The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for being at the beginning of a week-long holiday. These days off feel like the best idea I've ever had.

At PC Gamer, Andy Kelly spoke to the developers of Paradise Killer about how they made the open world detective game.

"Very early on, before we started Paradise Killer, Oli and I talked about the idea of a detective game where we just let you go out and be a detective," says Phil Crabtree, technical director and one of the co-founders of Kaizen Gameworks. "A game where you could do anything you wanted in any order. It wasn't really an idea, more a thought I had after playing other games. Then Oli took that and it became the heart of what we have in the game now."

At Fanbyte, Julie Muncy reviewed Tell Me Why, covering what the game is missing versus DONTNOD's previous stories.

Tell Me Why, which had its third and final episode released this week, features all these qualities. But it’s missing something. One of Dontnod’s best assets is its mastery of quiet, the brilliance of its stillness. But in Tell Me Why, the quiet is gone. And it’s taken a lot of the game’s nuance with it.

I enjoyed Martin Robinson's review of review of Super Mario 3D All-Stars for Eurogamer. He is correct about Super Mario Sunshine.

None of which stops it still staking a claim to being one of the better 3D platformers. Mario's FLUDD-enhanced moveset is sublime, with the man responsible for so much of the animation and character that made 64 special - Yoshiaki Koizumi - stepping up to the director's role for the first time. Which might explain Super Mario Sunshine's scrappiness, but also its exuberance - it's a game that, despite the stumbles, has a spring in its step, and can put a spring in yours with its tropical resort and all that cool, cool water and the dancing guitar and ukulele of Delfino Plaza's theme. It's enough to forgive its many frustrations.

Eurogamer also got developers and critics to pick their favourite ten games of the console generation, with some interesting results.

At Paste, Allison Keene had a request: videogames, please stop making me kill dogs.

Look, I get it. Dogs can be used to assist in battle, be it in Odyssey’s ancient legions, modern-day gangs, or fantasy bandit camps. But not enough games let the player have a dog companion (Far Cry 5’s Boomer being an excellent exception, as well as the Marbari hound you can recruit in Dragon Age: Origins; plus, you can pet both dogs). Even when they do, most dogs you encounter in games are hostile or openly aggressive, necessitating that you kill them to move forward in the area. Call of Duty, for example, makes me snipe or pummel dogs like it’s not actively destroying my soul to do so. All of the game series mentioned above include copious dog attackers and are far from the only ones, although the worst offender may be The Last of Us: Part 2, which seems to relish in it.

This New Statesman article on how a tax loophole led to businesses shipping items to the Channel Islands and straight back again is interesting. I used to order from Play.com a lot back in the day.

Arriving at Southampton Airport early one morning in 1998, a businessman and former IBM employee called John Biggs stopped at a line of large, wheeled racks, two metres square and a metre deep. On the racks were “tray, upon tray, upon tray, of flowers”. Biggs asked a nearby security guard if the flowers had just come in from Guernsey. But the guard’s response was mystifying: they were going to Guernsey, he said, and the very same flowers would be coming back tomorrow.

I enjoyed this long, funny post about someone playfully, curiously 'hacking' the former Australian Prime Minister, then going to great lengths to report it to the man himself.

Right click > Inspect Element, all you need to subvert the Commonwealth of Australia

Listen. This is the only part of the story that might be confused for highly elite computer skill. It’s not, though. Maybe later someone will show you this same thing to try and flex, acting like only they know how to do it. You will not go gently into that good night. You will refuse to acknowledge their flex, killing them instantly.

Music this week is Hellbent by Kenna, which I suddenly remembered last week apropos of nothing having not heard it in around ten years. I couldn't remember any of the lyrics, only the music video, but Googled my way towards it. Do I still like it? I'm not sure.