The Sunday Papers | Rock Paper Shotgun

Sunday is for finally accepting that this has become big-coat weather, stripping that big coat of its nine-month dry-cleaner's plastic shell, slipping it into the sleeves, and breathing a sigh of relief to find that it still fits. Not this year, Popeyes Spicy Chicken Sandwich. Not this year.

With the season comes another dose of interesting game writing, starting with Eurogamer's buzzy interview with former Xbox bigwig Peter Moore. This is hefty two–stallscovering the birth of the Xbox 360 and Microsoft's deliberate ignition of the console wars. I'm glad that I'm involved in computer games, where we, as you know, never argue about anything.

PM: We needed to create a complete platform, not just hardware, and that excited me. And they brought me; I was a little different because they needed “people like me.”

EG: What does it mean that people like you?

PM: That means I'm not… Look, I don't call myself a nerd. And Microsoft was very much a company that was perceived as the guys with pocket protectors and thick glasses, so we needed to bring in different people who could stand on stage and take shots at Sony and be a little more aggressive in other ways, and had experience taking on PlayStation, which is what I obviously did when I was at Sega. So I wasn't the stereotypical typical Microsoft employee. I was invited to strategize, stage front, be a little irreverent, maybe get a couple of tattoos…

Endless Mode has now become AV Club Games, surviving all four months as its own thing – a shame considering how often they appear in the Sunday Papers. At least all the usual writers have moved on to this topic: here is Marc Normandin on Why 2025 is the year of the Musou game.

What if you could swing your sword (or any other weapon, there are a lot of different weapons in these games) at hundreds and hundreds of enemies, but they were all tortured souls trying to stop your benefactor from reclaiming the throne of Hell? What if your goal here was to descend deeper and deeper into the bowels of Hell to destroy the demons and monsters that have taken over it? And you can play as any number of characters from Dynasty Warriors games, Samurai Warriors games, or even Atelier games since Koei Tecmo publishes them for Gust, which it became the parent company of ten years ago? Maybe you want to fight the forces of Hell with characters from the Ninja Gaiden games like Ryu Hayabusa or Rachel?

If this were true, this would all be disgusting, and the good news is that it is.

I can't properly rate this because Dominic from Dominic's Substack refuses to write his last name anywhere. But he has wrote an interesting story about artist Lee Petty's work with development studio Double Fine, which has been strangely quiet after once becoming a favorite in making human-centered games.

Broken Age was a tumultuous project in Double Fine's history. Although the game was a relative commercial and critical success, many considered it a disappointment. Unfortunately, for many gamers, the extended development timeline has tarnished Double Fine and crowdfunding's reputation as an alternative to traditional video game publishing models. Not to mention, Double Fine employees were also subject to various forms of online hate and harassment, which sapped morale within the studio and created a desire to return to the relative anonymity of publisher funding.

Keith Stewart from The Guardian remembers the 40th anniversary of the Sega Master System. Did Sega do something that Nintendo didn't?

Sega oversaw the distribution of the Master System in the US (at least initially), but hoped that local companies would tackle the more fragmented European market. In the UK and France (and later Spain), this role went to Virgin Mastertronic. “Sega's partners had the best marketing position in Europe,” says Nick Alexander, who was managing director of Virgin Mastertronic at the time. “They also had better retail and distribution relationships than Nintendo did in those days. There was a running joke in the video game magazine Computer Trade Weekly that Nintendo thought Europe was home to dragons – they didn't get it, they were nervous. So they directed their efforts towards the United States.”

Music this week – Bershy's Radio, Send– the guaranteed success of which obviously reborn the singer's love for creating music. I'd like to say I found this on a cassette tape I rescued from an independent record store that was in danger of being demolished by its pink-faced owners, but you know full well I just heard it from a superhero kissing game like everyone else.