The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for drumming your fingers until you get your hands on the new Horus Heresy boardgame. Any time now. Any time. Also, compiling a list of the fine (mostly) games related reading from across the week while trying not to link to some pop-music esoterica.

• Jim talked to a lot of hefty MMO sorts about the future of the form over at Eurogamer.
• Indie games does a survey about average indie-games-dev yearly earnings and discovers people who work in teams of two have twice the average earnings of those who go solo. Which are numbers which can prompt several explanations for, but it interesting either way.
• Non-Gamer Fanzine-pop-goddess Penny B goes to the Sheffield Launch of the Doctor Who games and reports.
• Tim Ingham asks a good question: why did The Sunday Times feel able to do this?
• Soren Johnson writes about Civ4's use of Religion for Kotaku in the splenidly entitled "God Was a Math Problem".
• Rob Fahey on Killing the Golden Goose - as in, the war between highly successful creatives and highly-suited corporate folk. Walks a good line by trying to actually show both sides to the debate. I suspect if I'd written a similar column, I'd be far more biased. Well done Rob.
• Been a while since someone's done something like this: Tap Repeatedly do a big ol' article on Fear.
• Papa Voodoo nodded at Joe Martin's short piece on difficulty - and the most interesting stuff is a comparison of how Serious Sam and Thief play with difficulty concepts. Not exactly revolutionary, but focuses the attention here. After reading about John talking about Difficulty over at EG, here's some other angles.
• It was Whispered World week at the Slowdown, with lots of stuff about this adventure game's six (Count 'em!) year development. If you want a review, I suggest Denby's at Resolution would be where to look.
• Why would you ever spend more than 2 weeks making your Iphone game, argues Facebook Indie Games blog. My initial response was a caustic "why would you ever spend more than 2-minutes making love to someone? You come either way".
• Magweasel translate the manga-format record of the conversation between Famitsu's editor-in-chief Hirokazu Hamamura and Developer Kenji Eno. Brilliant stuff, in execution, concept and what it shows (both cross-cultural differences in game writing, plus difference between now and a decade ago and... oh, just fun).
• I love this NY Times article about the ultra-long-distance cyclist who basically goes insane when he's racing.
• Everett True linked to this rant about music writing. Presented without comment.
• When I finish writing the Sunday Papers, I'm going to watch this Sparta documentary. Will it be any good? Who can tell.
• Between playing PJ Harvey's old Too Bring You My Love on repeat, I've been digging Simon Reynold's compilation of 00s
  Eldritchtronica and Wyrd Bliss.

Failed.