Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Sundays are for listening to people talk. They are also for reading what people write. They are for taking a moment. So let’s do that.

• Richard Moss on Cliff Johnson’s 25-year development of The Fool And His Money: “I am so delighted that I can say the game is finished,” Johnson chuckles. The Fool and his Money was a labor of love—a sequel to the award-winning cult-favorite 1987 Macintosh “meta-puzzle” The Fool’s Errand, which was later ported to Amiga, DOS, and Atari ST. “I’m glad [that] at the beginning I did not know the game would take me ten years,” Johnson confesses. “In some ways thinking it would be out every six months was my psychological way of dealing with oh my god oh my god oh my god.”

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Sundays are for staring in bemusement as the BBC attempts to self-destruct, and being grateful that there’s good games writing out there with which to distract yourself.

• It’s tempting to wonder if other people have put more thought about what they want to see in Elite 4 than David Braben. One of the most interesting discussions of what should be in there comes from PCGamesN’s Steve Hogarty, who really gets to the nub of the issues: “‘Cooperate on adventures or chase your friends down to get that booty,’ wrote David Braben on Elite: Dangerous’s Kickstarter page, betraying a keen understanding of why the game he co-created was any good. But what is that booty?” This is insight.

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Sundays are for waking up and peering out the window at unseasonable snow. Then perhaps to the Internet Parlour, for tea and manic page refreshing. Later there will be time for intriguing reports and opinions from far away lands.

• Polygon’s piece on Kaos Studios is a fascinating read: “That summer, THQ and Kaos undertook an audit of Homefront. They looked at everything in the design document and pitch documents, everything that Kaos had promised since 2008, and then made careful estimates of how long it would take to deliver every feature. That’s when the full extent of the damage became clear.”

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Sundays are for waking up in the dark, wondering what day it is. Ah, that day. With its links to a wide range of videogame writings. Better get up and get on with it, eh? That kettle won’t make tea by itself!

• Simon Parkin on League Of Legends: “Twice a month Riot Games, creator of League of Legends, hires an actor to visit its Santa Monica studio. While the developer adds a couple of playable characters to the online PC game each month, this performer isn’t hired to provide voice acting for a new champion, or to be rigged with Ping-Pong balls and motion-captured while pretending to swipe swords or cast spells. Rather, they are hired to mingle, to roam the studio and chat with the other staff, pretending to be a new employee.”

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Sundays! Oh Sundays. What are you for? Only the wise may dare to guess. And the rest of us, well, we must search in the internet for clues.

• Wired’s feature on the relationship between Peter Molyneux and Adam “Peter Molydeux” Capone is a must-read: “For the time being, Molyneux’s team is still building out some features. A few hours after we have lunch with his family, the game designer and I are at 22Cans, a 600-square-foot unit in a 70-acre office complex near a cramped roundabout. In case anyone forgets his mission, Molyneux has posted printouts every 5 feet around the perimeter of the office that read, “100,000,000 DAUs in 32 months.” CTO Tim Rance gathers the entire staff around his computer for a demonstration. While the idea behind Curiosity is simple, the technological infrastructure is tricky—22Cans needs to find a way to let potentially millions of people see the same dynamic object at the exact same time. When one player smashes a cubelet, it needs to disappear on the screen of every other player around the world at just that moment.”

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Sundays are for toast, cereal, eggs, fruit, and always tea. They are for knowing that winter is coming. And they are for taking some time to read, because what would life be without strings of characters formed into intelligible sentences?

• Eurogamer features a mysterious and handsome writer called Alec Meer, and his words are words about UFO: Enemy Unknown. He speaks only truth: “X-COM was always a game about losing, and not too far departed from those same masochistic tendencies that inform Dark Souls today. The losses, the causalities, the skating on the brink of disaster has to happen in order that those few snatched victories feel hard-won and meaningful.”

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Sundays are for driving along the motorway, humming the theme tune to Quantum Leap. Perhaps when you reach your destination you might end up reading some words gathered from the Internet. But perhaps not.

• Sinister Design on RPG character creation: “To analogize: class-based character creation is the Apple of character creation systems, founded upon the use of a few pre-built constructs that share the same core components and come in a limited variety of flavors. By contrast, skills-based systems are the PCs of the character creation universe, cobbled together from a dizzying array of components that can combine in interesting (though sometimes deeply flawed and incongruous) ways.”

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Sundays are for celebrating the birthday of previous Sunday Papers editor, Kieron Gillen. Happy birthday, old chap, we raise our morning mugs of tea to you and your vital way with words. Speaking of words…

• VG247 interview Valve’s Chet Faliszek: “I’ve funded a lot of things on Kickstarter. I figure 60% of these projects will actually create something by the end, and I’m fine with that. It’s going to be interesting for projects that take a long time, for teams that aren’t as experienced, seeing what people think, and to see what’s going to happen two or three years from now. Are they actually going to deliver and come through with it? So yeah, that will be interesting to see. But I do hope that it maintains being a viable way, because I love being able to see people saying, ‘yeah, I’m just going to do this project.’”

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Sundays are for looking out at the rain and then cuddling up against the warm light of a videogame. At least the weather in Borderlands 2 is predictable, eh?

• Over at Hookshot Mr Stuart discusses The Walking Dead, outlining some reasons why this series has generated so much excitement: “The genius of Walking Dead is that its decision system does not work like similar systems in other games; there are no right or wrong choices, there are no good or evil ones. There are just stark instinctive dichotomies. Certainly, in Walking Dead, you do what you think is ‘right’ but then instead of judging you, the game shrugs and changes the story accordingly.”

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Sundays are for nursing a headache. There, there, poor brain. It’ll pass. You just sit there in a quiet dark room. The rest of us will go get some breakfast. And perhaps something to read.

• Richard’s Skyrim diary is a thing to behold: “Even without eyes, Triss manages to follow along for a while, only to vanish early and never re-appear. So, pretty much like The Witcher 2 then. Alone, I find myself wandering through the snowy forests towards Helgen, and quickly discovering that my gear is nowhere near warm enough for even these climes. Before long, there’s snow all over me, and things only get worse when night falls. The temperature drops along with it, and in this Skyrim, night is pitch black. Then the messages start appearing. Messages like “A Forsworn is hunting you.” Gulp.”

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Sundays are for basking in early morning sun with a cup of tea. Sundays are for basking in the afternoon sun with a cup of tea. Sundays are for basking in the evening sun with a cup of tea. And also, for reading.

• This is a fascinating comment on Thirty Flights Of Loving (a game which some have dismissed because of its cinematic approach): “Usually, videogames inhabit spaces. They set them up to be populated, they create functioning, navigable environments that in some way or another have an unbroken connection to a previous space, even if it is only by virtue of the player’s memory. There is usually no cut. Like a long take from A Touch of Evil or Children of Men, the player wanders throughout a space at leisure, bearing witness to spatial connections unable to be hidden or emphasised through montage. But not always. Thirty Flights of Loving is a very unusual videogame. Thirty Flights of Loving is a videogame that cuts space up.”

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