The Sunday Papers

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The Sunday Papers is our weekly roundup of great writing about (mostly) videogames from across the web.

Assuming I haven't gotten torn apart by wild boars, Sundays are for navigating the wooded valleys around Cadair Idris. I'm on a hiking holiday in Eryri till Tuesday 14th April, tramping up slopes and wading through lakes of heather without a care for the depressing world of 'high' technology. I am Going Primitive, living as my Celtic ancestors did, with naught but a smartphone and a Crunchyroll subscription to ward me against Nature's ravages. Still, I have a few moments to scurry under yon dripping crag, eat a squashed flapjack, and tell you about some things I've read this week.

The dastards at Jank.cool have been talking to themselves about Marathon, mostly meditating upon how they are bad at the game and confused by it and hate it and would rather be playing Straftat instead but OOOH look, shiny! Site run by hamsters, folks. Site run by goldfish. I do like this edited "Readalong" format, mind you. We should steal it for RPS. I mean, we probably did it first, back when those terrible wankers worked for us. Here is Graham's intro.

Last week, Brendy explained his feelings about Marathon, Bungie's new extraction shooter. He didn't like it, arguing it was merely "going double-or-nothing on the simple psychological and adrenal hacks that define [the] genre".

Sounds like something we should all play together, thought Jonty and Graham. So we did. Will we be able to convince Brendy that there's more to Marathon than gambling and barcodes, or will we all repeatedly die in a prefab outbuilding while pathologically refusing to watch the lore videos? The following chat has been edited for length and clarity and to remove roughly nine of the times we died.

Auntie Ham has an entertaining rant on the Hamsite in response to Yoshi P's recent fretting that the kids might not be into Final Fantasy these days.

Do I think it'll get better? Do I think kids will swing back and fall really in love with Final Fantasy? Maybe. I think, at least, the current situation will end. Probably not anytime soon, but if it does, I do not see the current titans being the ones left standing as the champions of kid's media. Mascot Horror is already sweeping that demographic like the whooping cough and I suspect that the next big Thing for kids, on par with the titans of my generation, will be either Five Nights at Freddy's or a spiritual offshoot of that. There's a higher chance of a Poppy Playtime RPG taking hold of the youth than there is of a 12 year old knowing who the fuck Solus zos Galvus is. The most boring truth of the matter is that kids have stopped seeing games as things to Play and, by and large, seen them as another arm of socialization. If there's nothing to Partake In when they play Chrono Trigger, why even play it? They can just go onto Twitter and start screaming at people for shipping Stelle/Kafka because they perceive it to be pedophilic. I wish this was an anecdote I made up for a joke, but the only silver lining is that it's not any of the children I know doing it.

Slightly older, this one, but having caught the 'show' myself recently in Nottingham, UK, I have to pass along this boisterous and/or bored write-up of crowd-sourced donkey revolution simulator asses.masses by Luis Aguasvivas.

The herd’s collective frustrations when someone does something wrong or veers off path is audible. Disturbed laughter reverberates inside the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater as the lowest common denominator humor wins out. This becomes the show’s primary logic propelling decisions into a collective outhouse. We are asses after all, so it makes sense. Yet I was nevertheless distraught. The “ass” in asses.masses must surely be a deliberate choice its creators made to ease participants into discarding some inhibitions. My wife sneers and leers at me. Sweat beads gather on my brow. I say to myself “I should have taken her to Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. in Times Square as I originally planned.”!

For AV Club, Elijah Gonzalez makes the case that horror is cost-effective, in an article that doubles as a list of cool upcoming indie horror games.

Then there’s scope, as in the size of a game and what it’s trying to bite off. “A key element of horror is the fact that you can’t just escape, and so as a result, the story is confined. A lot of times, limitations and restrictions are the birthplace of creativity,” says Joseph Hunter (a.k.a. Akabaka), the developer behind the Sucker For Love series. The setting in horror games tends to be claustrophobic and condensed; there are obvious exceptions, but the genre tends to deliver shorter, punchier experiences that avoid overstaying their welcome. After all, seeing too much of the monster kind of ruins the effect.

A nifty Rebekah Valentine investigation to finish: doesn't struggling manchild Nate from Baby Steps remind you of someone?

Nate doesn't speak much about his personal life throughout his journey, but throughout Baby Steps, Nate can acquire various silly hats to wear, some of which provide him with dreams reflecting on his real life if he makes it to camp with them at the end of a day. In one of these dreams, Nate is referred to as "Nate D" and Nate "Dumbass" - he also goes by "Nathan Bake" at one point when he flirts with being a DJ. Through other scenes, particularly optional phone calls with Nate's dad, we learn that he has a sister named Cassie, and that he's a "junior" - his dad is also named Nathan. And per the credits, his mom is named Elena. If that's not enough out the gate as proof, dataminers have found that Nate's model is just referred to as "Nathan Drake" in the game's files (as shared by Caleb (monkeylicker) in the official Discord.)

Music this week needs to be Journey Music. I need momentum. I can already feel my knees giving way beneath the sheer density of squashed flapjack in my rucksack. I can smell the boar, massing in the undergrowth. Take it away, Led Zeppelin. Get us the hell out of here.