The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for drumming your fingers until the servers warm up on a closed-Beta of a game and compiling a list of fine (mostly) games related reading from across the week, while trying to avoid linking to some piece of irrelevant pop music. Go!

• In the week of the Digital Economics Bill, Rob Fahey writes about the triumph of the small over at EG/GamesBiz. Example quote: "...one of the serious, underlying problems with the Digital Economy Bill is simply that it legislates primarily for a market in which copyright and intellectual property resides with a handful of powerful, monolithic companies who can afford to take the kind of expensive actions against illegal downloaders and their enablers outlined in the bill. As Denki's problems earlier in the week starkly illustrate, this is not where our economy is moving."
• I haven't linked to the Escapist for ages, so since their current issue is the most PC-centric in ages, let's do so. It's their Zerg Rush issue, and devoted to all things Starcraft. As in, an interview with Blizzard on the pressures of the game, a couple of pieces on the pro scene and a good piece of personal experience with Starcraft.
• Alec linked to part of this on Friday, but in case you missed it, Bit-tech's What is Made in the UK week has been splendid. Best UK game ever?Introversion Interview? And the Alec-linked Fabled Lands stuff is a lot of fun.
• This is a couple of weeks old now, but it's been sitting on a tab and I've been having a think about it. Laura Michet over at Resolution wonders why there's a resounding silence around Saira, being the first commercial game by the creator of Kyntt. She brings up good reasons, certainly - I'd add a failure on the PR front to it. But it's interesting to watch a "major" indie game not actually get the attention you'd presume it would. Indie games can just disappear like this.
• Review with Extreme Prejudice on good and bad sandbox games. Always good to see someone roll their eyes at average old Mafia. Yeah, Walker. You heard.
• Michael Cook has a good think what to do with Sleep Is Death.
• Edge have a look at Robotron 2084, which remains my favourite of all the "classic" period
  games. It remains a brutally magnificent game - and also a brutally magnificent game which people continue to not just make games derived from it today... but make games derived from it which receive mass acclaim. I love it so. Also, ROBOTS.
• What I hate most about Pokemon is how unrealistic they are. Via Nathaniel Berman.
• Warren Ellis on why we should go into space.
• Malcom McClaren died of cancer this week, in a shock to everyone. Here's a hefty interview with him chatting to Momus. Opening quote: "People always ask me that same question, you know. What does [punk] mean to you and why do you still believe in it today. And you say well, give it another ten years, and we're truly inside the 21st century, and then you have to look back, and you have to pick out, well, what was the 20th century really about? Of ten things that you might talk about, in the whole of the 20th century, culturally -- from the invention of the motor car, to Pablo Picasso, I definitely think punk rock's going to be in it. In the top ten cultural phenomena, and things that produced that century and created certain lifestyles, or changed irrevocably life itself, punk rock will be one of them." Generally speaking, of all the tributes, Tom Ewing's is the pithiest: Best Troll Ever.
• Spinning off that triumph of the small piece upthread, here's an Interesting article on the future of print.
• My old mate Josh Ellis' Tom Waits/Bjork "Humans Down In The Hole" mash-up is a whole lot of fun, in an appropriately moody way.

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