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Sundays are for walking around under the the rythm of a Summer rain and keep on posting links.

• “The Science of Just Dance” is this week’s mandatory reading. Simon Parkin keeps delivering top class videogame journalism and does a three page special feature on Ubisoft’s Just Dance. Other than being a great piece, it also shows how there are still some people in the industry – in this case, Ubisoft producer Florian Granger – understands the appeal of videogames. “Casual’ gamers, if we have to call them that, are much more educated and demanding of what they are want to play than ‘hardcore’ gamers give them credit for. And, it might sound obvious, but it’s worth repeating: graphical fidelity, and the power of hardware itself is not what makes a game fun or not. The number of polygons is not what makes you laugh or cry: it’s the substance and creativity behind a game that holds its worth”. If only other sites of the Eurogamer network had this level of quality. Bonus: idiots in the comments section.

• Lewie Procter, aka Lewie P, aka the nice guy who runs SavyGamer, wrote about why he “fell out of love with the contemporary Japanese RPG”, choosing Lost Odyssey as an example. One of the game’s elements he singles out, and the kind of problem I’ve always pointed out even when facing stern opposition from the genre’s lovers, is “one of the main plot points is that the protagonist is an “Immortal”. This means that no matter what, he cannot die. Except he can die…if his health metre reaches zero in a battle. This disconnect between the ‘gameplay’ and the narrative is typical of not just Lost Odyssey, but the JRPG genre as a whole”. Procter wonders where are the progressive examples of the genre, like Chrono Trigger and The World Ends With You.
• “24 Hours Marston” is a small series of web comics depicting some of the absurdities found in the titular character’s adventures in Red Dead Redemption. Sometimes surreal, sometimes right on the money, it also highlights the kind of disconnect Procter observed in JRPGs. One particular panel exposes the depths to which Marston is ready to go to get his family back… Right after he picks up some flowers.
• Gotham’s legendary crime-fighter gradually learns to fight crime. “This works great,” Batman growled, throwing one attacking Arkham goon into another. “Throwing one goon into another goon and stunning them both is a great way to deal with crowds of enemies. Why haven’t I tried at some earlier point in my long career of fighting crowds of enemies?”. “Takes a little getting the hang of, though,” he added, attempting another throw and failing. “I’ll have to work on that.”
• Matthew Baldwin compiled criticism of reknown books written by Amazon.com consumers. Although it’s always necessary to question a notion of “authority” – in the sense that one shouldn’t drown their own judgement in favor of someone else’s judgement – there are some fantastic pearls here. On Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway”: “The only good thing to say about this “literary” drivel is that the person responsible, Virginia Woolf, has been dead for quite some time now. Let us pray to God she stays that way.”
• My favourite Edge pieces are usually “Time Extended” and “Making Of”, and this Maniac Mansion piece fits on the latter. “Bad horror movies, Gilbert identifies, were the game’s spiritual origin. “Gary and I tried to pull every cliché we could think of into the game and really make fun of the genre. Everyone in it was a stereotype. A little known fact is that most of the characters in the game are based on real people Gary and I know, but I’m not saying who for fear of reprisals”.
• “Fake gameplay footage” of a cancelled Ubisoft shooter. The project, as seen on YouTube, is just a pre-rendered sequence but like Beyond Good and Evil 2‘s would-be footage, it’s a much better example of the cinematic aspirations found in the gaming industry than most contemporary games.
• Tom Chick explores the online community of Battle.net with StarCraft II‘s multiplayer. Where else can you find a clan called “Vagina Tackling Squad”?
• Nara Dreamland “was a theme park in Nara, Japan which was built in 1961 and modeled after Disneyland in California. Due to the fact that it was an extremely cheap copy, it didn’t have a of lot success and was pretty much a ghost town before it closed permanently”.
• America in Color from 1939-1943 is a collection of color photographs that capture the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small town populations.
• Wipeout recreated with an RC car and lots of cardboard.
• When one doesn’t need to understand baseball in order to appreciate baseball.
• “Man jailed in Russia for assaulting fortune teller who predicted he would be jailed“.

CONGRATURATION THIS STORY IS HAPPY END