The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for rolling around on your couch, wondering why you bother to try. Probably best you turn away from my moping and spend your day reading fine works from the rest of the internet.

Funny. You don't remember your Lodgings smelling so strongly of sulphur and brimstone. Do you even own the latest edition of Now That's What I Call The Screaming Of The Damned? It only came out yesterday! And more pressingly, since when did you have a Lodgingmate with fangs, orange eyes and...

"Ah," says the Usurping Devil. "Were these your Lodgings? How unfortunate it must be to be you."

He chuckles to himself as he escorts you out of the front door and slams it in your face.

A moment later, it opens again.

"By the way, do you have a skillet? It's for a thing."

Richard's got 99 patrons at the time of writing, which gives you the opportunity to tick that number into triple digits.

She'd even re-written the rules for a game called Rolemaster, for her and her friends to use. "It started out as a fix for the 'encumbrance' rule which dictates how much weight a character can carry," she recalls. "It always felt so complicated, like balancing the chequebook. We didn't want to do all that shit." Romero's fix broke some of the game's other finely balanced systems. "It was very much my first lesson in design," she says. "You change something in a game then you'll break something else." She proceeded to redesign everything from the ground up. "I was very serious about it". The young girl's friends "were into it" and the group dubbed the changes "Brenda Law."

There's an argument that runs along the lines of "why would I watch a game when I could be playing one?" This misunderstands something about sport. If you can watch a sport, you're almost certainly more intellectually engaged than you would be if you were playing a scripted game. The act of physically participating is secondary, to me, to the stuff that happens in your brain when you watch a set of game mechanics operating in a competitive context. That's what a sport is: a set of rules resolving into narrative.

"But instead of the worn neon Bladerunner cyberpunk universe, it is a square, classically Blendo Games-style universe in the vein of Thirty Flights of Loving and Gravity Bone, his previous games. Things are often in sepia tones, cassette tapes lie around, there’s a refined, almost screwball comedy feeling to the game - though the main characters are all women and they do not talk. There is a strong feeling of the working class around Quadrilateral Cowboy, an emphasis on what hands do, make and use. Objects feel solid; when you connect wires to hack something, twentieth-century style, they do so with a satisfying reel and click, the keys of your suitcase deck sound like they respond to your instructions with the whole of their thickness. It’s like you are in a quirky heist movie directed by Hitchcock, but Dr Emmett Brown from Back to the Future has given you your tools."

"Once you are a Reaper Lord you will participate in missions, meetings, hangouts and attacks on other gangs. The Reaper Lords have current allies and enemies with other GTA Online biker gangs. The Reaper Lords website specifies if they have a cease fire with these other gangs and where their territory is and the status of their relationship, if they are friendly or not. If a rival gang upsets the Reaper Lords, then the members will attack. If anyone, non gang member or gang member, attacks or angers a Reaper Lord the rest of the gang will have their back and kill the offender."

SO THERE'S THIS PART IN TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION WHERE THE AUTOBOTS SUDDENLY ENCOUNTER A SUPER-LITERAL VAGINA DENTATA ALIEN THAT'S JUST HANGING OUT IN A CAGE. THERE'S NO REASON FOR THIS TO BE HAPPENING ON ANY LEVEL, IT'S JUST CLEARLY STUCK IN FOR SOME MOTIVATIONAL REASON. BUT PLEASE UNDERSTAND THAT THE REVEAL OF THE ALIEN'S VAGINA DENTATA-NESS IS NOT SOME PLACID CINEMATIC MOMENT BUT INSTEAD HIGHLY EMPHASIZED. THIS IS CLEAR. THIS IS OVERT. SO THEN THE FAT AUTOBOT (ONE OF THE GOOD GUYS, BY THE WAY) IS SO REVOLTED BY THIS IMAGE THAT IT TELLS THIS WAY-TOO-CLEAR-VAGINA-SYMBOL THAT IT IS "TOO UGLY TO LIVE." THEN THE VAGINA GETS SOME SLIME ON HIM AND THE FAT AUTOBOT COLLAPSES TO THE GROUND AND THINKS HE'S "BURNING." BUT THEN THE FAT AUTOBOT JUST REALIZES IT'S JUST "SHIZZ." SO HE CALLS THE VAGINA-SYMBOL "BITCH" AND SHOOTS HER DEAD.

What this World Cup has offered instead, and where it seems most likely to produce lasting memories, is superstars. I can’t remember a tournament that seemed to be more about individual players, both because of everything they have at stake and because of the influence they’ve had over outcomes. When Spain was Spain, as Barney Ronay recently wrote, “the ball was always the star.” In Brazil, we’ve seen game after game turn on individual moments of skill: Neymar pixie-dancing through 14 or 15 defenders, Arjen Robben scything to his left with the inevitability of death, Messi dragging entire defenses across the pitch like someone resizing a browser window.

Music this week is She Can't Love You by Chemise, as featured in this short cyberpunk jam game.