The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for packing yourself to the countryside to hunt owlbeasts with a catapult. It's what I do every Sunday, and this one is no exception. Goddamn owlbeasts.

• I could probably post something like this every week, but it amused me to see a mainstream UK newspaper commissioning their tech correspondent to help a 360-using reader work out how to build a gaming PC: "I expect that if you asked a thousand gamers this question, you'd get at least a thousand different answers. There are so many different parts that the number of combinations is impossibly large. The answer also requires a balancing act, because your £1,000 budget will not enable you buy the top-rated components in many categories without making sacrifices elsewhere." But to be fair, you can still build an insane PC for £1000. By contrast, check out Digital Foundry's £300 PC.
• Videogames According To David Cage is certainly a title for an article.
• Tim Rogers pretends to hate Final Fantasy VII over on Kotaku: "Final Fantasy VII's Wikipedia entry is 6,596 words.The Wikipedia entry for William Shakespeare is 5,999 words. Let's apply One-Hundred-Point Scale Internet Video Game Web Site Score Logic to these two word counts: if we were giving Final Fantasy VII a 10, Shakespeare's collected works would score a 9.7."
• This is an interesting article about Republique's Kickstarter: "A week into our campaign, we were surprised to see dozens of comments online from people saying: "Look at that game, look at how expensive their video looks... They don't need our money." Meanwhile, our company bank account was getting dangerously low."
• Here is an interesting comment on Sleeping Dogs. I daren't actually quote from it, because I believe it spoils one of the best moments in the game. But if you've played the game you might appreciate the analysis.
• More on "In-Game Photography": "The whole reason that I wanted to write this article is so that we can talk about IGP in a more useful and sophisticated way. After all, a reviewer wouldn't apply the same criteria for success for an FPS and a 4X game, or even at an extreme dealing with computers, for MS Excel and a Video Game. It would be equally a mistake to analyze all the different kinds of photographs, whether they are IGP, virtual or analog, the same way. Each IGP version of these categories will of course borrow, steal and comment on the discoveries of other categories just as they have in the history of analog photography. That's part of the fun of this conversation!"
• A guide to the Biblical references in Dear Esther.
• Leigh Alexander suggests that games journalists should be holding the industry accountable. I would point to John's fine and regular battling for consumer rights as an example of how to do that. Did I post that already? Probably.
• Interesting to read Ragnar's reaction to The Secret World's troubles.
• Hooray for Knock, Knock hitting its target.
• The first part of Polygon's documentary about themselves.
• Know some Java? Want to help with Project Zomboid?
• The world is so pretty.
• Warren Spector is so pretty.

Music this week is the trailer for Berberian Sound Studio.