Sundays are meant to help you recover from a spouse’s friend’s wedding that you attended on Saturday while suffering from an acute case of elderly back. Unfortunately, the time for recovery is actually over, because you have already moved on to the more immediately satisfying phase of life. assign blame. Possible suspects: your swivel chair, your mattress, the computer screen that you had to laboriously recondition for transport, your sofa and that most complicit and bendy bastard of all, the light walk. Spoiled for choice, you sit down in your untrustworthy chair and start reading some of the week’s writing highlights.
Here is Mazen Haggag for Deleted backups about Final Fantasy XVI’s attempt to work with cultural influences from the Middle East and North Africa.
The problem is that Dhalmekia – the only non-white nation in the base game – is all surface, no substance. It is a desert nation of artisans whose wealth comes from trading artisan goods across Valisthea. In the tradition of fantasy games, each of its towns has its own specialized products or services: Tabor has its tanneries, Dravozd offers a whole series of quests at its forge, and Dalimil’s main attraction is its hot springs, which are surrounded by shops, including a carpet shop, a shisha stand, shops selling herbs and spices, a brass ornament shop, and a bakery. For the latter, the variety tells a visual story about how the city grew thanks to a captive audience of travelers enjoying the hot springs and a population that made the most of the opportunities available to them. Although various objects and props on display add visual flavor, that flavor never extends to the people occupying the land.
Lilith, mononymous output Game lineexamines violence, games that chastise you for violence, both sides of violence, and the empowerment of violence, mostly through the lens of a big stomping robot.
Armored Core 6 understands that violence isn’t glamorous. Death is ugly and it manifests itself in screams and gunshots; war is full of people who don’t have time to say a catchy phrase before they die. But, depending on the journey, this same violence can be cathartic. I’ve said it before: the aesthetics of death and violence are noisy. The blood is shiny. Some emotions are too strong to whisper. A story in which a violent regime is overthrown by the oppressed is not the same power fantasy where one wholeheartedly protects the status quo. Both stories are violent, but this violence is not equal.
I can never write a Sunday Papers without someone talking, unfortunately, about AI. Dr Michael Cookartificial intelligence researcher and sometimes RPS contributor, remembers the optimism of earlier work on AI and compares it to what big tech has transformed.
I reviewed a paper on AI the other day, and I’m not breaking anonymity with this description because it’s one of a dozen identical papers I’ve reviewed this year alone, where the main contribution was simply: we asked an LLM to do this thing. This was the paper’s contribution to AI research. They took a product built by a private company and asked it to do something, then declared it did it (without evaluation). It’s totally okay if it’s AI research now, that’s fine, maybe you see value in someone reporting that they learned that this was possible. Times change, words change, and if I am no longer in this field, then I will come to accept it and find a new space to live in. But I look at articles like this today and I just find it… impossible to reconcile myself with the world that excited me twenty years ago. Much of AI research now simply uses the products of a handful of companies to pretend they can do something. If you’re lucky, they might ask another LLM to evaluate the results. Research studies the applications of capital, without expanding our understanding of the world.
Also on a Papers meta note: including Nathan Brown’s Hit points is gathering in easy mode. But it’s also one of the best, funniest, most stylish and furious newsletters in gaming. This one is about the Microsoft layoffs.
Obviously no one is fooled. Sure, there’s some logic in, say, integrating the Halo team – who spent a lot of money and took a lot of time to create pretty much the square root of all fuckery – into Activision, whose well-oiled Call Of Duty production line actually knows how to ship stuff. But I don’t think there’s a soul outside of the Xbox C-suite who thinks any of this is good or will work. Nowadays, the Xbox tarot deck consists only of Death cards. Mix them as much as you like; It’s nice to feel busy, after all. Don’t expect anything to change.
A little non-games to finish, perhaps. Here is Niko Stratis for Paste the magazine on the occasion of Nevermind’s 35th anniversary.
We never really talked about words; we just warned what they meant. My Baptist neighbors told me they were satanic, even evil, and I learned that my feelings, the ones I felt at home and which were reflected in Cobain’s lyrics, were wrong. Sin, like pride and murder before it. My mother didn’t pay much attention to him until he died by suicide, and when he did, his sinful words became desperate warnings. We never talked about why he was sad, why he was so happy but alone, ugly but good. We never talked about mental health, or the weight of the 1990s, a decade we often remember a lot about, but for me it’s still a bit dark. It’s the brown wallpaper and dark carpet in our living room. It was the nights that seemed to find more dark hours. These are all the words I didn’t have to know why Nevermind spoke to me so deeply. Why it was my favorite record to a boring degree once it became my record, once its unknowable form became tangible to me in a way it never would be to anyone else.
Actually, it’s not written, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t link People Make Games report on Bobby Kotick’s fight against the pressa two-year (!) investigation carried out mainly by a journalist Mikhail Klimentov.
The music this week is, if you’ll forgive the lack of imagination, the Controlling the resonant OST. I particularly like no matter what it is.
