The Sunday Papers

Sundays! Sundays are for going quickly.

Gabriel Winslow-Yost wrote for Harper's Magazine - not an outlet typically known for their videogame coverage - about Elden Ring and the role of death and failure in games.

Another way to put it is that the games can be, for the wrong person, or someone in the wrong mood, simply unpleasant. It is not always clear why one would want to spend one’s leisure time swearing at a screen, lost, stuck, dying over and over in the dark. More often, though, they provide something much more complicated: a paradoxical mix of joy and outrage, relief and despair. The repetitive drumbeat of failure, occasionally punctuated by success or disaster or revelation, batters you into a kind of gleeful serenity. Failure becomes funny, even soothing.

Dia Lacina in Paste Magazine wrote about Stalker 2 and the stories that happen within it.

The first man I killed in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl launched himself into outer space. It was dark, and I had been in The Zone for less than 10 minutes. I stabbed some kind of mutant-monster-pig in an abandoned hamlet and made too much noise doing so. That’s when I saw him move on me. He howled, I fired. Wildly. I watched him rocket upward like a Zenit-2. For a moment, I thought this was some mechanic of The Zone, that GSC Game World had decided to go truly wild with the anomalous physics this time. Then I noticed his body hadn’t gone anywhere, or if it had, it had come back. He was T-posing in the middle of a field. I turned around and the pig-thing was floating and vibrating. I turned back around and the man had disappeared entirely.

Shaun, of YouTube, made a two-hour video about the fake controversy drummed up around Stellar Blade. Love Shaun.

This 30-minute breakdown of "the most iconic electronic music sample of every year (1990-2024)" is superb. It takes famous songs and then deconstructs them into their constituent samples, with wonderful visualisations to show all they fit together.

This is old, but the above put me in mind of this Japanese video, which I think is from the clothing brand Beams, which charts Tokyo fashion changes over the past 40 years, with musical shifts paired to each era. Someone make something like these for video games.

Right, that'll do. Short one this week because it's December 1st and that means we'll have something else for you this Sunday, in just an hour...

Music this week is Cheers by Anderson .Paak, which is partly about Mac Miller; Righteous Minds by Joey Bada$$, which is from his 2012 mixtape 1999, a tribute to '90s east coast hip hop - and a good one; and ooh, I'll admit it, Derre by BIBI is so catchy I've listened to it ten times this week.

Also, I kept forgetting what songs I'd already chosen, so here is a YouTube playlist of Sunday Papers music picks, updated each week.