The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for stomping around the Bristol Comics Expo. Which means that Fridays are for preparing in advance a post of the week's fine (mostly) games-centric reading without including a link to some manner of piece of pop-music, then setting it to auto-post. It's a miracle of science I do for you.

• It's been a very Mass Effect 2 week for me. Tying neatly into the Zeitgeist is Tim Edward's splendid interview over at PC Gamer, where he has an after-game chat with its Project Director Casey Hudson. Topics include its episodic-structure, how people respond to pressure and how they actually go about plotting this monolith. Fun stuff. Go read.
• On a similarly Bioware note, here's Media Molecule's Audio-hero Kenny Young, writing at length about the use of voice in Dragon Age. Not just about the voice-acting, but how voice is use. Candid and entertaining.
• Alec edited this into his post on Super Meat Boy, but it's worth highlighting Edmund McMillen's thoughts on difficulty in general and Super Meat Boy's difficulty in specific.
• And, on a similar note to that, here's Post-Hype hailing the majesty of VVVVVV's Veni, Vedi, Vici as a paragon of something important and central to games. And while we're there, here's his take on what he thinks the best story in Mass Effect 2 is: Samara and Morinth's. Post-hype's only managed 7 (enormous) posts since starting this year, but this level of quality impresses the hell out of me.
• Nicholas Feinberg directs me to this piece at Game Career Guide about The Aesthetics of Unique Videogame Characters. Which is the sort of title which inevitably gets you linked in the Sunday Papers.
• Shamus Young having fun with trying to buy DLC from Windows Live. Embarrassing stuff for the system. Chatting to Schizoslayer about this, we found ourselves wondering whether it's some attempt to dial the PC back to the days of having to fiddle with your .bat file to make a game work.
• Games Fatale's quirky take on the Games/Cinema thing.
• It basically covers the same territory as our interview with Eric Flannum, but Colin Johanson writing about how they're planning to do their quests in Guild Wars 2 is a lot of fun. I'm excited about this in a way that I am about few, if any, MMOs.
• And on the topic on MMOs, Comrade Griddleoctopus has a theory about how we should "review" MMOs - and, perhaps, all games. In short, interview a variety of people and collate those viewpoints. I can't help but think it's a longwinded way of saying "You should cut and paste reviews from Metacritic".
• And I think thats' enough for now. Will save other stuff for next week. I think these are all really good things for people to chew over.
• Crikey. That's a worryingly on-topic Sunday Papers. Let's actually answer a question from a few days ago - Have U Got The New Look? is a track from 90s gospel-yeh-yeah! powerhouses The mAKE-UP's final album. Since that's not online, let's link to the album's glorious reinvention of Hey Joe. What it does with it towards the end is just an audacious inversion of the song's trad meaning. And while we're on the make-up, here's Born On The Floor, which always made me smile.

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