Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Sundays are for getting home late from London because of tea. No, really, tea is to blame for a late Sunday Papers.

• True PC Gaming’s Roguelikes Breakdown is, well, true PC gaming. They don’t manage to avoid the “rouge” typo, though. “When you find loot in a Roguelike it may not always be something good. One of the classic tropes is undefined items. In these games you will come across a potion and the only description you get is – a blue potion. You have no idea what it does. Well, why would you? Some guy just wandering through a dungeon shouldn’t automatically know everything about what’s down there. You have three choices of what to do with the blue potion: drink it, drop it or hold it and hope to identify it later. Drinking is the quickest, but most dangerous, option. Some potions may restore health or temporarily increase your attack power, but not all are beneficial. If it poisons, paralyzes or permanently reduces your strength then you know not to drink any more.”

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Sundays! Days of quiet contemplation of the victories ahead. Sundays! A time to consider the ideas offered by your fellow gamers. Sundays.

• I could have sworn I’d already posted this article on “The Simulation Dream”, but I see I have not. It’s essential reading. “That’s the Simulation Dream – the idea of making a complex simulation of a story world, which creates fascinating emergent stories as powerful as those you might write yourself. The idea bursts with potential. And it appears everywhere. Early in the development of BioShock, that game had an ecology too. There were three parts to it. Splicers would hunt Gatherers, who were in turn guarded by Protectors. The player was supposed to interact with and manipulate this ecology to survive. But these dreams shattered.”

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Sundays are for urrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrghh.

• Chris Plante on Klei: “The beta and two-for-one sale had a multiplicative effect, one Cheng recognizes probably can’t be repeated for every game. He credits the sense of discovery in Don’t Starve. When the beta went on sale on Steam, the most popular downloadable game platform on PC, the sales flew faster and faster. There was never a sales spike so much as a continual movement upwards.”

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Sundays are for worshipping the sun god. Careful though, because sacrificing meat on the burning altar of bar-be-cue may enrage him further. Later, as you hide in your cave from the blazing skygod, perhaps you’ll read about the happenings of the computer people. Or perhaps you’ll simply sleep.

• Simon Parkin on “that cancer game”: “Joel is four years old and currently fighting his third year of terminal cancer. His young body has already endured a life’s worth of surgery, of chemotherapy, of prayer. The tumours have left him partially deaf and blind and, at one point, forced him to relearn how to walk. Yet he remains a survivor, confounding his medical team’s expectations with a resolute determination to stick with life, with his brothers, with his lot. But while the family remain in the eye of this storm – next week Joel has an MRI scan to check whether the skewered tumours have returned – they’ve chosen this moment to express their story through a video game. Why now?”

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Sundays are for telepathy and cake. But that’s not all there is to life. There is also the contemplation of electronic contraptions. And they are many.

• An important (for the desktop colonel) article on recent developments in the strategy genre: “Strategy no longer means what it once did. The prominence of League of Legends and DOTA 2 and the recent failure of games like Age of Empires Online and Fall of Nations has led to a shift in what publishers and developers think people want. MOBAs now dominate the online space, there’s no getting around that, and who can blame them? These games are easy to get into, have a huge and dedicated community. Why would you develop anything else?”

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Sundays are for listening for the distant horn blasts of the approaching army. But while you wait for death on the windswept battlements of the final wall protecting your kingdom, why not read some interesting game-related links?

• Polygon present the story of Octodad: “During college, I discovered that I really … wanted to work on games, but became increasingly insecure about the quality of my work. … My level of anxiety reached its peak right before I started working on [the first Octodad]. It was to the point where I wasn’t able to sleep at night because I was terrified of not being successful. … I was worried that I’d be revealed as a fraud, that I never should have been picked for this [DGE] team in the first place and I didn’t have anything meaningful to contribute.”

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Sundays are for fighting a harrowing trans-dimensional war with an army of psychic aliens. Later: a roast dinner. Ah, lovely.

• Mike Rose writes about Andy Schatz and Monaco: “It’s interesting, because it really made me sympathize with a guy like Peter Molyneux, who talks about his games in the way that he imagines they’ll be like when they’re done. If you’re talking about a game in development, it’s very difficult not to talk about them as you imagine them to be. You really should talk about them as they are, and not as you imagine them to be.”

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Sundays are for retreating to your fortress of solitude as the heroic armies of light make a mess of your empire of darkness. Ah, well, there’s always next week, Lord Evil.

• Polygon’s profile of the handsome Norwegian adventure-game tsar, Ragnar Tornquist, is worth a read: “It’s about really coming into yourself. About growing up and settling down and becoming who you are meant to be and accepting that. It’s about turning the page and realizing you’re not where you thought you’d be, but be okay with that or to fight against it, make a conscious decision to say, ‘This is not where I’m meant to be.’ It’s about characters who are at a point in their lives where things are changing and they need to change and they need to accept that change.”

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Sundays are for waking up from a night of fever dreams and ohgod. So. Weak. Lung plague for real, and I am dying. This is how it ends.

• Digital Foundry looks at what the next generation of consoles will mean for PC specs: “PlayStation 4 in particular offers a substantial challenge to the PC as the top-end gaming platform – a state of affairs that may surprise many. Sony’s new console has often been described as a mid-range gaming PC in terms of its overall technological make-up. Rip apart the various components and the claims have some merit, but with the benefits of a closed box design and a unified memory set-up, the new console has certain qualities that could even give high-end PC rigs a run for their money.”

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Sundays are for picking the shredded remains of the previous week from your teeth, and thinking about the battles that lie ahead. Never surrender, readers.

• Ah, damn. This was an essay I should have written, and knew I should have written, but didn’t because I am weak and old. I am so glad someone else seized it, because it’s obvious and important. Geoff Dyer’s book Zona, which is about The Zone of Tarkovsky’s Stalker (and also Chernobyl) had a vast and glaring omission. For all its cultural literacy, it entirely ignored the game. Perhaps with good reason, but still. The New York Review Of Books (of all places!) takes up this topic: “The Zone in the video games is a beautifully dangerous place, bigger and grimmer than Tarkovsky’s, but somehow still appropriate. There are plenty of long, tense walks through damp weather or empty, creaking tunnels. Packs of dogs wander the landscape, ruined farmhouses give shelter from the rain; here and there the ground ripples strangely. Stalkers gather around campfires, bandits take potshots at passersby, and a man lies wounded in a ditch, begging for help. Watching Stalker, one is occasionally brought up short by remembering that it was not filmed in Chernobyl, so perfect an analogue does that event seem for the film’s images of technology and nature, beauty and danger in strange alliance. The games, at their best, can seem like a sort of miracle: a dead man’s masterpiece, come home at last.” Not sure I agree with “subpar graphics”, but then I suppose that’s partly a matter of taste and hardware (and modding.)
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Sundays are for meditating on a mountaintop. By Monday you will be an enlightened warrior, ready to use your perspicacity to fox oafish opponents in medieval China.

• Firstly, I want all of you to visit Shut Up & Sit Down. No excuses! No, not even you Man Who Says He Can’t Play Boardgames Because Of Allergies. The site has been relaunched by former-RPSer Quintin ‘The Boy’ Smith, and bard-like RPS-contributor Brendan Caldwell. Have a read of this article for a taste of what they’re up to.

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