The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for the silent remembrance of the beauty of Giant Anteaters, sipping tea and compiling lists of interesting gaming reading from across the week without revealing the odd 1996 musical flashback that's been happening in the last few days. So that's what I did.

• RPS couldn't make it to GDC, which made all the party invitations really annoying. Love's Eskil Steenberg did, making a presentation on the most-awaited experimental MMO on the radar. He's got an extended version of his presentation on his site, which really is quite the splendid thing. Example quote: "Moore law states that we can draw twice as much content every 1.5 years. So I'm suggesting a "Eskils law of game development" if you will, stating: if you cant double the amount of content per man hour you produce every 1.5 years the way you are working is unsustainable. Today's we have teams of up to 200 people, if we imagine that the next console generation will be 8 times as powerful, does that mean that we need teams of 1600 people? Even a doubling of the team size is quite unsustainable."
• Techradar do an Op-Ed on the subject of rights in World of Warcraft. As in, you don't have any so stop fucking whining about it.
• Not PC, but Simon Parkin writes about the ever-awesome Takeshi Kitano's flirtations with videogames in the 1980s: "Reportedly Takeshi hated the idea of videogames so much that he wanted to create one so irritating and poorly-designed that it shocked its players into a realisation of the futility of their hobby". If I ever get to interview Takeshi, I'll have to ask if he secretly did freelance design work for Cryo adventures.
• About as PC as it gets: Bit-tech shows how to make a custom R2-D2 case. Bless.
• A little more GDC response, with Eric Hardman getting all excited over Paul Barnett's presentation. And referencing Skinny Puppy. I like seeing Devs come actually fired up away from GDC. Surely, that's gotta be kinda the point?
• Okay - I've pretty much given up the Manics in terms of capital-M mattering. Which is fine. One album is about all I ever expect from a band, and they managed much mroe than that. However, Peeled Apples is the first track from Journal For Plague Lovers, which is where they've gone back to those long-left Richey-Edwards lyrics, got Steve Albini to do the producer and... well, it's quite the surprising thing, despite/becauseof sounding like Temptation by Heaven 17. And then I finally see the video for 96's existentialist soul-pop Orlando's debut track Just For A Second, shortly followed by discovering they've got their sole-album-plus-B-sides on Spottify. I'm going to be wearing eyeliner again by the end of the week, man.

Really failed.