The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for regenerating in a gloomy crypt. The adventurers may have defeated you this time, but they'll soon pay. Yes, they'll pay!

• Eurogamer meet Excalibur Publishing: "You'll likely know Excalibur from its vast selection of simulator titles, from Chemical Spillage Simulation to Camping Manager 2012 via such esoteric delights as Tow Truck Simulator. They're the subject of much mockery, but it's serious business - in a tumultuous time for many traditional publishers, Excalibur is, it proudly claims, the only fully privately owned outfit left in the UK. Not only that: it's a successful one, too."
• Keith Stuart remembers some nice positive things about games: "I don't know anything about the 40-person volunteer team who produced Black Mesa, a fan recreation of Half-Life released last year to great acclaim, but I am amazed by them. I don't know much about the Call of Duty and Counter Strike teams now earning millions of dollars competing in global e-sports tournaments, but I know that games and their communities have changed their lives for the better."
• Duncan "DeadEndThrills" Harris has redesigned his lovely site of videogame loveliness.
• Digital Foundry threaten my wallet with all this talk of mega-monitors: "A decent 2.5k monitor is evidently within reach for a reasonable price, but the expenditure really doesn't end there. Since 2560x1440 represents a 77 per cent increase in pixel count over 1080p, we must ask ourselves: how deep do we need to dig into our pockets to afford the bare minimum GPU upgrade to drive such an advanced visual experience?"
• Does one rotten moment ruin the experience? "Despite its seemingly exploitative marketing, Catherine addresses very adult, very human matters of sex and love rarely explored in mainstream video games. Unfortunately, it also features a transgender character whose sexual identity is treated as a gross-out punchline. The fact that it even dares to include a transgender woman as an otherwise sympathetic character represents a far more open point of view than any game I can think of outside the purview of the indie scene, but it utterly botches its attempt at progressiveness."
• The Reticule talks Surgeon Simulator with Bossa: "The core team is still just four guys that entered the game jam, so like he was saying it wasn’t “Oh let’s just sit down and plan the whole game out” because it was still just the four of us making it. That energy was still the same and that discussion of what we want – “is this going to work?” “Can we do it?” Then we’d just go and kind of do it and find out. So it was keeping that natural ‘game jam’ sensibility going. And meeting the publishing deadlines, or course…"
• The Idle Thumbs podcast is particularly interesting this week for some reason.
• Craig has been writing over on PCG about the weird joy of Team Fortress 2 idle servers: "Achievement maps are the flashier brothers to idle servers. Here you’re idling so others might pad their stats by killing you. At first look, achievement_all_v4 has everything you need to grind out achievements: short runs where you can cap points quickly, easy briefcases to capture, even self-building dispensers to sap. You’ll join and see an unbalanced fight between teams, where some Blus have given up their existence to Red kill-counts, but the fighting hides a massive, server-destroying secret."
• Some technical considerations on that big Eve battle.
• The guy behind the Everquest Next engine.
• More Crate & Crowbar.
• What have we done to London?
• Pulp fictions basically run our business. Here are some now.

Music today is a new track from Mark Pritchard.