Welcome back to The Sunday Papers. It's 2025, which means that this column has been running for eighteen years>. What might change here as we move into adulthood? Very little, I suspect. We here are like the chalk cliffs of the South Downs: bright and imposing and subject to inevitable but slow erosion by the sea. Or put another way: I'm thinking about bringing back the bulletpoints to separate different links. How are you?

Felipe Pepe wrote about the gentrification of video game history, arguing that American video game history overwrites more local experiences. "We’re not all suburban kids who got a Nintendo 64 for Christmas."

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I'm terrified to go out, because last time I stepped outside the black ice on my road waggled my feet around threateningly at every step. I'm afraid I'll fall over, but weirdly I'm not so worried about, I dunno, hitting my head, as I am wanging my elbow and getting that jolt of fuzzy numbness all the way down my arm. At least if I hit my head I wouldn't be around to feel the aftermath.

For all you fellows who are equally afeared of the outside world, let's all agree to stay indoors and play some excellent games. Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!

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Factions. Here are the factions: the aggressive conquest Klingon guys. The evil insectoid hive mind who build stuff and/or have loads of cheap soldiers. The researchers who are probably robots and you usually pick because they can be competitive at anything. The diplomacy/espionage ones (humans, or The Greys).

You know what I'm talking about. You may well have thought of a recent exception too, since we've had a fair few 4Xeses experimenting with some of the standard formulae these last few years. It's been a while though since I read through every word of every faction's description and wanted to play all of them. Zephon captured my interest immediately.

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Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 continues the misadventures of Henry of Skalitz, 15th century Bohemian blacksmith's son and chivalric Laddy Lad, who is questing to reclaim his murdered father's sword from some absolute shit of a noble. The prologue starts you off as the handsomely equipped and fully levelled-up bodyguard of Sir Hans Capon - an exasperating gadabout and your bosom chum from the 2018 game. You're on your way to deliver a message to a distant lord, in hopes that he'll take your own lord's side in the on-going civil war. But Plot intervenes in the shape of some suspiciously familiar bandits, who slaughter your retinue and reduce Henry and Sir Hans to a pair of shirtless runaways.

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"I sometimes joke about it, but it's like I need a war to start a new game," Rasheed Abu-Eideh tells me over a call. "The specific thing that made me make Liyla And The Shadows Of War is the attacks on Gaza in 2014, and the specific thing that made me make Dreams On A Pillow is the attacks on Gaza in 2023."

Dreams On A Pillow is a stealth adventure that tells the story of a young mother during the Nakba - the 1948 ethnic cleansing, displacement, and cultural suppression of Palestinian Arabs by Israel. As its funding campaign puts it, it’s a game about "a land full of people being made into a people without land."

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A long, long time ago I became obsessed with watching people play rally games beautifully. It was a blessing to see those disembodied hands sling virtual cars around with grace and precision, kicking up dirt in a way I could only dream of.

Now, though, I am going through a different phase. A less blessed phase. One where I watched the popular streamer and influencer Ludwig attempt to climb to Platinum rank in League Of Legends, all because he wanted to prove another popular streamer, who thought he couldn't do it, wrong. I know I've already put you off, so I don't blame you if you stop reading. Just know that I couldn't stop watching his streams, even as it conjured up terrible memories of a time spent doing the exact same thing at uni.

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Dell has slashed prices on two configurations of its Alienware m16 R2 gaming laptop, offering significant value for those looking to upgrade their gaming setup. The model equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 GPU is now available for $1,299.99, while the RTX 4070 variant can be yours for $1,499.99.

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Terrible news! Santa ignored all my letters asking for 2025 to be a year when no new videogames came out so I could catch up on everything I missed from the past several years. In fact, it seems like maybe someone else might have sent him a letter asking for there to be more big games coming than ever.

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! The longest novel ever written is generally agreed to be Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past - a coward’s pick, since it’s actually 13 different volumes. Don’t let Proust’s despicable lies sully the joy of literature for you, though. He did have a good quality moustache - a far more important literary trait than actually doing any writing, imo.

This week, it’s ITU Copenhagen Games Professor and Broken Rules co-founder, Martin Pichlmair! Cheers Martin! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Happy new year to you all! Let's make sure we collectively start off 2025 in the right way: that is, by playing games in our free time, and leaving no room for anything else. Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!

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