The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for doing this one last time before Jim takes over next week. Well - one last time and a little self-indulgent extra later today you'll have to wait for. Fine (mostly) gaming reading, collated from across the week, with a desperate attempt to avoid linking to some piece of pop music and then a "Failed" when I inevitably don't, in a joke I fear most people still don't get.

• You know Arcen's financial current troubles? Well, PC Gamer have printed with permission an e-mail from Chris with their financial breakdowns. If you want to see the cold hard graphs which ultimately make a developer solvent or not, it's essential.
• Seriously, AI War gets all the hype, but Tidalis is really neat. Here's Savygamer's review.
• Comrade Diogo writes his New Glitch Manifesto, a long and in depth look at how errors can lead to wonder. Strong stuff.
• Considering what big hissies its devs have been this week, I'm tempted to slag off Hydrophobia without ever having played it, just on the principle of the thing.
• Michael Cook writes about the AI issues around F1 this week - and spins it out into writing about the concept of "Bad AI" generally. I'd agree that writers should educate themselves as much as they can before criticising stuff, though the division of AI from design does strike me as a misunderstanding of the medium. Badly designed AI *is* bad AI.
• Robert "Radiator" Yang starts his Philosophy Of Game Design series over at the Escapist.
• Making public what I suspect a lot of people are doing now, Mode 7 Games on what indie devs can learn from Minecraft's runaway success.
• The Hathor legacy on the sexual harassment of female players over in the Team Liquid forums. Bad to begin with, it only escalates when some Team Liquid Forumites escalate in a move which doesn't exactly highlight their tactical genius.
• Bit Tech on the final hours of APB, including interviews with players and how they feel about it. This stuff is always sad.
• I suspect we'll plug this properly when we actually see a copy, but 1001 Videogames You Must Play Before You Die is available to buy now. Edited by Edge's Tony Mott, if it's up to the level of the publisher's other books, it should be an amusingly hefty tome and ideal for flicking. I believe Alec, Jim and me all did some entries, though not an enormous number - I think I did about 10, which were clearly the ones which no other fuck has even heard of. I think Simon Parkin did 100 odd or something.
• On a similar book note, I haven't picked up Tom Bissell's Extra Lives yet, but this interview intrigued me. And no, not just because it passingly namechecks me
• Okay, maybe because of that.
• Actually, while we're talking videogame writing, I finally got a copy of Kill Screen this week. Just finished it, and it's brilliant and infuriating in about equal measures. I suspect if you're a regular reader of the Sunday Papers, you are absolutely its audience and you should consider throwing down cash for the handsome volume.
• Do you play apps? You probably want a review site for 'em. J Nash and Stuart Campbell start their podgamer, which balances a worryingly professional google-friendly title with the chainsaw-as-ranged-weapon attack of two titans of British games journalism. If you have any interest in app gaming, I suspect you need it in your RSS feeds.
• To state the obvious, thanks to everyone who's written something nice about me leaving RPS. I'm not going to link to them, for reasons of common decency, but I was touched.
• The full 50-pieces-on-cyborgs list which Jim contributed to.
• Unpowered Manned Flight, at last. Win!
• Tom Ewing positioning Britpop in the frame of the 90s. I suspect if I was going to give a single article to sort of explain what that whole mess was all about, I'd give this one.
• God, it's been a great week for gibberish. I've been equally in love with Gonzales' I Am Europe ("I am an imperial armpit, sweating Chianti", "I am Socialist Lingerie, I am Diplomatic techno, I am gay pastry and racist cappuccino") and My Chemical Romances' Gonzoid new single Nananananaaanananaanana(Snip!-Ed) which is simply stupid as an art form.

Failed.