past the cloud cover, it’s worth enjoying. Perplexingly, though, my laptop screen is hardly visible in the sunshine, meaning I must retreat to my cave for the study of important videogame links and literature. Hm.

• Matthew Burns on the “Dumbness” debate: “Another way of saying this is: it is extremely difficult— maybe impossible— to come up with a story and characters that, when placed within the context of most current video games, don’t feel inherently silly.” And another perspective from The Guardian.

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Sundays are for quiet regret. Don’t spend too long on that maudlin stuff though, because you’ve only got a limited time to make the most of what you love. And if you are reading this site, then you probably love videogames. Let’s see what’s been going on with them.

• True PC Gaming interviews Arcen’s Chris Park: “What we do run afoul of, however, is that exact same problem but with complexity instead. During alpha the game grew enormously complex, and we still thought it was too simple. Turns out we had the opposite problem of what we thought. During early beta in particular, one of our big challenges was to streamline the ideas of the game so that they were more accessible to players. And the other challenge throughout beta was making the game adequately explain itself to players as they progress.”

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Sundays are for packing away nerd paraphernalia into boxes, and wondering if you will ever see it again, or if it will one day be unearthed from a forgotten loft by your grandchildren. They are also for sitting with the quiet hum of a computer and leafing through the internet pages from the past week. What have we read? What will we read?

• I’m sure most of you have browsed The Valve Handbook For New Employees, but if not, you probably should.

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Sunday! It’s the day of the week when your latent super-powers are at their most useful. Let’s see if we can use those innate abilities to find interesting reading material. Hmm, it’s somewhere around here.

• Games and the making of ominous architecture: “Regardless of what monstrosities we face, digital environments must capture our attention and establish a grim atmosphere. Yet for the most part, the architectures of horror games draw on symbols that we commonly associate with fear and revulsion. From Castle Wolfenstein to Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the stonework, mildew ridden basements, dark hallways, and cobwebbed attics of gothic mansions remain established horror locales. Many games, including the two above, use their environments remarkably well. Regardless, the frequency of candlelit masonry tests my patience.” (I wrote something similar a few years ago.)

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Oh dear, it turns out I was just too busy with eating eggs for the Rabbit God yesterday. How about we try the compilation of links and game-related reading today? I know it’s radical, but it might just work.

• A proposal for Lego X-Com: “The basic idea was to have two teams of LEGO figures pitted against each other, and it’s around here that I started seeing an analogue, LEGO version of XCom for my inner eye (in the turn based squad game with destructible environment sense). We built a scene using a regular LEGO baseplate and put together a squad of three LEGO figures each, where each one could choose one ‘weapon’ (only variants non-lethal sleep lasers allowed I’m afraid) and one special ability that we agreed upon before hand.”

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Sundays are for planning the conquest of central Europe. It doesn’t all have to be violence, of course. I am sure some of those Kingdoms will give way to diplomacy. Anyway, all that stuff is for the afternoon, right now we have to plan the conquest of a week’s worth of videogame writings. Let’s see what’s ripe for plunder.

• Tom Francis writes about the exquisite Proteus: “Even once most of your curiosity is satisfied, your exploration is still motivated by music. It’s quiet at night, so I headed to the place that was most frenetic by day: the trees. Their tone and mood is different with the moon out, and it gave my song a new texture. I found an unusual creature and chased it. Each time it ran from me, its movement struck a new cord, one which tinkled on as long as I followed in its wake. It led me out of the trees, over a mountain, through the desert, and finally leapt into the sea. Its thread faded from the music, and as I watched the water glint, I realised the sun was coming up.”

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Sunday mornings are for waking up under a stream of sunlight and realising you need to get out of bed and compile a list of interesting reading for the internet’s unblinking gaze. Yes, the ‘Papers are more important than sleep – Up, Rossignol, and to the coalface!

Actually, I will sit in the garden for a bit with a cup of tea and it’ll be late. Sorry about that.

• You should start today by reading Richard Cobbett’s retrospective of Wasteland. What with the big Kickstarter and everything, it’s worth remembering what it was all about: “When combat starts, I yawn. That might seem strange, and yes, RPGs have always been combat heavy. For me though, fighting things and looting their corpses has never been the point. Instead, when I buy one, it’s for the joy of entering and exploring a new world, poking around a new culture, and ideally savouring the journey like a tourist instead of feeling trapped on a rail.” Oh, if only RPG designers remembered that…

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Sundays are for looking at far away places on the map and feeling a bit like Truman. I should like to go to Fiji. One day. Now though, it’s time to consider other escapes, and the things people write about them.

• We’ll have our own feature on this soon, but I wanted to link to Gnome’s Lair’s coverage of Wing Commander Saga, the freeware project intended to bring that franchise back to life in the Freespace 2 engine: “Features don’t make games great. What makes them great is the love poured into them, great game dynamics, and solid storytelling–and we’ve done our best to make sure Wing Commander Saga has all of that. We, as designers, wanted to ensure that the entire experience is exciting: the game makes you feel that you are not just watching the action but actually stepping into the role and experiencing what it is like to be Sandman.”

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Sundays are for nursing a bout of insomnia with some gentle electronica and cup of tea. It’s a beautiful misty morning here in the West. Perfect for collating some internet writings before setting off for a long walk to a pub lunch. After that, surely, a man will be able to sleep.

• Mr Garratt on why Molyneux quitting Microsoft is such a good thing: “No one deserves the accolades more. Peter Molyneux is British gaming’s national treasure, a genius creative who’s pushed games in areas no one else has dared. Yes, he’s failed on more than one occasion, but that’s because he’s tried. In such a risk-averse industry, that’s rare. If you push you will fall, but he never stops. Going it alone again means he can experiment in ways a large corporation would never allow, that he can remain on the road of innovation.”

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