Media Meditation...

What I like about this game is how dense it is in its artistry. What I mean is that when you play this game, you can feel the effort and thought that went into every area. Games like Skyrim have a lot of artistry in them, too, but there are still areas that feel like they've been forgotten about in the creation process. Little Nightmares is dense throughout.

The sequel is a bit longer, and a bit less consistent in quality. I encountered a few strange bugs and stuttering when loading new areas, which is a regression from the first game. Some areas feel dense (the school cafeteria) while others can feel quite sparse. To grow from the first game, more puzzles are present along with more tense "skill"/timing segments, which is a plus in my opinion. Overall, I'd grade the sequel slightly lower: it shows that stretching the same formula doesn't always give the same great results.

This is a very cool game. Visual and audio design, each amazing on their own, are also perfectly attuned to each other, including a banger “main theme” that expresses perfectly how it feels to play ZoE. Sound effects perfectly express the character of different attacks, movements, and UI actions while remaining distinct; animations and character designs remain readable and appealing even at the game’s fast pace, which is so quick that it tends to run up against the PS2’s frame‐rate limits (a modern port with an uncapped frame‐rate would be a godsend here.)

To elaborate on the visual design, it’s interesting to see what design elements are shared between this game and Metal Gear Solid 2, which was being made by the same people around the same time. Things like the wide, all‐caps UI font, teal everywhere, sterile, almost surreal metallic environments, and trilling, computer‐bird sound effects are part of the shared vision of the future here.

Game‐play‐wise, things are very polished and streamlined, with a fighting game‐like set of block, dash, grab, and attack actions, sans combos, enemies with the same abilities, and a suite of features designed to make the 3D space feel relevant and actionable, such as the rings indicating the direction of attacks and enemies, but not overwhelming, such as the automatic turning and navigation to face and move towards the selected enemy.

Outside of this, there is one element of the game that felt starved of consideration before release: the translated dialogue, which comes off as incredibly wooden and alien‐like—although some credit must be given to the voice actors, who do their best despite the strange lines. The animated cut‐scenes also help to make up for this.

What a thriller! This movie's strength is gathering long stretches of minutes together into what feels like one intense moment. Some wonderful uses of of CGI—too many to count, really. The characters were dead-simple (especially George Clooney, who is written like a video game character), and this definitely shows when the plot calls for an emotional moment and all it can do is pull in convenient strangers who have more innervating things to show the audience than the leading lady. However, those things don't have to be intricate when the film has such baroque physicality. A movie where you can feel the third dimension even in two dimensions. Like they took the “space simulator” from your local theme park and made it a feature film.

Friendship, to me, is a mean-spirited movie. Tim Robinson's character plays a lonely, maladjusted, mentally unwell person with no inner arc, because the audience is not meant to empathize with him. The other characters seem to go out of their way to be passive-aggressive to him, insulting him while speed-walking past him when he overfills his coffee cup and has to do a funny shuffle with it (a rare but of un-tainted physical humor) or getting in their cars to shout “Nice going, jackass!” from an un-addressable position. I thought “comedies” like this (the Griswold's Family Vacation reboot comes to mind) died in the early 2010s, but their fans haven't, it seems, and that worries me. The toad trip scene got a nose exhale out of me, which is an achievement when it's surrounded by tens of minutes of watching a guy make the worst social decisions possible and watching the people around him (perhaps including the audience?) wallow in their in-group-affirming lack of sympathy for this man. Some points are left for being a competent, if boring, TV movie thriller.

Strange Days captures a piece of what I imagined adulthood to be like as a child, pieced together from stray motes of restaurant cigarette smoke and pictures stranded in a silver digicam. A knifes-edge walk fully immersed in a sea of people, taking and defending your softest and most foolish feelings, even in a harsh world. It feels good to watch an action movie where the white male protagonist gets to emote something other than fear/anger/lust. I wonder if this was to the 1992 Los Angeles riots as Cloverfield was to 9/11?

One of the main sticking points of the Souls games, for me, is the character progression system. I remember hearing from a GDC talk that given the chance, many players will optimize the fun out of their own experience. In my experience with these games in particular, I always manage to un-optimize the fun out of my experience. Besides, with a “plot” so threadbare and with so little player agency, what does it matter if I get to “build” a character? Change those, and you get Sekiro, the only Souls game I've ever finished (twice!).