The Sunday Papers is our weekly summary of great writing on (mostly) video games from around the web.
Sundays are to see how a delivery van turns into a bollard. Before we hear the crunch, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game-related stuff).
On BuzzFeed News, Sarah Emerson wrote about how someone stole Seth Green’s Bored Ape, which was supposed to star in her new show. Actor and producer (and Normandy pilot) Green succumbed to a fishing scam and his ape jpeg was hijacked. A very fun read.
“I bought this monkey in July 2021 and have spent the last few months developing and exploiting IP to make it the star of this program,” Green told Vaynerchuk. “Then days before, by the way, it’s called Fred, days before his world debut, he’s literally kidnapped.” Green did not respond to a BuzzFeed News tweet about the show.
For Kotaku, Claire Jackson wrote about why Steam Deck needs a better screen. Steam Deck could improve readability, but it’s also an interesting insight into how influential a device change can be. For example, I bounced Hollow Knight on the PC, but I did it immediately on Switch.
I was also curious to see how a device in my hands would influence my interaction with games like Cyberpunk 2077, Prey, Control and Fallout 4 of 2017, games with many documents in the world to sift through. Before Fallout, I always sighed a little when I came across a terminal. I wanted to appreciate writing and building the world in these cases, but slowing down the pace of exploration was not something I was willing to do. On the deck, sitting with these terminals now feels much more like the experience in a way that I think needs to be felt to really understand each other. Reading no longer feels like a break from the flow of the game.
James Vincent wrote about his visit to a factory that makes sophisticated humanoid robots at The Verge. It reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun. By the way, another great read!
It is these facial expressions that encapsulate the ambitions of Engineered Arts. “The human face is that mass-bandwidth communication tool,” Jackson says. “You have a physical interface that people recognize.” As a species, we are configured to identify faces, but Ameca is so real that we hardly have to work hard to project intelligence where none exists. As Jackson asks the robot to trot out some pre-programmed sentences, I get up to see how his face feels, and I doubt it. Jackson assures me it’s not dangerous, but I was worried it was disrespectful.
In PC Gamer, Christopher Livingstone wrote about Farming Simulator as a surprisingly good sport. I’ve always heard good things about the Farming Sim sports scene, so that’s the motivation I needed to watch it.
One of my favorite parts of the sport is that both teams compete on separate maps, but they can still have an effect on the progress of the other team. If one team uses the bridge that leads to the barn, that same bridge climbs on the other team’s map for a few seconds, forcing them to use another path or try to jump the bridge before it gets too high. If you don’t think that seeing a tractor crossing a bridge could make your heart skip a beat, and if you’ve never watched in amazement as someone throws a couple of wheat bullets through the top window of a barn, then you never he had seen agricultural sports before.
This week’s music is HONEYMOON by Jo Hill. Here’s the YouTube link and the Spotify link. A summer bop I’m totally obsessed with right now.
That’s all, for now, we’ll catch you next week!