The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for wondering why you sent Jim a link to a story last night, prompting him to mail asking you to do the Sunday Papers tomorrow as Walker and he are on planes. Still - probably worth Jim owing you a favour, so you talk your parents' barely functional PC into accessing the RPS Wordpress back-end and see if you can collate a few of the finer pieces of games-related reading from across the week for the RPS readers' entertainment and try not pay tribute to two awesome pop bands who took their final bow this week in a cheery attempt to annoy those terminally addicted to invigorating drone.

• This week Apple decided to pull Sweatshop from the Apple Store, as they viewed its educational approach towards the issue of sweatshops as somehow inappropriate. Designer Simon Parkin writes about his experiences over at The Guardian. Frankly, this sort of bullshit happens whenever you hand a curatorial role over to a fucking corporation. The main reason I'm always as pro-PC as I have been is because of that. You cannot trust a corporation with that kind of control of an artform.
• Mike Rose over at Gamasutra wonders who's buying all Niche Simulation games (You know - the ones involving tractors) and decides to do the journalisty thing and go and find out. And then share the information with you, as that's a pretty jorunalisty thing to do too. Hurrah for journalisty things.
• Joe Martin left games journalism recently, and then clearly ended up writing a big long essay about the game he's been playing. Because, for some people, you can leave games journalism, but games journalism doesn't leave you. It crouches in the belly and snarls. Anyway - he's been playing Thief: the Dark Project and while accurately pinning down the axis it works on, focuses tightly on its flaws, and compares and contrasts with Dishonored. Worth chewing over.li>
• Kotaku do the sort of article that always outs the terminally boring when itwrites about the seemingly endless urge for people to add cocks in games. This is clearly a human nature one, but it makes me smile fondly about my days at PC GAMER. Whenever the first shots of a game arrive, the magazine gathered around the editor's monitor to have a nose, and inevitably the Ed scrawled a big cock on them while everyone said "Oh God - what are EA thinking?!? This image has a phallus on. Have they gone insane?" That said, that wouldn't even register on the EA PR-blunder scale nowadays. Releasing cock-adorned screenshots would probably be sign of a renaissance.
• Ashelia at Hellmode writes an article she didn't want to about Tomb Raider over at Hellmode. "Tomb Raider triggered me and that’s ok. Maybe that’s even good. I think it is because it means it’s the first realistic, non-gratifying portrayal of violence against women that I’ve seen in video games. It’s the first one I’ve seen that wasn’t exploitive. It didn’t hold any punches, but it didn’t need to. It was raw. It was accurate. And it affected me in a way years of therapy never did."
• Quinns and Leigh talk about a sexy boardgame. It had to happen eventually.
• Bye-bye Girls Aloud! Bye-Bye My Chemical Romance! Kiss you!

Failed.