Sundays are for recovering from the friend-of-a-spouse’s wedding you attended on Saturday while suffering from an acute case of Old Person’s Back. Unfortunately, the time for recovery has in fact passed, as you have already moved to the more immediately satisfying phase of assigning blame. Possible suspects: your swivel chair, your mattress, the PC monitor you had to laboriously re-box for transit, your sofa, and that most connviving, spine-bending bastard of all, light walking. Spoiled for choice, you sit down in your untrustworthy chair and begin to read some of the week’s writing highlights instead.

Here’s Mazen Haggag for Deleted Saves on Final Fantasy XVI’s ropey attempt at working in Middle Eastern and North African cultural influences.

The problem is that Dhalmekia – the only non-white nation in the base game — is all surface, no substance. It is a desert nation of craftspeople whose wealth comes from trading artisan goods across Valisthea. Much in the tradition of fantasy games, each of its towns has its own specialty goods or services: Tabor has its tanneries, Dravozd features an entire questline about its smithing, and Dalimil’s main attraction is its hot springs, which are surrounded by shops, including a carpet shop, a shisha stall, stores that sells herbs and spices, a brass ornament shop, and a bakery. For the latter, the variety tells a visual story about how the town has grown due to the captive audience of travelers enjoying the hot springs and a populace who make the most of the opportunities they get. While various objects and accoutrements on display add visual flavor, this flavor never extends to the people that occupy the country.

Lilith, of mononymic outlet Gamesline, looks at violence, games that scold you for violence, the both-sidesing of violence, and the empowerment of violence, mostly through the optics of a big stompy mech.

Armored Core 6 understands that violence is not glamorous. Death is ugly and it comes in screams and gunfire; war is filled with people who don’t get a moment to have a catchy one-liner before dying. But, depending on the route, that same violence can be cathartic. I’ve said it before: the aesthetics of death and violence are loud. Blood is bright. Some emotions are too loud to whisper. A story where a violent regime is overthrown by the downtrodden is not the same power fantasy where you uncritically protect the status quo. Both stories are violent, yet that violence is not equal.

I continuously fail to compile a Sunday Papers without someone talking sense, however sadly, about AI. Dr. Michael Cook, artificial intelligence researcher and sometime RPS contributor, remembers the optimism of earlier AI work and contrasts it with what big tech has warped it into.

I reviewed an AI paper the other day, and I’m not breaking anonymity with this description because it’s one of about a dozen identical papers I’ve reviewed this year alone, where the core contribution was simply: we asked an LLM to do this thing. That was the paper’s contribution to AI research. They took a product built by a private company and they asked it to do something, and then they reported that it did it (with no evaluation). It’s perfectly okay if this is AI research now, that’s fine, maybe you see value in someone reporting that they learned this was possible. Times change, words change, and if I am no longer in this field any more then I will come to accept it and find a new space to be in. But I look at papers like this today and I just find it… impossible to reconcile with the world I got excited about two decades ago. So much of AI research now is simply using the products of a handful of companies to claim they can do something. If you’re lucky, they might ask another LLM to evaluate the results. The research is investigating the applications of capital, not expanding our understanding of the world.

Also on a Papers meta note: including Nathan Brown’s Hit Points is roundupping on easy mode. But it’s also one of the best, funniest, most elegantly furious newsletters in games. This one’s on the Microsoft layoffs.

Obviously no one is fooled. Sure, there’s a certain logic to, say, folding the Halo team — which has spent a lot of money, and taken a lot of time, to make pretty much the square root of fuck-all — into Activision, whose well-oiled Call Of Duty production line knows how to actually ship stuff. But I don’t think there’s a soul outside the Xbox C-suite who believes any of this is any good, or will work. The Xbox tarot deck these days consists solely of Death cards. Shuffle them all you like; it’s nice to feel busy, after all. Just don’t expect anything to change.

Bit of not-games to finish, perhaps. Here’s Niko Stratis for Paste Magazine on Nevermind’s 35th birthday.

We never really talked about the words; we just warned of what they meant. My Baptist neighbors told me they were satanic, evil even, and I learned that my feelings, those that felt at home and reflected in Cobain’s lyrics, were bad. Sinful, like pride and murder before it. My mom didn’t think much of them until he died by suicide, and when he did, his sinful lyrics became desperate warnings. We never talked about why he was sad, why he was so happy but alone, ugly but okay. We never talked about mental health, or the weight of the 1990s—a decade that is often remembered as many things, but to me it is always a little dark. It’s the brown wallpaper and dark carpet in our living room. It’s the nights that seemed to find more hours to be dark. It’s all the words I didn’t have for why Nevermind spoke to me so deeply. Why it was my favorite record to an annoying degree once it became my record, once its unknowable form became tangible to me in a way that it would never be for anyone else.

Actually, it’s not writing, but I’d be remiss not to link People Make Games’ report on Bobby Kotick’s press-targeting lawfare, a two-year (!) investigation primarily by journalist Mikhail Klimentov.

Music this week is, if you’ll forgive the lack of imagination, the Control Resonant OST. Am especially fond of whatever the fuck this is.