Sundays are for recovering from an evening of trailerblogging and oops, no, wait, there are two more full showcases just tonight. It’s too late for me, readers, but you can spare yourself with more thoughtful, perhaps even calming, reading about games and non-games. I bet none of them even to have the words “a great experience for our players”.
First of all, Niki Fakhoori’s piece for Stop caring about how the happy-go-lucky Yakuza/Like a Dragon protagonists play into the heroine’s journey.
Ichiban also takes on roles generally considered feminine. He is the caretaker of Masato Arakawa, a wheelchair user and the son of his family’s patriarch Masumi Arakawa. Despite the need for caregivers, this work is treated negatively by those around him. An employee of the local hostess club asks, upon seeing Masato walking, if this means Ichiban will be “freed from indentured servitude”. Ichiban is a heroine in a world of heroes, who underestimates guardian roles due to the lack of “conquest” associated with them. Caregivers generally get “nothing” from it. It’s not possible to “climb that ladder” if your hands are busy pushing a wheelchair.
GI.biz Lewis Packwood, perhaps the best-dressed video game journalist, examines the habits and challenges faced by older video game enthusiasts. Like for older game enthusiasts, not older game enthusiasts.
“We’re definitely losing this cohort,” he said. He suspects that older gamers are likely to take long breaks between gaming sessions, and part of the problem is that games generally aren’t effective at reorienting players when they return after a break. “There’s a lag between the general investment in tutorials during the first few minutes and when the player’s loss actually occurs,” Ball said.
For the NMEAli Shutler spoke with Saros composer Sam Slater about how to make a game horrible (without actually being horrible).
“The thing about game developers is that they’re all dirty metalheads. You can’t pretend they’re heavy,” says Slater, who adores the great drone influencers – Sunn O))), Earth, Boris and Khanate. At first he played it safe, but when these first attempts were met with a polite shrug from the Housemarque team, Slater decided to try something more extreme: “I wrote ‘go too hard’ on a huge piece of paper and hung it in my studio. The next piece he submitted received a two-word response from Louden: “Holy moly!” He had cracked it.
It’s over My cityRebekah Valentine investigates the extent to which gaming hardware manufacturers use conflict minerals in their kits – and the extent to which they allow themselves to be audited to verify.
This year, 68 percent of Sony’s smelters and refineries were back in compliance. Of the non-compliant smelters and refineries this year, Sony’s report said it wasn’t even able to determine the location of 45 of them. Sony says it is taking steps to address all of this, such as sending stern letters or threatening to revoke its activity on non-compliant sites. But Sony has made these exact promises year after year in the past, and it either doesn’t deliver on them effectively or it just doesn’t work for them. We’ve reached out to Sony for comment and will update when and if we receive a response.
John Blanche, founding artist of Warhammer 40K, creator of that image of the Emperor, died this week. Among the many tributes pouring in, this one – by Trench Crusade Marc Gasgoigne, writer and Games Workshop veteran, feels particularly personal.
From epic battle scenes for the latest world version of the game to the little details of a new mini, John had a hand in everything. John set the style, tone and direction of Warhammer art over the decades, as it grew from a small British hobby company to a truly global phenomenon. However, he never became complacent and always introduced new influences, rather than lazily repeating what was done last time. He loved taking artists from the GW studio to the big London galleries and seeing them realize in front of a Dürer, a Bosch or a Géricault that everything was there to influence this new style of “grimdark” fantasy.
Something Happier to End: Kelly Burke, for the guardiantells the story of a spectator pianist who served as an improvised stand-in for a stricken artist, fulfilling the dream of literally everyone who owns a musical instrument.
As orchestra musicians frantically called local contacts, offers began to come in from substitute musicians who were 15 or 20 minutes away. But Hurwitz knew time was up.
“I thought no one was as close as they were made out to be…so I just thought, well, we have 2,500 people here…”
I didn’t get any tickets, so this week the music is Oxford rock. South Arcade – to try 2005 if you only have three minutes to spare. It’s good and fun, although all four of them look like they’re carded for buying Strongbow at a large Tesco.
