The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for... Christmas. It's Christmas day. I guess that doesn't mean we can't link to just a few articles about videogames from across the week.

Simo Parko is at the Guardian this past week with a long feature about FIFA and how it changed football.

Along with Mario and Tetris, Fifa belongs to an select group of video games that are familiar to people who have little further interest in the medium. For many, Fifa is the only game they buy each year. In many parts of the world, the word “Fifa” is synonymous not with football’s scandal-ridden governing body, but with the video game that licenses its name.

When I was at PC Gamer, producing the backpage each month was one of the best parts of the job. And occasionally one of the worst parts of the job. I enjoyed PC Gamer UK's staff roundup of those they made in 2016, with critiques from each.

Tony: Not one of our best. We’re basically just humblebragging about Eidos sort of putting our mag in their game.

Samuel: You bitch.

At Waypoint, Jack de Quidt writes about The Division's survival mode as part of his "A Postcard From..." series. I need to get back to this game.

He's about six feet ahead of me, a dim shape in the blizzard, and he's desperately looking for medicine. The helicopter we took into Manhattan has crashed, and we've both been stripped of our gear, weapons, and skills. And we've been wounded—no, worse, badly infected. A timer on our screen shows how long we have to live, and it's hovering at around forty five minutes. I've just taken some painkillers, so mine is paused, but only temporarily. Austin's isn't. He disappears behind some broken down cars.

At Gamasutra, developers recount their first game designer experiences, from Sam Barlow to Suda 51. (Actually those are just the first two on the long list). Here's a bit of Barlow:

As a teen, I made a series of text games that chronicled one of my friends’ search for romance; bawdy romps as much influenced by the BBC’s Bottom as by the Infocom titles that I loved. When I look back now, the heart of those games was a kind of antagonism between the game’s narrator and the intended audience, a kind of humor that came from making my friends act out their own humiliations. Already I was thinking about the complicated relationship between the creator and the audience in an interactive story!

At Kotaku, Rich Stanton confuses the commenters with his article about a virgin that's furious that a fictional woman is a lesbian.

"Tracer used to do whatever I imagined but now, when I try to forget the news and think like I used to, she just laughs and runs off saying 'see ya!' We had a really serious discussion on 8Chan a while back about what would happen if she used her time-rewind powers during sex, and now I feel those evenings were wasted on a lie."

That'll do. It is Christmas day, after all. Music this week is a series of lofi hip-hop mixes on YouTube. This is the one I have open right now.

No papers next week. We will resume our Sundays on January 8th. Have a good one, everybody.