The Sunday Papers

It's Sunday. So, as usual, here's your chance to relax with a selection of things to read and think about from the last few (er) weeks which we've compiled for you while striving to avoid linking to a Noise-band who are making a lot of sense today. Yes.

• Last week the Sunday Papers document really was overloaded, so some of these are slightly older than usual. For example, here's Alex Litel over at Game Set Watch defending the Marc Ecko's Getting It Up: "Getting Up's closest contemporary is not the kinetic kitsch of Jet Set Radio, but the French fantasia of Beyond Good & Evil." Conversely, our own Quinns - no stranger to the strange - thought it was rubbish.
• Actually, let's also link to GSW's column by Alistair Wallis where he interviews Matt Hestill. It goes a little haywire. Oh - and while we're at it, Leigh reboots her Aberrant Gamer.
• Slightly outside The Sunday Papers usual remit, but Tales of Tales are continuing hyping their forthcoming The Path, their revisionist Red Riding hood game. Six incarnations going to see Grandmother, each a different age. They've just revealed the second sister, Carmen. Which is all very well, but they're really reaching for the alternative marketing methods by letting Carmen run her own Livejournal. I've seen it done in other forms - hell, for my own Phonogram, two of the lead characters have their own myspace pages - but not so much in games. I think it's an area worth exploring.
• This is cute. Adventure Classic Gamer examine turning adventure games into adventures themselves. They're rooting through the assets in old Siera games to find what they can find. Assets which basically exist, but aren't used in the game. There's a fun history to this - first one I recall is the unused creatures buried in the code of Jet Set Willy. Or I may be misremembering.
• From the PC triumphalism file: PCs dominate development. Well, PC with the 360, but still. 70% are making games for home computers compared to 43% doing it for the consoles. More details in the article, but it's certainly one of those Big Picture numbers which make you pause for thought.
• I suspect Cliffski's got more attention than he suspected he would from his recent discussions of Piracy. He explores similar terrain here while thinking about the Economy of Happiness. His views towards a future of increased modularity of games is definitely worth thinking about.
• There's no proper version of Dracula Mountain by Lightning Bolt which I can find online, but this bloke's used it for the soundtrack to one of his videos so you can listen to it there. Actually, fuck it, just go straight to the Muppet's version, as the sound quality is a little better and Dracula Mountain always sounded like Muppets were playing it.

Failed.