The Sunday Papers

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The Sunday Papers is our weekly roundup of great writing about (mostly) videogames from across the web.

I will spend this Sunday nursing a chest infection, probably by wrapping blankets around myself and watching YouTube videos until sleep comes. Let's first round up some good links with writing and videos about videogames.

This is surely the best link this week: an hour-long video on how to beat "every possible game of Pokemon Platinum at the same time". That is, coming up with a set of game inputs that can win billions of possible permutations of the game, as determined by its RNG, when played simultaneously. It's an impressive feat, but the video itself is great too, patiently breaking down the process with motion graphics and video editing flair. Delightful.

The Nintendo DS, a handheld I adored, turned 20 this month. Keza MacDonald wrote about what made the DS special, and influential, at The Guardian:

The idea of a dual-screen console had been knocking about at Nintendo for a while. It was an idea that Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo from 1949 until 2002, was especially fond of, and he mentioned it often to his successor, Satoru Iwata, and to Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s creative lead. As Iwata put it: “The demand to make something with two screens had been with us for a while, a persistent source of motivation, to the point where Miyamoto and I basically reverse-engineered the thing.”

I've become lightly obsessed with Titanium Daydream, a series of animated shorts posted on TikTok (also Instagram) and clearly inspired by PS1-era graphics and games like Shenmue and Silent Hill. This recap episode gives a sense of it. The hair, the fashion, the timing, the walk animation; all perfect.

Bertie over at Eurogamer spoke to developers from Silent Hill, Slitterhead, Still Wakes The Deep and others to learn how games scare you.

"In short, I would call it the 'stimulation of imagination'," Toyama tells me. "The psychological appeal of horror, I believe, lies in a fundamental desire to collectively identify and overcome threats that surprise and challenge life (and species). Therefore, once something is understood, it may still be a threat, but it no longer evokes fear (as with plagues, for instance).

As with plagues, for instance.

In 1997, an episode of the Pokémon anime reportedly caused 685 children to be taken to hospital due to seizures. AJ, an author at Anime Feminist, digs deeper into the story:

As an Epileptic, I’ve been very outspoken about my opinions on the increased use of strobe lighting effects in American cartoons. Even today with movies like The Incredibles II, the use of flashing lights and red lighting effects has made a lot of cinema not only inaccessible but potentially deadly for many viewers. Yet people have accused me of being a hypocrite: why do I continue to love Pokémon? Surely if I had conviction in my beliefs, I’d refuse to watch the show that caused all those children to be taken to hospital! My response often surprises people. That, in my personal opinion, morally speaking, the animators were not responsible for what happened. That Porygon was, in fact, innocent.

Also on Eurogamer, Chris Tapsell did the noble work of explaining Pokémon TCG Pocket's encircling nest of free-to-play currencies.

There's no getting around the grubbiness of it, as with almost all free-to-play games of the modern age. But by mobile standards, and indeed other live service standards, there are things that could be worse. For one, unlike certain other pack-based online competitive games, spending money doesn't really gain you any meaningful advantage: there's no online transfer market, for instance, where you can hawk your wares for in-game megabucks to then buy an otherwise unobtainable good squad.

Obviously the biggest news in games media this week was that we published a flawless list of the top 100 PC games.

RPS is also on BlueSky, if you care to follow us there. We might even use it.

I was a teen in central Scotland in the late '90s, which means I had several friends who were deep into happy hardcore, a genre of music defined by high BPM and high-pitched vocals. New local outlet The Bell spoke to some of the makers, decades on, about how the music intersected with pirate radio and gang fights.

Music this week is not happy hardcore, because I could never stand the stuff. Instead take the mellow softcore of do u go out together by Kate Bollinger, the Japanese piano pop of Lush Life by clammbon, and the explosive, soulful, all-time great, Les Fleurs by Minnie Riperton. That last one inparticular is powerful enough to make any Sunday great, chest infection or not.