Sundays are for recovering after a late night of trailerblogging and oop, no, wait, there’s another two full-length showcases just this evening. It’s too late for me, readers, but you can save yourselves with some more thoughtful, maybe even calming reads on games and not-games. I bet none of them even have the words "great experience for our players."
First up is Niki Fakhoori’s piece for Stop Caring on how Yakuza/Like a Dragon’s punch-happy bloke protagonists play into the Heroine’s Journey.
Ichiban also takes on roles generally thought of as feminine. He is the caretaker of Masato Arakawa, a wheelchair user and the son of his family's patriarch Masumi Arakawa. Despite how necessary caretakers are, the job is treated negatively by the people around him. An attendant at the local hostess club asks, when seeing Masato walking, if it means Ichiban will "be released from indentured servitude." Ichiban is a heroine in a hero’s world, one that undervalues caretaking roles due to the lack of "conquest" associated with them. Helpers generally don’t “get anything out of it.” It isn’t possible to "claw your way up that ladder" if your hands are occupied pushing a wheelchair.
GI.biz’s Lewis Packwood, perhaps the best-dressed games journalist, examines the habits and challenges faced by older game enthusiasts. As in, uh, game enthusiasts who are older, not enthusiasts of older games.
"We are definitely losing that cohort," he said. He suspects that older gamers are likely to take big breaks between play sessions, and part of the issue is that games generally aren't good at reorienting players when they come back after a break. "There is a mismatch between the general investment in tutorials for the first few minutes, relative to where actually the player loss happens," Ball said.
For the NME, Ali Shutler spoke to Saros composer Sam Slater on how to make a game sound horrible (without actually being horrible).
"The thing about game developers is that they’re all filthy metalheads. You can’t fake heavy to them," explains Slater, who adores the influential greats of drone – Sunn O))), Earth, Boris and Khanate. At first, he played it safe – but when those early 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 track he submitted received a two-word response from Louden: "Holy moly!" He’d cracked it.
Over on Kotaku, Rebekah Valentine investigates the extent to which gaming hardware manufacturers use conflict minerals in their kit - and how thoroughly they allow themselves to be audited to check.
This year, 68 percent of Sony’s smelters and refiners were in compliance once again. Of the non-compliant smelters and refiners this year, Sony’s report states that it was unable to even determine the location of 45 of them. Sony claims that it’s taking steps to remediate all this, such as sending sternly worded letters or threatening to revoke its business from non-conformant sites. But Sony has made these exact promises year after year in the past, and either it’s not effectively following through, or it’s just not working for them. We’ve reached out to Sony for comment and will update when and if we hear back.
Foundational Warhammer 40K artist John Blanche, creator of that image of the Emperor, died this week. Of the many tributes pouring in, this one – by Trench Crusade writer and Games Workshop veteran Marc Gasgoigne – feels particularly personal.
From epic battle scenes for the latest worldwide game release to tiny details for a new mini, John contributed to it all. John set the style, tone and direction of Warhammer art across the decades, as it grew from a small UK hobby company to a truly global phenomenon. He never became complacent though, and was always introduce new influences, rather than lazily repeat what had been done last time. He delighted in taking artists from the GW studio to the great London galleries, and watch them realise in front of a Dürer, Bosch or Gericault that it was all there to influence this new "grimdark" style of fantasy.
Something happier to finish: Kelly Burke, for the Guardian, tells the story of a piano-playing concertgoer who served as an improvised replacement for a stricken performer, thus fulfilling the dream of literally everyone who owns a musical instrument.
As the orchestra’s musicians frantically phoned local contacts, offers started rolling in of backup players who were 15 to 20 minutes away. But Hurwitz knew time had run out.
"I figured nobody’s as close as they say they are... so I just thought, well, we have 2,500 people in here..."
I didn’t get tickets, so instead, music this week is Oxford rock outfit South Arcade – try 2005 if you’ve only got three minutes to spare. Good, rollicking fun, even if all four of them look like they’d get carded for buying Strongbow at big Tesco’s.
