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Image credit: RPS

Sundays are for finally, after months of waiting, getting your siblings to come round and collect their shares of the bequeathed photos and other familial bric-a-brac that’s been leaving a dust smell in your spare room. Yet not getting mad about it, as you know their tardiness only confirms what you knew all along: you really are the most responsible one. Take that warm, cosy smugness to the sofa, and relax with some of the past week’s finest readables.

RPS contributor Jeremy Peel runs his own newsletter, The Peel Perspective, and sometimes leaves previous editions near a window so they waft into the faces of non-subscribers. Here’s one such piece on how Fallout: New Vegas’s old-timey quirks don’t just extend to cowboy hats.

There’s also an unflinching temperament to New Vegas that connects it back to the 90s Fallout games. When you take up a quest, there’s no guarantee you’re working for good people, or acting in the best interests of the communities around you. In Vegas, it’s money that talks, not idealism. Money and the footsoldiers of Caesar’s Legion, who brag about fitting slave collars so tightly that they catch when the wearer turns their head - a regular reminder that they’re owned.

Keith Stuart investigates the Teletext-lookin’ origins of Football Manager, speaking to original creator Kevin Toms:

Football Manager was first released in the early days of the gaming industry – copies were sold via mail order or at computer fairs. But by 1982, high street stores started to take notice of the emerging video game sector. “WH Smith got in contact and said, ‘We like your game, we want to stock it,’ and they invited me down to London. They eventually placed an order for 2,000 units – the invoice for that order was more than I was earning in a year. About a month later, my girlfriend rang me at work and said: ‘Oh another order has come in from WH Smith, it’s 1,000 units.’ When I got home I realised her maths was pretty crap – it was 10,000.”

From the Void are localisers-for-hire, who’ve worked the words on games spanning Children of the Sun to Goat Simulator 3. Their founder, Marc Eybert-Guillon, isn’t sold on the inevitability of genAI in game development:

And all this talk of inevitability is based on nothing other than the promises of tech CEOs and investors who need everyone to believe in this inevitability if they want to syphon as much money as possible while the bubble is still inflating. They manufacture the shovels everyone’s trying to sell and we take them at their word. Nevermind the fact that after decades of doomsaying, machine translation still hasn’t gotten past “decent” in most contexts and no-one has really managed to make it work properly for game localization where understanding the context of the text is crucial to proper translation. Nevermind that every actual worker who’s seen AI pushed on them by management has reported on how it actually slows and generally hinders the process. Nevermind some AI models actually getting worse as they reingest their own output after flooding the web with garbage, akin to some dystopian non-human centipede.

Here’s Kerry Brunskill on the ambitious ZX Spectrum oddity Doomdark’s Revenge, which came with its own tie-in fiction and real-life prizes for getting the best ending.

It’s a noticeably warm welcome for a game set in a world of ice and snow, and the foreward accompanying the five chapter novella (a prequel to the game introducing new allies, enemies, and explaining why we’re setting off to war again) that comes afterwards carries a similar tone, Mike Singleton signing off with “I wish you luck on your quest and hope you enjoy the game as much as I enjoyed writing it!“.

Outside of games, The Pickup’s John Paul Brammer is keen to know why flatness enthusiasts Oklahoma City suddenly want to build America’s tallest tower.

I opened the website. An unclickable link titled “Our Staff” featured an obviously AI-generated Black woman wearing aviator glasses confidently stepping into a bright new tomorrow. Photos of “Our Volunteers” showcased the brave participation of mutants with appendicular deformities not yet recognized by science. A picture of two hands shaking counted a dozen fingers, a bewildering choice of image considering there’s no shortage of royalty-free stock photos of handshakes available, implying a firm commitment by Aspiring Anew Generation (AAG) to sourcing all visuals straight from Uncanny Valley.

For Literary Hub, Maris Kreizman argues that reading more books won’t heal the world, but it’s worth doing anyway.

I’ve read so much about studies that show, in some form or another, that reading fiction is meant to make you more empathetic, that considering someone else’s point of view might help you to gain greater understanding of people who are different from you. I don’t believe that reading is a secret shortcut to empathy. It never was. My pat answer is something like, “I know tons of morally reprehensible people who read good books all the time.”

Today’s music is Jamie Page’s Birdbrain, which is enough of a bop that I’m willing to risk career-ending reputational damage by admitting I sometimes listen to vocaloid music. Actually, y’know what, it’s great. Fuck it. Fuck it! Have a good Sunday.