Spiffing Reads: Blade Runner, TumbleSeed and the connection between Moomins and elephants

This week on Spiffing Reads we start off by looking back on a wonderful video-game version of Blade Runner that’s all but impossible to play nowadays, and sadly is unlikely to be rereleased.


Westwood’s Blade Runner is an all-time classic in danger of being forgotten (Eurogamer)

The more I read about the 1997 Blade Runner game, the more I want to play it. It had a phenomenally ambitious premise in which each game was unique in terms of which characters were replicants, and it had a whopping 13 different endings. But because of data loss and rights issues, it’s never been re-released, which is a crying shame. Lucius P. Merriweather


The eight best advances in gaming during the last decade (The Guardian)

After 13 years, Keith Stuart is stepping down as Games Editor at The Guardian. To mark his departure, he looked back at the advances in gaming since he started the job, and it’s fascinating to see how far we’ve come in that time, from the rise of indie gaming to the development of online communities. L.P.M.


PlayStation VR One Year Anniversary Sale (PlayStation Blog)

Has it been one year already? Just about every VR game on PS4 is on sale this week. Sounds like a great time to get into VR, or pick up some classic VR titles you may have been holding out on. Battlezone, Farpoint, Here They Lie, PlayStation VR Worlds, Resident Evil 7 and The Brookhaven Experiment are all particularly excellent VR games if you’re in the market for some. Baron Richenbaum Fotchenstein


A Boy and His Frog: A Blaster Master Zero Review (Obtain Potion)

An excellent review of the Blaster Master reboot, packed with fond reminiscences of the hard-as-nails NES original. Bonus points for mentioning the weird Nintendo Worlds of Power books from the 1990s. I wrote about the Metal Gear one a while back – it was odd. We might also see some work from Obtain Potion‘s Matt Mason on this very site in the near future – WATCH THIS SPACE. L.P.M.


How TumbleSeed helped me cope with a newborn (Polygon)

Looking after a newborn child is TOUGH. It’s exhausting, full of unexpected problems and it comes with a near-constant sense of anxiety. So quite a bit like playing the Switch indie game TumbleWeed then, as this beautifully written article points out. L.P.M.


Niklas Hallin: Let’s Play Moomin’s Tale (video)

While doing research for my review of Niklas Hallin’s thoroughly enjoyable game, Yono and the Celestial Elephants, I came across this video from Hallin’s dev blog where he plays a bit of the obscure Japan-only Game Boy Color release Moomin’s Tale. The video is interesting on multiple levels: in it Hallin discusses how his game was indeed inspired by Tove Jansson’s fantastic books (little known in North America but more well-known in Europe and Japan), which confirmed my suspicions, and Moomin’s Tale itself looks like a fun oddity with some great animation. Professor GreilMercs


Spiffing Reads is a regular feature where we pick out the best gaming articles of the week. If you’ve read anything interesting, please let us know in the comments.