The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for eating Biscoff spread and rewatching Better Call Saul, again. Crunchy, ofc. Before that, let’s read some writing that I, Nic Reuben, personally found interesting about games (and game related things!)

Bug Quest wrote some nice words about UFO 50.

in fact, UFO 50’s investment in its fiction really only highlights and celebrates the actual human beings who worked on all of its many games. i have no idea how many (if any) of the notes associated with UFO Soft’s games are autobiographical. i know for a fact, though, that UFO 50’s actual developers - Derek Yu, Jon Perry, Ojiro Fumoto, Eirik Suhrke, Paul Hubans, and Tyriq Plummer - are, like their fictional counterparts, people with friends and families and dreams and favorite bars and paintings in their offices. humanity is something that we take for granted every time we play a video game, but UFO 50 celebrates it as the thing that makes games so special.

Oh hey, more UFO 50. It’s 50 games, it can have two entries. Christian Donlan chatted to Derek Yu for Eurogamer.

"Each game needed to have its own unique identity but it also needed to be part of the collection," Yu explains. "I would say that most games started as their own thing, though, and then became more and more considerate of their role in the collection as time went on. And through that process, each game's identity actually became stronger because of its connection to the whole. It didn't just exist in a vacuum anymore - a game could be a sequel or share themes with other games or maybe be something one-of-a-kind. There's a lot more context for each game as part of UFO 50 than as a standalone title."

Ed Smith wrote about Soma for Bullet Points Monthly

The problem however is that videogames are often so systematic and so mechanical that they are only able to illustrate perfect visions of ideologies. Think about SimCity, or more recently Cities Skylines 2, wherein certain esotericisms of the games’ respective code bases resulted in a large number of homeless people appearing within players’ cities. In both cases, these swells in the homeless population were regarded by the game makers and by players as imperfections within the system, as bugs, as glitches, and they were summarily ‘fixed.’ Both of these games simulate and symbolise ideologies related to capital, democracy, enterprise, social welfare, policy, and so on, but if the results of those simulations drift outside utopia—when the ideologies in the game result in a lessening of the player’s success—the simulations, the symbols, are considered defective.

For 404 Media, Emanuel Maiberg chatted to Japan game industry analyst Serkan Toto about the Nintendo lawsuit against Palword. (Edit: this wasn't paywalled for me when I included it, but appears to be now. Apologies for the annoyance!)

they had a famous mobile game called White Cat Project, not copying Mario, not copying Pokémon, not copying Zelda, nothing at all. Nintendo brought forward six patents that they thought that this company was violating inside their very successful mobile game at one time. It was one of the most popular mobile games in Japan, and they built a huge case. One of the patents was for a confirmation screen after sleep mode. You know when devices are sleeping and you want to resume there's a confirmation screen in a lot of games? “Are you sure you want to resume?” And then you tap yes or no. Nintendo has a patent on that, and this game uses it. And then Nintendo said, you know, look, you're using our patent and you cannot do that. You're not paying us any licensing fees.

Here’s a cool mech piece from the RPS archives that came up in Slack this week. Here’s a cool piece on graphics card box art from the archives of that other PC gaming site. Here’s Resident Evil 1’s original cast playing the game. Here’s a brief argument that FromSoftware’s influence is hurting the action genre, which I foresee some of you might enjoy scrapping about on this, the holy Sabbath. RPS contributor and good wordsman Rick Lane has a newsletter recommending Steam demos. I am not immune to Moo Deng propaganda. Music this week is a new mix from Pizza Hotline. Have a great weekend!