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The Sunday Papers

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A plain white mug of black tea or coffee, next to a broadsheet paper on a table, in black and white. It's the header for Sunday Papers!
Image credit: RPS

Sundays are for plopping eye drops into your eye pouches to prevent that horrible, allergy-driven burning sensation. Before you raise the dropper, let's read this week's best writing about games.

For PC Gamer, Edwin Evans-Thirwell writes about how Lemmings still haunts his nightmares almost three decades later. Admittedly, I've never played it before, and I'm now unsure if I want to.

The game isn't that difficult to begin with, but mistakes are easily made. Perhaps you've forgotten to set one lemming as a blocker, in order to box in the horde while you send out a lone builder to bridge a gap. Perhaps you've forgotten that there are only so many of each skill to go around: you can't just make every last lemming a floater as they toddle off a cliff. Either way, any oversight transforms the level into a slaughterhouse line, with freshly dropped lemmings dutifully repeating the errors of their siblings, death cries blending into a single, garbled scream. I'm aware there are worse ways to be introduced to the concept of dying, but try telling that to little infant Edwin, bawling his eyes out at the altar of a Macintosh Performa. Better yet, tell little infant Edwin that you can pick skills while the game is paused. Somehow I didn't work that out until 1999.

For the Before Mario blog, Erik Voskuil caught up with Nintendo collector Fabrice Heilig, who recreated the company's 19th century office to store his collection. Incredible commitment here, and very impressive too. I'd work from home in it. Cheers Kotaku for the spot.

Another detail that shows the great lengths that Fabrice was willing to go, to make this reproduction as faithful to the original as possible, is this fire-extinguisher box (消火器), which he imported from Japan.

Over on Wired, Lauren Goode wrote about how the internet will never let her forget about the wedding she cancelled. Frightening really, how the internet never stops even if you do.

Of the thousands of memories I have stored on my devices—and in the cloud now—most are cloudless reminders of happier times. But some are painful, and when algorithms surface these images, my sense of time and place becomes warped. It’s been especially pronounced this year, for obvious and overlapping reasons. In order to move forward in a pandemic, most of us were supposed to go almost nowhere. Time became shapeless. And that turned us into sitting ducks for technology.

For The Cut, Laura Bassett spoke to the man who kept uploading pictures of her feet to WikiFeet. It really is...quite something.

Robert agreed to go on the record and was helpful and responsive as I tried to set up an interview. I was only reminded of the nature of our relationship at one point when he asked, right after saying he was available to chat Thursday, whether my feet are ticklish. (I dodged the question.)

Music this week comes courtesy of the Yakuza 5 OST. It's a track called "highway" and it's a perfect companion to a lazy Sunday.

I spotted this over on Twitter and thought it was cool:

There's also a comment which links to a behind-the-scenes video which shows off that amazing floor.

That's me. Have a solid Sunday everyone!

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About the Author
Ed Thorn avatar

Ed Thorn

Reviews Editor

When Ed's not cracking thugs with bicycles in Yakuza, he's likely swinging a badminton racket in real life. Any genre goes, but he's very into shooters and likes a weighty gun, particularly if they have a chainsaw attached to them. Adores orange and mango squash, unsure about olives.

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