The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for jet-lag, 110 degrees Vegas heat, and crouching on an old friend's apartment whilst being harried by her dog. Also compiling a list of the notable games writing from across the week while trying not to lob in a link to one of the most glorious noble follies of Eighties pop music.

• Game Set Watch sidles up to another one of our writers, gets them drunk and then takes them home to have their wicked way with them. This time it's our man in Canada, comrade Quinns, starting a new column - BATTLE KLAXON! - which seems to be about whatever is in the inside of his funny little noggin. This time it's how Warhawk is an overlooked pleasure. And it's certainly overlooked. I can't find it on the PC release schedule anywhere. Man!
• I'll try to write up my notes on Barnett's presentation at Develop before I disappear into Comicon, but one of his themes - one of the more traditional ones mentioned by UK devs - is the difference between what the programmers our side of the pond had to do versus the ones over in the US. As in, limitations are creative. Edge Online published a great Making Of piece about the seminal Lords of Midnight which includes all the evidence you wish.
• Big Ken Levine interview over at Gamasutra, on the topic of studio culture.
• Meanwhile, Lewis Denby went to Manchester's Videogame Nation exhibition and reports back for Gamasutra.
• Derek Smart on DRM.
• Harry Kaplan interviews Jim Mahrer on his specialist topic - being the history of Interactive Fiction.
• Rammy lets Tom "Tom Bramwell" Bramwell take over his blog to talk about the problems of embargoes and games.
• Crispygamer gets cheerily provocative, arguing why - despite many publishers anguished cries - the second-hand market doesn't hurt but helps the industry.
• The Onion do some more WoW parody malarkies. We all feel like this about Walker, because he's the worst healer.
• The seemingly-pseudonymous R Dobbs' Examiner.com columns caught my eye. I will be watching.
• Dennis Dyack of Silicon Knights thinks a single format is inevitable. Lucky he didn't say war is inevitable as.. oh, God, I'm going to start segueing into In The Loop gags.
• Some non games stuff: Warren Ellis' notes on his Dundee speech on comics are interesting for cross-media thinking. Similarly, Tom Ewing kicked off a debate about why serious music writing didn't emerge until the sixties. Finally, in Darkfallout I linked to my piece on games journalism in the general Drowned In Sound Is Music Journalism Dead? special. It was an unusual one to write, in terms of trying to explain briefly everything we do in this corner of the world to a field of writing where stylistic excesses are a lot more accepted. There's a lot of worthwhile stuff in the series, but I'd point you in the direction of my old hero Neil Kulkarni 10-step guide to being a record reviewer. Compare and contrast.
• As those who follow my twitter will know, I had a cheery twitter-fit upon discovering there's a full twelve minute version for Dexys Midnight Runners' This Is What She's Like. Sober, I think I already knew it, but it's still quite the thing. The record remains a singular achievement in pop music. And while we're at it, it was first brought to my attention by Chris Roberts' rhapsodic 95-era piece for the Melody Maker covermount "Unknown Pleasures" where their critics each wrote an essay hailing something that seemed to have slipped from the canon. Awesome piece.

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