The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for hanging out with your kid, obviously. Best make this week's jaunt to the world of videogame worlds and videos a quick one, then.

Leigh Alexander's Lo-Fi Let's Play, once syndicated here at RPS, has returned as a Patreon-funded series. Each episode features an old adventure game. No, not LucasArts or Sierra stuff - older and more obscure. The new episode looks at Escape From Rungistan.

At PC Gamer, Steven Messner wrote about Ultima Online in celebration of its 19th birthday, and highlighted some of the stories which have emerged from it during its lifetime.

Ultima Online turned 19 today and despite being so outdated, few PC games inspire nostalgia quite like Richard 'Lord British' Garriott's first MMO. Unlike most modern MMOs—ignoring EVE Online of course—Ultima Online is unique because it's the closest thing to a Dungeons and Dragons campaign gone massively multiplayer. It's sometimes bizarre, always hectic, and wonderfully intimate. Without all the modern luxuries of global chat or automated trade systems, players had to interact with each other in ways that gave rise to friendships, rivalries, and devastating betrayals. Oh yeah, Ultima Online was hardcore as hell too. Griefing and player killing were the laws of the land, and death wasn't just a slap on the wrist—you could lose everything.

This is a long - extremely long - look at Star Citizen's Chris Roberts and (spoilers?) Derek Smart. I confess I have not read all of it but there were details in there that I didn't already know about both designers, and found interesting as a result.

This might sound strange, considering he was the one hyping it in the press a few years earlier, promising to blow Wing Commander out of the water. But in reality, his calculations for how long it would actually take to finish the game had been so many lightyears off that he now faced the risk of being associated with a game no one in their right mind would consider a fully playable space sim. Take-Two was about to charge full price for what constituted half a game, if that. On September 27th, 1996, he took stock of the situation and chose to sign a contract granting Take-Two complete rights to the game. Then he got into his car and cruised along the east coast all the way home to the balmy weather of Florida.

I enjoyed this look at a Deus Ex Mankind Divided quest which everyone loves but I missed entirely.

The latest Donlan.

Here's a question: What do you do in Mario?

Good question. I love Mario! In Mario you run and jump and defeat enemies. You explore. You get from left to right. You sometimes climb flagpoles. If it's Mario 2 you pick and throw vegetables. If it's Super Mario World, you get to knock about on a dinosaur. If it's Mario Galaxy you dropkick meteors into the heart of a distant sun. Mario is pretty good when it comes to doing things. It excels at getting things done. It has purity, and it also has range

FIFA 17 came out this past week. I'm playing and being disappointed by it. Luis Miguel Echegaray at The Guardian wrote about how the series helped sell soccer to the US", and it's a good read.

For Kelvin Garcia, growing up in a Dominican family from New York City meant two sports took priority. “As a Latino kid in the Bronx, all I ever played was basketball and baseball,” says Garcia, who now lives in Texas. As a boy, soccer was barely on Garcia’s radar. He remembers working at a sports camp with European counselors during the 2010 World Cup and wondering what the excitement was about. As a basketball fan, he was more interested in whether LeBron was going to the Knicks.

Nowadays, Garcia cannot go a day without talking about his love for Antonio Conte’s Chelsea and their title chances.

Told you this was a quick one. I didn't link it when I was listening to it most, so here's Sia's video for The Greatest, which I am still watching.