The Sunday Papers | Rock Paper Shotgun

Sundays are for waking up before the sun and getting a bike ride in before the tarmac gets hot enough to cook an egg. Any sensible person would skip the bike ride altogether, but I, a nonsensical person, have agreed to a ride across the country at the end of the month and I’m currently not able to manage 40 miles a day, let alone a hundred. So, I have to get them gains.

Still, should I get back home unsizzled by this heatwave sun, I can celebrate with a tarmac-fried egg and lazy perusal of some of this week’s best gaming (and non-gaming) reads.

Here’s what I’d recommend.

Writing for IGN, Phil Iwaniuk tells about how he was invited out to a 30th anniversary celebration at Criterion, maker of Burnout and Need For Speed, only to learn the studio will now just work on Battlefield.

“We’re not here to talk about the past,” says VP & GM of Battlefield Studios Europe Rebecka Coutaz, on the occasion of Criterion’s 30th anniversary. Behind her on the wall is the studio’s new logo, which reads “Criterion: a Battlefield Studio.” The message is pretty clear, then.

For the past decade, the Guildford-based studio that made its name in the racing space has been a collaborative partner on EA’s Battlefield series, first lending its expertise to 2016’s Battlefield 1 and later to Battlefields 5, 2042, and 6. When I ask whether the Burnout and Need For Speed developer’s newly established scope might include projects other than Battlefield, Coutaz is clear: “We are solely focused on Battlefield.”

Though, while EA may not want to talk about the studio’s racing game legacy, Iwaniuk knows enough about it to give the studio a proper tribute on its 30th birthday.

Alex Donaldson and Tom Orry launched Respec, a news, criticism, and feature website. You may well remember Alex from his years working at VG247 and then at Eurogamer, but that’s always been almost a side hustle as he is also the owner and founder of RPGsite. Tom, too, is festooned with accolades, 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 games news, criticism, and feature website. A chill tone that’s like you’re hearing a pal wax lyrical about games over a beer, be that in the written word or in podcasts and videos. On the boring side – sensibly and sustainably built. No clickbait ‘you’ll never guess’ or ‘one neat click’ headlines. No silly bollocks – and on that topic, unabashedly British-owned, even if we have contributors from all over.

We, of course, wish them the best of luck. Unless they write about PC games, then I can only hope that the earth of their allotment is salted and their bed sheets become mildewy.

Speaking of Jank, Jon Hicks charts the emergence of the waist high wall in the early 2000s and all the games that made it briefly ubiquitous. It’s more than just Gears of War. (But it is also mostly Gears of War.)

I should state for the honour of the developers that not all walls were waist-high – sometimes they were high ones that let your character peek around the corner, such is the magic of videogames – but the signature experience of the generation was entering a space about fifty feet square, with a series of waist-high walls (or crates, or vehicles) scattered through it, and knowing that within minutes you’d be crouching behind them to avoid incoming fire.

It’s a very specific mis-en-scene that almost never occurs in reality (most places full of heavy objects are more efficient in their use of space) and is now largely abandoned in games too. We have destructible scenery now, larger spaces and smarter enemies, and games are better at both artfully disguising 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 some concrete again.

Over on Gamesindustry.biz, Rob Fahey has written a clear-eyed, often scathing, but also occasionally hopeful assessment of what has happened at Xbox in the past week. It’s one of the best responses I’ve read so far.

Even so, the “reset” of Xbox shouldn’t be dismissed entirely. At least the problems seem to be better diagnosed now, even if the solutions still need work. Of course, in a week when 1,600 people have had their lives turned upside down due to terrible decisions made far above their heads – and thousands of others are left wondering when and where the axe will fall next – it’s more than fair to be angry at the destructive waste of it, rather than concerned with the strategic positioning of it all.

Nobody should forget that Microsoft actively chose to put itself in this position, spending billions buying studios it now can’t manage properly, thus playing havoc with the lives of thousands. This kind of thing is sadly something we’re getting used to in the industry; but it was contemptible behaviour when Embracer did it, and it’s no less contemptible when Microsoft does it. Even acknowledging the impossible, conflicting priorities Xbox is faced with, and even if this whole sorry affair does end up snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, it won’t quickly be forgotten how shabbily Microsoft has treated the people and studios it was responsible for. Attempting to earn back some of that lost goodwill can be another competing priority on Asha Sharma’s increasingly difficult to-do list.

I’m not sure that Sharma and her team have made a mistake in refocusing Xbox. They are responding to a division that has been woefully mismanaged for years and producing very little to show for the amount of money spent on it. Or, to read the last decade differently, Phil Spencer and his team tried a laissez-faire strategy and it’s an experiment that didn’t work and now it is coming to an end. However, I’ve no idea if Sharma’s actions will lead to good games being made in the coming years. In some ways it seems impossible that it could: Id and Zenimax Online Studios look to have been snapped in two, and low morale across the rest of the company is going to impact development at every studio. Though, whatever happens in Xbox’s future, the cost of that trial is being paid for by the workers who didn’t get the choice to set the strategy.

I cycle out to Epping most weekends to escape the concrete of London, so this Guardian long read on the build up to and recovery from last year’s protests outside a hotel housing asylum seekers makes for particularly grim reading. Yet, within there, I was struck by this incredible description of a person who could live on in any number of absurdist novels:

One protester I speak to says the only way to sort out the “migrant problem” may be insurrection. Lee Collinson, a 68-year-old retiree who has recently taken up bodybuilding, lives in a penthouse apartment on the high road featuring a novelty waterfall and portraits of Horatio Nelson and Winston Churchill (the MP for Epping from 1924 to 1945). Collinson says he went to the protests to protect “daughters” and “granddaughters” from people he says were sent to the UK by the investor and philanthropist George Soros to destabilise and take over western countries. Collinson says he has read a lot about it. When I ask where he gets his information, he replies: “YouTube!”

I was hoping to end on something a little more upbeat, such as Quentin Shaw’s LRB article on glow work sex, but it comes with the context that artificial light at night is messing up their breeding patterns. I will leave you to read the wider article, and instead stick just to the saucy bits.

At around 10.40 p.m. on dark, warm nights in June and July, the females climb out of their burrows into low vegetation. They switch on the green light, about as bright as the charging lamp on an electronic device, hoping a low-flying male will land and mate. If no males arrive by around midnight they switch off and creep back to their burrows to wait for a better night tomorrow. Once they have successfully mated, females lay up to a hundred eggs and then lie down to die.

Well, after a string articles about layoffs, racism, and glow worm deaths, I think I’ll have to resort to music as a mood lifter. Break glass and deploy The Floozies’ Oh My Gawd.

Now, let’s all cross our fingers, eat our tarmac eggs, and hope that next week brings better news.