Sunday is for catching up on your fourth 10-hour flight in two weeks, if you really Maybe sleep and avoid adding to your physical decay by staying up late on Saturday and making a list of interesting games and essays not related to games. Why not do it earlier, you ask? Stupid question. You've been busy with these flights.
Eurogamer's Robert Perchese and Alex Donaldson discuss their respective Dragon Age: Guardian of the Veil reviews, a year later. Admittedly, this may be one that says more about press colleagues than our readers, touching on the profession's classic concerns about whether past criticism has been too harsh or overly lenient, but it's still a thoughtful look at the sausage factory.
I've been thinking about Dragon Age: The Veilguard from time to time throughout the year. More specifically, I was thinking about my review of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the five-star review I wrote for Eurogamer. This torments me. Because, frankly, I'm not happy with the way he sits. I don't consider The Veilguard a five-star game, and I definitely don't consider it BioWare's best game. The suggestion of such a thing has haunted me for 12 months, especially after new information about Veilguard's troubled development came to light and we learned how the Mass Effect team took over the project to save it, surpassing the Dragon Age team at its core.
For GI.biz – and I promise I'll link to someone later who isn't an extended RPS colleague – Rob Fahey thinks why even Amazon, which was endlessly cashed in, couldn't make a sustained push into gaming.
Scale, finance and technological dominance are simply not enough to make it in the creative industry that sometimes masquerades as the tech sector on weekends. Google was unwilling to make the long-term commitment needed to build a business in the sector, while Amazon seemed to lack the consistent vision and high-level support needed to leverage its real competitive advantages to benefit its gaming ambitions.
IN Rolling StoneWill Borgard searches for lost meaning FEAR Ghost girl Alma.
Alma is positioned as a FEAR monster. She's on the cover; but the real monsters are Armacham, her father and capitalism. It's hard to blame Alma. She is what she was made to be. The real horror happened long before the opening moments of FEAR; it just doesn't look out from the shadows. It is open, conducts business in broad daylight and demands respect. It's easier to make a monster out of the ghost of a little girl than out of the system and the people who killed her.
Good original report Here The Esports Advocate's James Fudge on why the International Olympic Committee split from sports gold medalists Saudi Arabia over the previously agreed upon Olympic esports plan.
Sources tell TEA that tensions between new IOC President Kirsty Coventry (who was sworn in in June) and those in Saudi Arabia responsible for running the esports Olympics have arisen because they have been unable to agree on some key issues, namely important issues in the IOC statutes themselves. The IOC Charter usually requires game organizers to work with relevant stakeholders/federations, but since eSports only has the International Esports Federation (IESF) and the Global Esports Federation (GEF), the Saudis did not want them involved in the process as both organizations are experiencing financial difficulties and have no control over the intellectual property of their stakeholders.
Here They are about the decline of Crunchyroll's previously stellar subtitles and typing for its localized anime library. It's quite complex in places, but full of a killer story about how we got here.
The only conclusion we can draw from this is that the executives at Funimation-turned-Crunchyroll still have no respect for anime as a medium. Additionally, they seem to refer to Crunchyroll and its ways of doing business as “pirate” – which is not entirely untrue, since Crunchyroll's use of Aegisub and ASS does come from pirate fan subscribers. But fansubbers care deeply about anime as a medium (otherwise they wouldn't illegally subtitle it for free as a hobby), which in turn means that the way fansubbers have developed subtitling for anime is actually extremely effective at doing the job – much better than basically any “industry standards” for subtitling.
This week's music is the amazing music of Marco Beltrami. Le Mans 66/Ford v Ferrari soundtrack. Happy Sunday! Do not wake Me Up.
