Sundays are for waking up in a cold sweat at 6AM. It never ends. The monkey of life will never be off your back. You’re trapped. You try to get up, and your legs don’t work. You fall down, but don’t feel anything. What hell is this, you wonder in horror.
Somwhere above you, something moves. You lie frozen in place as it creeps closer, and closer, and closer. Then BOOM, it’s right on top of you. It’s your mum, but her face is obscured by Dagoth Ur’s mask from Morrowind. She takes one look at you and gasps. “Oh no,” she screams. “You’ve caught the disease!” Tears in her eyes, she brings you a mirror. Adrian Edmondson stares out of it, winking cheekily. “It’s twenty-twenty-smegging-six,” your mum howls. “Why hasn’t he gone away yet!”
Wait. Maybe you can finally convince Ade to leave, now that the calendar has flipped over into a fresh 12 months. You know that, as ever, he craves wordly knowledge and entertainment. Right, let’s ‘ave ‘im. Your opening salvo comes courtesy of Eurogamer’s Alex Donaldson and a correct conclusion that five years is enough time to crown Hitman 3 an all-time good thing.
All of this is also a testament, I suppose, to independence. While Square Enix clearly believed in the World of Assassination vision enough to bankroll the first game, they clearly didn’t have subsequent belief to continue. IO Interactive did and has ultimately reaped the rewards – and to be fair, much of what has been accomplished likely could not have been in a larger publishing operation. The way Hitman 3 has morphed into a hub for content from all three games, for instance, and the way it continues to deliver free content five years after release, feels like the sort of forward-thinking generosity only an independent studio could manage.
Hmm. That seems to have made a promising start. Assuming the irises of Ade’s eyes turning very patterned and swirly constitutes a promising start. How do you follow such a start? With a big hop, via a review of froggy platformer Big Hops penned by Michael Beckwith for Startmenu.
I wouldn’t say Big Hops is a slog to get through, but between some of the more frustrating platforming challenges, the aforementioned unreliable fruit and veg, and occasional unclear direction, progression sometimes felt unsatisfying. Occasionally, it felt like I only made it to the next part of the game by accident, like I had stumbled on a solution through sheer luck and not by outsmarting whatever intentions the devs had. That’s why it’s imperative that Hop controls so well. Even if I wasn’t having as much fun as I should have, at no point did I feel like I was fighting with the controls.
Has the big hop happened. As your limbs continue to dig into the carpet, you still struggle to tell. Ok, no letting up. Next thing. Uh oh. It’s a slice of sports chatter, ostensibly crammed in here because you couldn’t find anything worthy of inclusion which simply said ‘those Seattle Seahawks are good right now, aren’t they?’ It’s by Ray Ratto of Defector, and adds some context to the currently whirling NFL coach merry-go-round.
The 10 owners involved in this cardboard-box cycle have fired 50 coaches and 28 general managers or football operations boss in their time, collectively. None of them are new to any of this; the issue is what they do when their pals in the suite on game day start laughing at their teams, because just as Jack Woltz told Tom Hagen right before he got a horse’s head in his bed, “a man in my position cannot afford to be made to look ridiculous.” So they do this instead – 47 times in this half-decade alone. As a meaningless aside, the coach with the second-longest tenure with their current team, Sean McVay, turns 40 this Saturday.
Oh no. You’re starting to think it’s not enough. One last shot. It must be enough. You flick open The Guardian. Keza MacDonald kindly lets you aim her glowing laser eyes at the Ade mirror. You think you see him wince as an interview about walk-and-fall sim Baby Steps is fired into his glass mug.
“I don’t know why he is in a onesie and has a big ass,” shrugs game developer Gabe Cuzzillo. “Bennett just came in with that at some point.”
“I thought it would be cute,” replies Bennett Foddy, who was formerly Cuzzillo’s professor at New York University’s Game Center and is now his collaborator. “Working on character design and animation brings you over to liking big butts. I could give you an enormous amount of evidence for this.”
When you look back, the mirror’s reflection is empty. He’s gone. It’s 2026, and you’re free. You stumble to your feet, brushing down your onesie and big ass.
It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, you think to yourself. It’s a new life for me, yeah. Fish in the sea, you know how I feel. River running free, you know how I feel. Blossom on the tree, you know how I feel.
Your mum removes her mask.
Ade Edmondson I see, you know how I feel.
The Sunday Papers,PC#Sunday #Papers1769339460
