been rewatching lots of community recently w my boyfriend who never watched it lmao. grew up watching that shit and rlly loving it and then became an adult and was like hold on that show kind of sucked and dan harmon is a weird fucking dude. but id be lying if this rewatch wasn’t rlly like rewarding?? like it’s still def smth that thinks it smarter than it is and hit me at a time in my life where I thought I was smarter than I was but it’s also like frequently rlly funny and weird in how it tackles genre but still feels ultimately like the same show it started out as/fits into the mold of corporate nbc comedies. kind of sucks a lot of the time kind of incredibly sexist and showcases more of harmon’s weird and problematic writing than rick and morty ever does but also i think donald glover and gillian jacobs are so unbelievably talented. idk been thinking of this game a lot bc abed wears multiple de blob shirts in the third(?) season which is rlly funny and kind of places that series perfectly in the early 2010s, costume design in the show kind of goes hard. played one of these de blob games on my ds while camping in my family’s backyard as a child, also played whatever tony hawk game had a motion sensing cart you put in the gba slot, was very cool. i rlly love the 00s

there are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see :-)))

rlly makes you FEEL like ur 19 again and still experiencing religious delusions/paranoia. which is like such a specific feeling and thought process and not one I wouldve thought a video game could nail. but nah this took me right back to 2019 and how ill and scared i felt back then. loved any moment where indika was able to sit down and u would be able to cycle through all these beautiful camera angles where each one is centered on her through these like far away creep shots,, like she’s being stalked and looked at w hatred by some unknown figure. idk the feeling of being totally alone but still being watched and like ur never alone even when u want to be is ultimately like an entitled and self important one but it’s crazy to me that a game can get across these v specific feelings.

reminded me lots of i saw the tv glow,,, both ultimately about how living inside ur head and through fantasy is like a v unhealthy lifestyle and bad for mental/physical well-being. how any kind of fantasy whether a positive or negative one is end of day bad for u if it’s all consuming and u can’t live without the fantasies that play out in ur head. u end up seeing and hearing what’s inside ur head rather than what’s actually there in front of u.

religious horror team ico game (tho im sure a case could be easily made that that’s exactly what those games already are) or like alice madness returns w more contemporary aesthetic pretenses. kind of shit that yorgos lanthimos would be making if he wasnt a fucking coward and freak loll and im NOT just saying this bc there’s a disorienting usage of fisheye here tho more things should def use fisheye. zulawski vibesss here too for sure. love this,, finished all in one sitting,, had me in a trance fr
(which the gendered violence had more of a statement or take before the ending and not just in the final section but yk oh well play the cards that im given)

ok but where’s sativa tho😭

I've read from a few places that this game was inspired by the John Cage composition 4'33, but honestly it sort of feels like a kind of sarcastic response to John Cage. The idea that I've always taken from 4'33 is that even though the musicians are silent, the audience will make some small ambient noises just from slightly shifting around in their seats or whatever else, which combined with the ambiance of the room the piece is being performed in creates a series of sounds that will be unique at each performance. This game is different though, the "game-play" of the game will be the exact same loading bar for everyone. The unique aspect comes from the fact that in order to beat the game, the player must be the only one playing for the whole 4 minutes and 33 seconds (Which is pretty easy nowadays, I wasn't interrupted a single time.) To me, this comes across as questioning why we value uniqueness in the first place. As I was waiting to win the game, I found myself wondering why it's important to be the only one who happens to be playing at this very moment when people have had this exact same experience before me and will after me. It sort of reminds of The Stanley Parable, where in that game the idea of choice and freewill is questioned by having a pre determined path and story even when the player believes they've gone off the beaten path (The ending where you jump out of bounds from the office window is a great example of what I'm talking about here). Here, there's a similar thing where even if the player may feel unique, every moment of the game is pre-determined, meaning every successful play-through will always be the same unless someone else decides to play the game during your play-through. It's never truly unique. And you can apply this to all sorts of other things as well, especially art. What does it mean to be unique if you can easily just make an exact copy of any given painting. Why is the painting being the one originally painted by the artist even matter if you can just make an exact copy of the painting? These same questions can also be asked of movies, shows, books, John Cage compositions, and as this game shows, video games.

Also I quickly want to write about how this game pushes the idea of what is a video game. The only way you can interact with it at all is by launching the game. Does that make this a movie or a video? I would argue no, because other people launching the game will reset your play-through. But that's not a change in the game itself, that's just rewinding the game to the beginning and starting it over. If you were watching a movie in hotel lobby and the staff reset the movie every time someone else glanced at the screen, would that be a video game? or even just a game? I'm not sure, but I think it's really cool that this game makes me ask. Really, that's why I like this game and other games like this. Sure, some may say they're pretentious and not worth playing, but I just love that something as simple as this can ask so many questions about the way that we think about art, uniqueness, and what it means to be a videogame.

i have not a speck of interest in the deepest pits of my soul to see how this game, this so intrinsically male-gazey game, handles the subject of rape. i feel like i'm watching a lars von trier movie. to be clear, i'm no prude! i don't mind - many times, i even enjoy - skimpy character designs and general titillation. i'm not rejecting this on some moral basis, either, as i enjoy plenty of exploitation media. look at a game like lollipop chainsaw. themes of SA and weird pedo shit? yes. sexualization of its main character? also yes. but the creators knew what they were making and set the tone accordingly. haunting ground's approach is the equivalent of putting jiggle physics in rule of rose. it's screaming "i have zero self-awareness" at the top of its lungs.

my belief in total artistic freedom doesn't mean i have to put up with jack shit. i see no reason to continue playing when i could be enjoying any of the 600 other video games in my backlog. i'm gonna go play silent hill 4.

been thinking lots about hard/challenging games and how i just absolutely don’t fuck w them and don’t see the point. i often find myself annoyed and abandoning scrimblo platformers for this very reason bc it’s not even smth where u can get better at learning how to use the mechanics like in most games,, w these types of games it comes completely down to reflexes that I just don’t have. but this is cool and chill and v forgiving,, more so about being in this games world and appreciating its vibes than most platformers. idk rlly appreciate a platformer that cares more about aesthetics + narrative than actual gameplay. rlly beautiful and pretty game ^_^ #kidcore #scrimblo

as for like idk the hate of this remake in comp to original game…..u hating from a cracked screen….aint u dizzy???? fr tho like idk ive played the first three levels of the original ps1 release and it’s def it’s own vibe and is v pretty but this has accessiblity options both by being easier and being readily available which is nice lol…
also idk i think this game has its own specific vibe that’s kinda diff from the original game,,, has a similar look + feel to balan lol sick that’s cool

Singular.

A lot of the outward presentation might be silly (hints, patch notes, name [love the name]), but within is a deep exploration into how far emergent puzzle-solving can take itself, an argument in favour of gameplay as it's own artform. When I say argument, it's in the academic sense. This is an academic work, doing to 'immersive sims' (video game genre terminology continues to confound and bemuse) what Godard did to his work in the 80s, turning inward, stripping back, and seeing if when only abstractions remain, it still works. It then makes total sense that this in no way resembles the immersive sims it comments on and critiques, much like Godard's King Lear has very little in common with filmed stage play adaptation as a genre, or indeed Lear itself. It's pretty up in the air if Godard was successful in his efforts, but with Mosa Lina, I feel it's a home run. A triumph in stripping away everything from the concept of an immersive sim until all that's left is emergent gameplay and perhaps even more successful in its showcase that this element is an art all its own.

Sorry for all the nerd talk, but I do believe it's important to recognise how successful the developer was in making the 'Hostile Interpretation of an Immersive Sim' (so well put) they were aiming for. I find it deeply interesting on this level. But I admit, if that was all there was to Mosa Lina it wouldn't be enough to get me THIS excited. The bonus is the sum of this investigation is an endless platforming roguelike I find to be the most delightful game I've played in years.

The presentation, all obscured ambient drones and gorgeously pastel sketches, is perfectly matched to the addictive puzzle-solving. The levels are uniformly sublime, the randomness keeps it endlessly fresh and this 'final boss of physics-based abilities' moveset has an infinite amount of fun utility and combinations to discover. If you somehow get bored of the base game (Raw Random is one of the most fun high-score modes I've played in any video game), custom levels are so accessible that there's already an endless swathe of fantastic ones to enjoy. I, nearly every level, found myself exclaiming in delight at a never-before-seen interaction or discovery or insane circumstance that led me to victory. Few games have frustrated and excited and made me feel this smart and this dumb all at once. It's glorious. Sorry to the 6 brothers (Armored Core and Street Fighter) who battled it out as the two wolves inside me for 2023 GOTY. This thing waltzed on up and handed everyone their respective ass.

I think movies have gotten to the point where they are reflective about the inherent danger and evilness of the camera. reflective about the bad shit they’ve been responsible for and the evil they’ve brought into this world. I saw it this year with pearl and nope and fabelmans, I don’t think any of those necessarily are intentionally about the evils of the celluloid camera, but maybe being so in love with film is the same as kind of despising both the medium and the industry. and I really don’t care about movies anymore, I used to watch about a hundred new releases per year and hundreds of older movies every year but tastes change and so does the medium. for a while it was disheartening to see the a24fication of indie films and the marvelfication of blockbusters, everything has became one homogenous blob of certain tropes and certain beats to hit, it’s easier to just not care. it’s easier to just hang up ur hat and accept that after a hundred years this medium died, it was inevitable wasn’t it? it died a sad and uneventful death. I guess that comes off as very cynical which I really don’t think I am nor am I trying to be. I’m just trying to be realistic, that something I once cared about and was passionate about is more or less dead. I’m fine with that, I still saw several new releases I really really loved, saw some older stuff like 1981’s possession and 1985’s smooth talk. this review is all over the place but mostly my thoughts boil down to the fact that Sam Barlow is as in love with the medium of film as he is critical and hateful of it. more than any other movie I’ve seen since maybe 2002’s autofocus and reflections of evil, immortality understands the destruction that films have left in the wake of people who worked on them. it’s impossible to not think of weinstein or spacey or baldwin or morrow or lee when playing through this. how many lives have ultimately been fucked over by this monolith of an industry. whether or not intentional the ‘22 movies I mentioned understand this. pearl with both its exploration of exploitation of young women in the industry and how ultimately escapism via movies is some of the most dangerous escapism. nope with its commentary on how most every movie ever made is built on the suffering of minorities, how it’s an industry built upon this that works every day to put people down. fabelmans is directly about how movies stop people from coping directly with their trauma, a very expensive distraction. immortality is all of this, it’s every piece of criticism on the film industry that’s ever existed, condensed into one of the most beautifully dense things I’ve ever experienced. doing things that are only possible in this medium, not the medium of film but the medium of games, because ultimately this does not work as anything but a game. maybe it’s really cynical of where movies are at and where they’ve always kinda been but at the same time it’s ridiculously hopeful of where games are and where they can go.

(scattered thoughts because I just slugged down a fig apple redbull and wrote all of this in my hour before work lol.
crazy that Barlow actually wrote a competent and not fetishistic portrayal of women here, the story here almost comes off as an apology for how he wrote and treated femininity in her story and most likely everything else he ever worked on.
just insane to see the wide range of influences that Barlow cops from here, I have no real issue with this as it’s just as much an exploration of the problematic themes that the directors he’s borrowing from exhibited as it is a homage to rollin and friedkin, etc.
fucking love how truly skeletal this is, ripped away from anything complete makes this feel much more realistic than her story which worked almost entirely on the gotcha of the plot. stripped away from trying to be cinematic and showing the bones of film production makes this more cinematic in the long run.
I like the costumes ^_^)

this is like the anti-sonic forces to me.

the problem with sonic forces is that it's bland, boring and it has extremely little to do. shadow has plenty of levels, hundreds of paths and is ANYTHING but boring.

but it's laggy, unpolished as all hell, extremely edgy in the corniest ways possible, and the level designs are... awful, to say the least. sonic forces, for how much i enjoy shitting on it, is an extremely polished game with so little edge it may as well be a circle.

shadow is better simply because i felt something while playing it. even if that was just laughing at the stupid cutscenes and stupider dialogue, it got something out of me. it also took some risks that, while i don't think they paid off, were at the very least interesting.

bad, but in a fun way.

Not a Sonic game but I'm including it in my marathon anyways, when the hell am I gonna find another excuse to check this game out lmao

It's fun! Once you play the way the game expects you to, of course. My first attempt on stage 1 was a travesty cause I had no fucking idea what was going on. A quick YouTube video pointed me in the right direction though, and I was soon gathering blue spheres while trying to score attack the shit out of every stage.

But it's far from perfect. Boss fights were either too simple or annoying to get through, and those god forsaken spike rings can go eat a box of nails.

Now that I have consumed the Nights DNA, I'm ready for my eventual journey into Balan Wonderworld. (Don't ask)