The Sunday Papers

Another RPS Sunday. So it's a good time, as the poisons drain from your body from last night's thirty-something birthday party at a gloriously rubbish club, to catch up on a week's readings. We lob up a series of links to such things, and try very, very hard to not link to the track that left Alec, an awesomely sozzled Tom Francis and myself stranded in a close-to-empty floor and dancing for dear life.

• Firstly comedy-writer/cultural-commenter/scatologist/games-journo quitter Charlie "Best Thing He Ever Did Was That Prank Call Where He Accused Edge of Being a Parish Magazine" Brooker does a run down of his favourite games ever for Brit paper the Guardian. First part here and second one over here.
• This has been all over the internet, but I think it's all worth reading. MTV's multiplayer blog had a week of interviews with Black Professionals In Games. The main thing which blew up is N'Gai Croal reopening the Resident Evil 5 trailer can of worms, but Morgan Gray of Crystal Dynamic's comments on Gear of War's Cole Train got a lot of attention too. It's all worth reading, however.
• Point/Counter-point. HardCasual takes the blogosphere - and us - to task for not rising to the critical challenge set forth by You Have To Burn The Rope. Softcore gamer argues the merits of levity. I'm firmly with Softcore on this one, and think that HardCasual - in the same way that he argues we're confusing Smart with Clever - is confusing Serious with Intelligent. We refrained from dissecting it because You Have To Burn The Rope's main merits as a serious game/game-as-critique is its relative transparency. It makes its points particularly elegantly and wittily to anyone who plays the bloody thing - which makes the logical approach to just encourage people to play it and have the game explain itself to them. Your Have To Burn The Rope isn't Pathologic, after all.
• GameSetWatch embarrass the copy-and-pasters over at GamePro. Everyone's response at RPS to reading this was a simple "Ouch".
• Shawn 64: A retrospective. A profile of a prolific GameMaker developer and... well, it's sad, human stuff.
• That they're called "Introversion" really is terribly ironic. They won't shut up. Mark Morris gives some pointers on starting your own Indie studio. It's the first part of a series, where he deals with idea generation. Which, I supsect, is developer shorthand for drinking a lot and talking nonsense in pubs.
• This is old, but it's the audio lecture of Thief 3 Project Lead Randy Smith talking about the Fundamentals of Stealth Gameplay. Which, I suspect, include such nuggets as "Shadows=Good" and "For God's Sake, don't give them an enormous robot death machine".
• It was I'm Going To Hell by the Long Blondes, which was as unexpected and entirely welcome as Gold Coins falling from the heavens.

Failed.