Sunday is for waking up before the sun and going for a bike ride before the tarmac gets hot enough to cook an egg. Any sane person would avoid the bike ride altogether, but I, a foolish person, agreed to travel across the country at the end of the month and am currently not capable of doing 40 miles a day, let alone a hundred. So I have to make them win.
Still, if I get home sizzle-free in this scorching sun, I can celebrate with a fried egg on the tarmac and a lazy perusal of some of this week’s best gaming (and non-gaming) reads.
Here is what I would recommend.
Write for IGNPhil Iwaniuk recounts how he was invited to a 30th anniversary celebration at Criterion, creator of Burnout and Need For Speed, only to learn that the studio will now only work on Battlefield.
“We’re not here to talk about the past,” says Rebecka Coutaz, VP and GM of Battlefield Studios Europe, on Criterion’s 30th anniversary. Behind her on the wall is the studio’s new logo, which reads “Criterion: a Battlefield Studio.” The message is therefore quite clear.
For the past decade, the Guildford-based studio that made its name in racing has been a collaborative partner of EA’s Battlefield series, first bringing its expertise to 2016’s Battlefield 1 and then Battlefields 5, 2042, and 6. When I ask if the newly established scope of Burnout and Need For Speed developers might include projects other than Battlefield, Coutaz is clear: “We’re just focused on Battlefield.”
However, while EA may not want to talk about the studio’s racing game legacy, Iwaniuk knows enough to give the studio a fitting tribute on its 30th anniversary.
Alex Donaldson and Tom Orry launched Respecta news, reviews and features website. You may remember Alex from his years working at VG247 and then Eurogamer, but it has always been almost a side hustle as he is also the owner and founder of RPGsite. Tom is also decorated with distinctions, as one of the founders of Videogamer, then editor of VG247, before taking over as editorial director of Eurogamer.
(O)ur mission is simple: a good gaming news, reviews and features website. A cool tone that feels like hearing a friend talking about games over a beer, whether written or written. podcasts And videos. On the boring side – built sensibly and sustainably. No “you’ll never guess” or “one click” clickbait headlines. No stupid bullshit – and on this subject, unapologetically British, even though we have contributors from all over the world.
We of course wish them good luck. Unless they’re writing about PC games, I can only hope the dirt on their lot is salty and their sheets go moldy.
Speaking of GarbageJon Hicks traces the emergence of the waist-high wall in the early 2000s and all the games that made it briefly ubiquitous. It’s so much more than just Gears of War. (But it’s also mostly about Gears of War.)
I must clarify, for the honor of the developers, that no all the walls were waist-high – sometimes they were high that let your character peek around the corner, such is the magic of video games – but the iconic experience of that generation was walking into a space about fifty feet square, with a series of waist-high walls (or crates or vehicles) scattered across it, and knowing that in a few minutes you’d be crouching behind them to avoid incoming fire.
This is a very specific staging that almost never happens in reality (most places filled with heavy objects are more efficient in their use of space) and is now largely abandoned in games as well. We now have destructible landscapes, bigger spaces, and smarter enemies, and games are better at both cleverly hiding cover and giving you more challenging ways to use it. But we also have boomer shooters as deliberate throwbacks, so maybe there’s room for a new breed of retro third-person shooters stuffed with carefully spaced low walls, giving us a chance to crouch behind concrete again.
It’s over Gamesindustry.bizRob Fahey has written a lucid, often scathing, but also occasionally hopeful assessment of what happened on Xbox last week. This is one of the best answers I’ve read so far.
However, the “reset” of the Xbox should not be entirely ruled out. At least the problems now seem to be better diagnosed, even if the solutions still remain to be found. Of course, in a week where 1,600 people have had their lives upended by terrible decisions made way over their heads – and where thousands more are wondering when and where the ax will fall next – it’s more than fair to be angry at the destructive waste of it all, rather than worrying about the strategic positioning of it all.
No one should forget that Microsoft deliberately chose to put itself in this position, spending billions to buy studios it can no longer properly run, upending the lives of thousands of people in the process. This sort of thing is unfortunately something we get used to in the industry; but it was despicable behavior when Embracer did it, and it’s no less despicable when Microsoft does it. Even recognizing the impossible and conflicting priorities facing Xbox, and even if this whole sad affair ends up snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, it won’t quickly be forgotten how poorly Microsoft treated the people and studios it was responsible for. Trying to regain some of that lost goodwill may be another competing priority on Asha Sharma’s increasingly difficult to-do list.
I’m not sure if Sharma and his team made a mistake in refocusing Xbox. They are reacting to a division that has been woefully mismanaged for years and produces very little for the money spent. Or, to read the last decade differently, Phil Spencer and his team tried a laissez-faire strategy and it was an experiment that didn’t work and is now coming to an end. However, I don’t know if Sharma’s actions will lead to the creation of good games in the years to come. In some ways, this seems impossible: online studios Id and Zenimax appear to have been split in two, and the low morale of the rest of the company is going to impact the development of each studio. However, whatever happens in Xbox’s future, the cost of this trial is paid by the workers who had no choice in setting the strategy.
I cycle to Epping most weekends to escape the concrete of London, so this Guardian long read about the build-up to and resumption of last year’s protests outside a hotel housing asylum seekers makes for particularly grim reading. Yet I was struck by this incredible description of a person who could survive in many absurdist novels:
One protester I speak to says the only way to solve the “migrant problem” might be through insurrection. Lee Collinson, a 68-year-old retiree who recently took up bodybuilding, lives in a penthouse apartment on the high road with a unique waterfall and portraits of Horatio Nelson and Winston Churchill (MP for Epping from 1924 to 1945). Collinson says he took part in the protests to protect his “daughters” and “granddaughters” from people he claims were sent to the UK by investor and philanthropist George Soros to destabilize and take over Western countries. Collinson says he’s read a lot about it. When I ask him where he gets his information, he replies: “YouTube!”
I was hoping to end with something a little more optimistic, like Quentin Shaw’s LRB article on light work sex, but this comes in the context that artificial light at night disrupts their reproductive patterns. I’ll let you read the broader article and stick to the trickier parts.
Around 10:40 p.m., during the dark, warm nights of June and July, females emerge from their burrows into the low vegetation. They turn on the green light, about as bright as the charging light on an electronic device, in the hope that a low-flying male will land and mate. If no males arrive around midnight, they turn off and return to their burrows to wait for a better night tomorrow. Once mating is successful, females lay up to a hundred eggs and then lay down to die.
Well, after a series of articles about layoffs, racism, and the death of glow worms, I think I’m going to have to resort to music to cheer me up. Break the glass and deploy the Floozies Oh my God.
Now let’s all cross our fingers, eat our tarmac eggs and hope that next week brings better news.
