The Sunday Papers

Back from the Ukraine and it's time to catch up on a week's reading. Hey - why don't you join me, in the RPS regular we're calling "The Sunday Papers". In it I link to some pieces that caught my eye in the last week for your to dwell over, and try to do so before linking to Youtube novelty records which are a bit too close to how I operate. GO!

• Tom Chick takes a break from memorising hotkeys to interview Brian Reynolds about poor old Rise of Legends. I loved it, but it clearly didn't do as well as anyone hoped - and seems to have stopped Big Huge from considering another pure strategy game. Blimey. Read more good stuff too.
• Over at Gamasutra Alvan Monje argues something close to my position on the importance of Gygax and D&D regarding videogames - in fact, the biggest influence isn't actually the numbers and mechanics and whatever - it's the intellectual one of the idea of what games could be.
• This is proving to be a particularly Gamasutra heavy Sunday Papers week. First, Mr Remo's take on games needing more Subtext. Being a man who likes to spout nonsense about games - I was snarled at GameCamp yesterday for talking about Fort Frolic's rabbits as metaphor for sexuality - I clearly agree. On that point, there's a large narrative-centric review with Ken Levine there too - it only really starts hitting new ground in the last few pages, so do skip it you start thinking you've heard this before. And Sins of a Solar Empire gets a post-mortem, which promoted quite a bit of debate over at Quarter To Three.
• We linked to the Campbell/Everiss Piracy bloodbath in a previous Sunday Papers, but this is the after-match analysis. J Nash collects all the deleted information. Particularly painful reading is the side-by-side version of the page as can be read now and the one with all the uneditted posts. Ouch. Also - message to Nash. DO MORE STUFF.
• Elemental's Cup of Brown Joy. This is, I suspect, a lot what our American readers think RPS are like. And they're not entirely wrong.

Failed.