The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for sipping tea, wondering whether you're going to be able to find any time to play a game with all the shit you have to write today (or maybe go see Los Campesinos at Rough Trade) and compiling a list of interesting games-related reading from across the week, while trying to resist posting a link to some manner of pop music that caught my (and Walker's for that matter) ear. Go!

• PC Gamer's hug-king editor Tim Edwards on the whole Ubisoft thing, including a right of reply from Ubi. He also coins the phrase "DRMageddon" which we're going to pay our highest compliment to by stealing.
• It's been a good week for the high-ranking slaves of the SINISTER EVIL MEGA-GLOBAL CORPORATION. Here's OXM's editor Jon Hicks giving rented celebs a few friendly notes on how not to host a games event.
• Remember the Qwak pay-what-you-want sale? Jamie Woodhouse presents the data on his hits, his sales and the prices they paid. Everyone has picked over it this week, and you should too. Here's Cliffski doing it.
• Talking about Cliffski... Here's Positech's commander talking about how Gratuitous Space Battles got made.
• More indie-analysis! The Organic Indie Preorder Pack for Natural Selection 2 and Overgrowth was available as a pre-order, and had a mass of blog and social-media pushing. Here's the results they saw. In short: "We sold more preorders in one week than we had sold in a year, previously." Well done them. We certainly had enough people mail us about it when it was running.
• The whole issue of what to charge for an indie game rolls on. For interesting comparison, here's the gathered public statistics top 20 XBox Live Indie games. What sells what? What makes how much? Interesting to note the number 3 game makes more money than the number 1 game, despite selling half as much. Moreso, the number 18 game on the chart makes more money than the number 2 game - because it costs 10 times as much.
• Steve Gaynor of 2k Marin writes about games' obligation and cheerfully tries to wind some people up. Good show.
• Chris Evans at Resolution writes about art games, speaking to developers about 'em.
• Gaming Daily has been busy. Here's James McEwan has noted that... hey, these Diablo games. They may not be much fun are just based around collecting shit. I'm shocked! Shocked, I say. Meanwhile, Craig Lager kicks the living shit out of Fahrenheit (Including a splendid graph).
• Ara Shirinian over at Gamasutra wrestles with the enormous topic of actually merging games and narrative. Enormous article, with serious intent.
• Spoilers don't matter? SPOILERS DO MATTER.
• Walker wrote a love letter to the DS 4 years back. Now he's writing about having a bit of a break. Man! Sniff.
• Parkin interviews Ste Curran about his charity game. I suspect that may be the funniest and least likely sentence I've ever written in my fifteen years of games journalism.
• Global Game Jam! Go!
• Tune Yards play Real Live Flesh live, which is just luscious. Also, the Knife's Darwin-opera double-album is currently available to buy - and in streaming in its entirety - on their site. Phenomenal stuff, if not exactly easy going. Second album is where to start if you want it easier. Colouring of Pigeons, if you want a single track.

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