The Sunday Papers

I went to see Opera last night. Opera! And not even Space-Opera or hiphopera. Madness. This means I'm RPS' most cultivated member, and the man to do the Sunday task of collating a week's worth of intelligent gaming reading into a list while trying not to link to late nineties Northern-soul-indie-pop-records I've just written a comic about for reasons to be disclosed.

• Following on from the approaching Ensemble closing, Edge speak to Microsoft's Shane Kim wherein he says that this was done purely for financial reasons, Microsoft are firmly behind PC game creation and there will be future Age games. Which I can only actually interpret as "Future Age games will be done on the cheap".
• Blizzardwatch! I'm not sure why Sunday Papers links to so many Blizzard interviews, but this Crispygamer's recent chat with VP of Product Development Frank Pearce about the problems of satisfying trad Starcrafters (i.e. The Nation of South Korea) and newcomers. What most caught my eye was the writer, Billy Berghammer, who has the best name a games journalist has ever possessed. Man! We're bloody jealous.
• Actually, while we're at CrispyGamer Tom Chick - which is a pretty good name too, now I come to think about it - did his top 10 tips for playing RTS games. Perhaps unsurprisingly for followers of Chick, this involves Hotkeys. If a key's not hot, Tom doesn't give a damn.
• Spore malarkies! Will Wright interview-off-cuts by Lev Grossman on the internal dynamics of the Spore team. Specifically, Cute versus Science. Which sounds like a theme for an RTS if I've ever heard one. Meanwhile what Jim has described in the Sunday Paper document as "tech blather".
• A couple of MMO pieces. Firstly, Terra Nova examining Ever Quest 2. Opening quote: "As some on this list know, my research group has been working on a joint project with Sony Online Entertainment for the last two years. This collaboration has enabled our team to collect virtual world data on--as far as we know--an unprecedented scale. SOE has let us access the full data logs generated and collected by the world Everquest II." Crikey. Lots of demographic elements to be found, clearly. Lighter reading over at PopCultureOfDestruction in their Rockstars of Warhammer feature, talking about how different personalities inside the team has been used to position the games in different ways. English posh people on drugs versus serious RvR balancing issues, basically.
• Spearmint - Sweeping the Nation. Bottom of the MySpace player.

Failed.