The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for getting home late from London because of tea. No, really, tea is to blame for a late Sunday Papers.

• True PC Gaming's Roguelikes Breakdown is, well, true PC gaming. They don't manage to avoid the "rouge" typo, though. "When you find loot in a Roguelike it may not always be something good. One of the classic tropes is undefined items. In these games you will come across a potion and the only description you get is - a blue potion. You have no idea what it does. Well, why would you? Some guy just wandering through a dungeon shouldn't automatically know everything about what's down there. You have three choices of what to do with the blue potion: drink it, drop it or hold it and hope to identify it later. Drinking is the quickest, but most dangerous, option. Some potions may restore health or temporarily increase your attack power, but not all are beneficial. If it poisons, paralyzes or permanently reduces your strength then you know not to drink any more."
• More of Electron Dance's series on the shooter: "The 3D shooter was still just a shooting game at the end of the day and it would take Half-Life (Valve, 1998) to demonstrate that the shooter could shed its simple traditions and become a movie simulator. Cutscenes became scripted events that happened around the player and the difference was profound; instead of the tried and trusted method of separating fiction from game, developers began to blend them. Titles like Unreal (Epic MegaGames, 1998) and Shogo: Mobile Armor Division (Monolith Productions, 1998) also dabbled with story elements in the same year but it was Half-Life that raised the bar."
• Brandon Sheffield talks to Khang Le about the art and design of Hawken: "As far as mech aesthetics go, there's a lot of different variety that people are used to, and they like a certain type. There's Transformers, Gundam, Evangelion, the humanoid-looking mechs that has a head and fingers. There's the American-style mechs with the lumbering gait, feels like a machine -- the mechs in MechWarrior or the robot in Robocop (ED-209). There's also very sleek-looking... like Bubblegum Crisis, that type of mech. The one I really like, my personal favorite, is just an old, basically 1980s kit bash style, it's from this Japanese designer named Kow Yokoyama. He does a line of robots called Maschinen Krieger, so they kinda look like World War I, if World War I had tech robots and mechs. That's what they look like."
• The Escapist on the silent protagonist.
• Jason Schreier's piece on Trendy Entertainment is quite the read: "A Skype log obtained by Kotaku shows Stieglitz talking about one of the female characters in Dungeon Defenders II in terms that made at least a few employees uncomfortable. "Needs to be more like [a] Brazilian beach super model if you know what I mean," he writes. ""It'd also be nice if the ass was attractive.""
• Russ Pitts on Destiny at E3. I firmly believe Bungie need to stop being so pathetic and commit to PC on this one.
• "You're not wrong, Microsoft, you're just an asshole."
• Kunzelman on Remember Me: "The reason that I’m making this post is that an incredibly beautiful thing happens around the 70 or 80 minute mark. I talked a little bit on twitter how the androids/gynoids of Remember Me triggered some kind of teary aesthetic sublime for me, but that was a creeping feeling that sat around me like a cloud for the entirety of the game. The moment that I’m talking about wasn’t like that–it only happened once, and when it happened I smiled the biggest goofy smile. Then I did it over and over again."
• I'm thinking about graphics card upgrade time, so found myself read this review.
• On Thomas Backlund: "Quitting my apartment and my job at the same time was really hard to do. I had elevated adrenalin levels for days. To sooth the waves of anxiety that swept over me regularly, I had one picture that I kept looking at. It was a picture of the beautiful forest which I was to move to. That gave me strength to take the steps necessary to get on the trail."

Music this week is Thomas Koner's Daikan.