The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for forming all-star comic boyband on stage at an 3am at a comics festival, snatching hurried sleep, catching a train back to the South away from the land of 24-hours Greggs shops and compiling a list of interesting game related that caught my eye from across the week, while trying to avoid linking to something to immortalise that pretty magical evening. Go!

• I almost linked to this one as a singular story this week, as I suspected it could be a monster comments thread. Gamesindustry.biz reports that marketing matters three times as much as game quality. In other words, you're better off reducing your budget on the game and not polish and pass it over to the marketeers. To be honest, I think what's quoted seems disingenuous - noting that Bioshock sold more than Dead Space because it had more marketing assumes that they were actually equivalently good games. And even metacritic doesn't think that, y'know? I'd like to see the actual hard numbers, I admit.
• The Modern Warfare writer speaks out about Modern Warfare 2, including No Russian. Less pithy than my It's Bullshit take.
• Eurogamer interview Introversion about their ongoing situation. Forthright and entertaining as always.
• Also at EG, they interview Redlynx about the success of Trials 2 and its console version. Makes me really happy to see them do well. Also, for the record, who was the first journo who was raving about it? It was me, wasn't. Listen to me, for I will never lead you wrong, except when I'm drunk, which is admittedly often.
• Jordan Mechner digs up his old rules for making story-based videogames. Interesting stuff from one of the people who was first actually doing this kind of stuff. The first Prince of Persia could be argued as the first modern videogame as well as many, I suspect.
• The Times on "The Driving Force Behind Grand Theft Auto". Yeah, it's one of the Houser brothers. Man!
• Magical Wasteland has a little think on the whole maturation of the media and the various ways it can go and all that malarkies. A little Americentric - comics, of course, fill a different cultural niche in different countries - but well done.
• Kyle Francis is a complicated man. Sometimes he tells stories about his in-bred hillbilly family having a fearful time in Left 4 Dead 2.
• Yeah, the Warezfinder General stuff is disturbing as hell.
• My good lady is obsessed by 20th century poet Valentine Ackland this week. As is only right. She's pretty interesting.
• A little cross-media stuff here. Marketing bods talk about how marks effect album sales in music. In their case, pretty much only positive reviews matter. Negative reviews aren't really a problem - but someone actually putting a high number on an album actually can really help. How and why games differ is worth chewing over, I think.
• Picking up from last week's beard feature: Ex-Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein on beards destroying rock and roll. Fucking hippies.
• Oh - I've a comic out this week. DARK AVENGERS: ARES 2. More black comedy/action. The opening will probably show the way my brain works on this chap.
• Scant minutes before three. Four men on stage. A crowd of hands. Lights. Action. Wonder.

Failed.