kamige. having campaigned to get this on backloggd for months now, i am pleased that at least one of the sex kitten games made its way on here!! isn't my favourite of the series, but 2000s lolrandom edgy humor combined with stolen anime art is my favourite niche slice of internet nostalgia (ew).

this is objectively awful but idc idc idc it reminds me of my weird horrible disgusting childhood.

your takeaway from this review should be to never let your child on newgrounds.

proud repulsion; the wriggling extremities of capital and hyperneurotic shoot-to-kill police horror viewed thru a queasy dutch angle. the malignant hypnotic wave of the gig economy, conditioned response, consumer slop, microplasticked newborns, get-rich-quick schemes, and salacious newsreel highlights as accelerated further thru nihilistic excess

indebted to bataillean self-laceration and mystic economism; transformative violence, sacrificial hedonism, and refusal of poise undercut by knowingly grotesque laughter. trauma and transgression as freefalling elevators toward the most terrestrial outcomes; absurd monuments erected to the unwell; flickering lighthouses and garbled siren songs drawing shipwreckers into the same crashes again and again until they find an exit

organs spilling out and lining your pockets, stock markets juddering senselessly and pointlessly, bank accounts engorging and deflating. every exchange, every action inherently transactional in nature; shared psychosis hitting fever pitch

work/life balance as infinite on-call uniformity

body as pure reflection of environment

self as perfect corporate weapon

It starts out pretty cool, but immediately transitions to a hallway with a QR code that jumps you to the merch. I don't know if it's only me or is common, but that would have been less annoying if they had it open on the map on the companion website, and then just had the link for the merch. Overall it made the whole thing feel a little cheaper. That art isn't a foremost goal. Of course, we all have to make money, and unfortunately art comes from that pursuit as often or maybe more so than the pure drive to create and express. So I'll give a little benefit of the doubt. Though the frequently reoccurring minotaur character is present in Fall Guys and Fortnite, which... feels weird for an art forward walking sim. Like if "Edith Finch" was the next character in smash or something.

It taps into a lot of what I love about listening to Radiohead. The metatextual narratives throughout their work, similar aesthetics their music evokes paired with their album artwork and other media and so on. I do think that a lot of Radiohead feels a bit like... a solved ARG. Like something that once contained a lot of mystique, a broadened pastiche of the societal angst that's in their music with deeper mysteries hidden below. I feel like this should have been the perfect thing to reinvoke that feeling, minus the solved part. It unfortunately did not. It feels a bit "we live in a society", that sort of boring puddle-deep cynicism sometimes at this stage, especially with how narrowly focused on repeating elements this is. This sounds harsh, but I genuinely loved all of it. It's just when analyzing things within my mind would wander back to this.

I may have that expectation from the late 00's when I was getting into them and they did hold an ARG(if I recall) around in rainbows, and this was around the time they were making big moves to try and shake up the piracy-frightened music industry. I'm waxing a lot about the band, but if you're generally interested in art, art galleries, narrative-absent walking sims, definitely play it. It is worth the time even if not invested in the broader act of enjoying radiohead. There were some genuinely cool moments, and as I previously mentioned, the aesthetics are very pleasant in an unpleasant way.

Some folks have stated this is groundbreaking, or mind blowing. I would not agree with this necessarily. It's great, a standard I'd love to see in future projects going for a similar thing, but folks have been creating non-game walking sims for a while that offer just as much. It is nice to see a big name attached for future projects though. I'd love to see many other bands and simply art installations get translated into this sort of game format. Preferably with a VR mode, as that stuff works with the added layer of immersion that provides.

Some highlights: an amber pillar that plays the drum and bass segments of a song that when you step outside it, it plays the more ambient pieces.

A big TV cube that alters when you step on different spaces throughout the room

A backrooms liminal hallway

an endless spiral staircase a la guggenheim museum with sketchbook paintings

a morphing 2d/3D landscape.

demon dance circle

exploding album art

And some other great bits.

I love shinji mikami but I gotta say

damn bitch, you made this?

they called this shit "panic horror" and boy I'm panicking — panicking that there might be another god awful pipe puzzle from the twisted mind of shu takumi or that once I'm done collecting two of every keycard under the sun someone might ask me to build an ark

with little interest in horror or combat dino crisis bets it all on sludgy adventure game tedium and loses. it might've worked better if there was even a hint of resident evil's unhinged charisma — the weird doors, weird keys, bonkers architecture etc — but what's here is crushingly dull from top to bottom

if it wasn't for the narrative branching and crafting system I'd be hitting it with the chicxulub impactor grade extinction score it otherwise deserves, but I gotta acknowledge how cool that stuff was when RE3 made good on it later that year

reading more into the development I found that not only did shu takumi design all the puzzles, he served as the game's director before being fired after throwing the team into "uncalled for confusion" due to his lack of experience. kamiya and takumi corroborate this with the former referring to takumi as the game's director to this day and the latter alluding to mikami's role as being that of a fixer — someone brought in to get the project back on rails after much of the game had been already established

I love shu takumi but I gotta say

damn bitch, you made this?

A terrifying game. Its bone-chilling nature, if it is engaged with earnestly, comes from two factors. First, the obvious one, the nuclear threat, portrayed through a mixture of three different tragedies: Chernobyl, a failure of a mission by the American troops, and the looming presence of an even bigger nuclear disaster. The second, likely less noticable if this was to be someone's first CoD game, is the horror that technological advancement brings to armed conflict. It struck me first on the second American mission, when you put on the night goggles and see all these lasers coming from the guns of your allies contrast with the lack of lights on the side of the enemy. Then, you use the Javelin missiles, you also get some aid from air support. If you die as much as I did, you're likely to see the messages popping up—a staple in the series—however, there's less of these inspirational, detached quotes about war. They are replaced by the costs of the weapons of destruction that have been assisting you. Soon after you get to see from the perspective of air support, where targets are no longer people, they're white outlines—the allied ones are pulsating, the enemies are not. It's the most I've been invested in a CoD title up to this point. It was a truly challenging piece of media, one that doesn't stray from not only cleverly, but also very openly criticising the actions taken by certain governments. The best writing in the series up to this point—a plausible, slightly hyperbolized political thriller with very memorable moments.

The setpieces are undeniably the best ones in the series so far. Modern Warfare has one of the best defensive sections—where you defend a point waiting for extraction together with your sniper teammate who is unable to move due to injury—while also having undeniably the best offensive sections, so many that I can't even choose one, but pushing through enemies towards a point of any kind is intense, difficult and satisfying, upping the stakes and, subsequently, investment in the story.

Veteran is rarely unfair in this title, my only complaint is that the enemies behave a bit inconsistently but the sections where I truly got stuck for longer than I'd want to are few and far between, and they are placed appropriately, given how they would clearly be the most difficult ones for real people as well. You absolutely need to use certain tools at your disposal, the flash grenades especially are key to finishing the last missions, in particular the epilogue plane section.

Modern Warfare is a gaming pioneer and a tough pill to swallow. It holds up fantastically. The moment of eeriness, as well as those of overwhelming noise and pressure—the haunting vignettes of people who got to experience war in its most devastating version so far.