The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for looking upon my DIY works and despairing. Strewn sawdust, spilled paint, and hunks of broken MDF litter my living room kingdom. When will it be over? When will I be free? When will I be able to reassemble my sofa, sit down with a cup of tea in hand, and admire my books, unpacked and arranged on perfectly fitted alcove bookshelves?

"Today?" I whisper hopefully in response to a paragraph of rhetorical questions. "Probably not," snaps back Reality. Especially if I don't get out of bed soon. Still, here in bed I can read the best writing about and not about games from the past week.

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Horror-steeped card game Forbidden Solitaire shows how a strong theme can elevate even decade-old mechanics

Like a tag team of oiled snakes that have entered a wrestling contest, theme is a difficult quality to pin down. A game can be well designed, but if it lacks a coherence between those mechanics and its appearance, narrative, and its framing, there is a dissonance that can be hard to ignore. I realise I've just stepped into an old argument by using the word 'dissonance', but Hocking was right, games that don't cohere can be jarring. A developer may desire that sensation of discomfort, but often it is accidental and unwanted.

(Much like opening an article with a simile about wrestling snakes when there is nothing connecting that image to a game about solitaire. It might be a good line, but it doesn't smoothly connect with the rest of the article to elevate its argument.)

Anyway, what does this all have to do with Forbidden Solitaire, a game in which you're delving deeper into a dungeon filled with horrors, progressing by clearing screens of cards? Well, it's an excellent example of how well-handled theming can raise a game into something more than its parts.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

My scares should have been reserved for today, what with it being All Hallows' Eve and all, but my fright came on Thursday.

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Baldur's Gate 3 custom campaign mod channels World of Warcraft with an adventure about undead former slaves fighting to reclaim a kingdom

The opening act of a Baldur's Gate 3 custom campaign mod which injects an adventure set in the World of Warcraft universe into Larian's RPG has been released. The mod, Forsaken, is another ambitious bit of work from a modder who recently expanded the second act of BG3's main story with a new region to explore before you head into the final chapter. This time, they've abandoned the D&Dverse for a tale of undead slaves rising up after being freed from serving a Lich King.

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Mouthwashing is getting a feature film adaptation from Sony and I need all of you to be normal about it whenever it comes out

I quite liked that there video game Mouthwashing. It had a lot to say about how corporations take advantage of their workers, it played around with character perspective to let you in on certain narrative threads and withhold others until they're taut enough to snap, and was short enough so that its misery didn't outstay its welcome. What I wasn't so fond of was much of the fandom response that came afterwards, which is why I am quite scared to say that it's getting a movie from Sony.

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Phantom Blade Zero kicks off its launch with a day one patch that offers improvements to ray tracing and some bug fixes to boot

If you've been hankering for some video gamey wuxia shenanigans, today seems like a good day for it, given that Phantom Blade Zero has now been released unto the world (with a 145GB install size that's technically actually 300GB but only for a bit). And like many big games before it, it comes not quite finished, as a day one patch attends to some of the action game's issues… I think, anyway, there's been a promise of a day one patch but no clear indicator if it's actually arrived or not. I don't own it either, so I can't check. At least I can tell you what's in it!

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Can the SideWinder Game Pad, Microsoft's first game controller, work on modern PCs? I bought three of them to find out

1996 gave us two incredible gifts. The first was me. The second, arguably more impactful on the course of human civilisation, was the Microsoft SideWinder Game Pad 1.0.

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