Sunday’s documents | Stone paper shotgun
Sundays are to spend with a group of teenagers who play soccer and feel mortified when their ball comes jumping towards you. Before you clumsily prepare to relax, let’s read this week’s best writings on gaming.
For Pioneer Works, Everest Pipkin wrote about beauty and comfort in the abandoned worlds of Roblox. Shout out to commenter Ben King for the find.
Alone, I can be interested in the material of the soil, the scarcity of construction, how little it takes to make a place that is theirs, and how quickly these worlds are built, explored, and then forgotten. How even the most hasty place still waits there, sleeping. These worlds say a lot about the default Roblox editor capabilities and tools: assets that are reused over and over again; the types of spaces that are valuable or loved; what is needed and what meets that need.
In Unwinnable, Ben Sailer wrote about the The future of the role-playing television of tomorrow, yesterday..
The one pop culture gem that almost made this media desert worthwhile was the pseudo-VR adventure game show for kids Knightmare, which ran from 1987 to 1994. Combining green screen technology and RPG elements from the real world to create elaborate dungeons that contestants would navigate through, the show seemed so ahead of its time that it felt like the future of entertainment. Instead, his ideas have languished in obscurity since his final season concluded, leaving millions of viewers (or at least me and a few people on the official fan site) wondering why.
For Eurogamer, Martin Robinson took a quick look at A Little Golf Journey, and how it takes all the stress out of sport. I worked on a golf course one summer and easily my favorite part of the job was driving a soda cart. It looks like this game can come close to capturing that summery lazy feeling.
“We really wanted to capture the sensitivity you have when you’re playing a triple-A game,” says Goatley of A Little Golf Journey. “If you’re playing Assassin’s Creed and you’re climbing a wall or whatever, you don’t have to trace exactly where your hands and feet are; you just point in the direction and you move, and you feel like you’re climbing that wall, you feel like you’re a expert at that, even though you’re just walking up, essentially. And we wanted to do something similar with golf, where we really just took a lot out of the stress. “
For RPS, Katharine previewed Eastward, which got her excited about its September release.
Retro RPG Eastward has been on my list of most anticipated games for years. When I first saw him at EGX in 2019, I quickly fell in love with his signature pixel art and ingenious pair of protagonists – miner and pan extraordinary John and his mysterious pupil Sam – and couldn’t wait to see what post-apocalyptic wonders lie. beyond the mutated forests and the ruined central city that I saw in that first demo. This week, I got a glimpse of his Quake City dungeon, a toxic wasteland where you’ll be collecting around ten hours in the game. With carnivorous plants, pesky crows, and plenty of poison-spitting pigs to deal with, Eastward has a surprising number of bites hidden underneath his lovely visuals, and now I’m more excited than ever to play it in its entirety when it comes out next month. .
Many of you probably already listen to The Back Page podcast, but if you don’t, I highly recommend it. I really enjoyed your episode “Games we’ve been playing in 2021”. Here is the Apple Podcasts Link, Y here is the one from Spotify If you prefer.
This week’s music is Rainy Night In Georgia by Brook Benton. Here is the Youtube link and the Spotify one. I heard this song for the first time in a taxi from Lisbon airport to our Airbnb, just arrived on its sunny shores. Our driver had Smooth FM on, his arm was hanging out the window, and this song was blasting out, it was magical.
That’s me. Have a nice Sunday everyone!
