The Sunday Newspaper | Rock-Paper-Shotgun

Sundays are for eating Biscoff spread and rewatching Better Call Saul, again. Crunchy, of course. First, let’s read some pieces that I, Nic Reuben, personally found interesting about games (and game-related stuff!)

Bug Quest wrote some nice words about UFO 50.

In fact, UFO 50’s investment in fiction only highlights and celebrates the real people who worked on all of its games. I have no idea how many (if any) of the notes accompanying UFO Soft’s games are autobiographical. What I do know for sure is that the real-life developers of UFO 50—Derek Yu, Jon Perry, Ojiro Fumoto, Eirik Suhrke, Paul Hubans, and Tyriq Plummer—are, just like their fictional counterparts, people with friends, families, dreams, favorite bars, and paintings in their offices. Humanity is something we take for granted when we play a video game, but UFO 50 celebrates it as something that makes games special.

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

“Each game had to have its own unique identity, but it also had to be part of the collection,” Yu explains. “I would say most of the games started out as their own thing, and then became more mindful of their role in the collection as time went on. And through that process, each game’s identity became stronger because of its connection to the whole. It no longer just existed in a vacuum – a game could be a sequel or share themes with other games or maybe be something unique. There’s a lot more context for each game as part of UFO 50 than it would as a standalone title.”

Ed Smith wrote about Soma for Bullet Points Monthly

The problem, however, is that video games are often so systematic and mechanical that they can only illustrate perfect visions of ideologies. Think of SimCity, or more recently Cities Skylines 2, in which certain esoteric aspects of the games’ respective codebases resulted in large numbers of homeless people appearing in the players’ cities. In both cases, these increases in homeless populations were seen by the game’s creators and by the players as flaws in the system, as bugs, as glitches, and were simply “fixed.” Both games simulate and symbolize ideologies related to capital, democracy, entrepreneurship, social services, policy, and so on, but when the results of those simulations drift outside of utopia—when the games’ ideologies result in a decrease in the player’s success—the simulations, the symbols, are seen as flawed.

For 404 Media, Emanuel Maiberg spoke with Japanese game industry analyst Serkan Toto about Nintendo’s lawsuit against Palword.

They had a famous mobile game called White Cat Project, don’t copy Mario, don’t copy Pokémon, don’t copy Zelda, nothing. Nintendo brought up six patents that they thought this company was infringing on in their very successful mobile game at one point. 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. You know when devices are in sleep mode 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 is using it. And then Nintendo said, you know, look, you’re using our patent and you can’t do that. You’re not paying us a licensing fee.

Here’s a cool mech piece from the RPS archives that showed up in Slack this week. Here’s a cool piece about graphics card boxart from the archives of that other PC gaming site. Here’s the original cast of Resident Evil 1 playing the game. Here’s a short argument about how FromSoftware’s influence is hurting the action genre, which I foresee some of you guys enjoying arguing about, holy sabbath. RPS contributor and fine wordsmith Rick Lane has a newsletter recommending Steam demos. I’m not immune to Moo Deng propaganda. This week’s music is a new mix by Pizza Hotline. Have a great weekend!