(Also catching up on all the Netflix releases I’ve missed in the years since season four. Ultraman Rising rules and I don’t know why we aren’t just talking about it all the time??)

This could potentially be read as part of SH’s greater interrogation of what it means to be Japanese vs American horror. Most SH games have streets built for cars and trucks, so encounters are avoidable due to their size. This is not the case for the small, old, winding roads of Ebisugaoka.

The argument is always that Silent Hill games never have good combat, but I think Silent Hill F suffers from its combat MOST approaching conventional while not quite hitting the mark, a gap further highlighted by a high rate of forced encounters.

And I guess the other big defining feature of Death Stranding is all-caps AUDACITY, and DS2 has that in spades.

Some of the things Kojima gets these famous people to say are w i l d

To be fair, I don’t think there’s a way to capture that feeling of walking into the unknown again unless they started again from the ground up.

Death Stranding 2’s world opens much earlier. I understand it’s a sequel, and some people were turned off by just how slow the first was, but I miss that slow build. Still, it felt like once I unlocked roads I was off to the races. I barely experimented with other transportation methods.

In my mind, DS is most characterized by its interesting balance of the inherent loneliness of exploration with a cooperative spirit. In the first, there was a real sense of work and discovery when first entering an area, and it was so satisfying to finally connect and see other player structures.

And then AKB48—who, sure, I’d consider legacy now—is straight up just releasing an AI-written single trained on one of their usual songwriters, because AKB48 has always been about ruthless calculus at its core. www.bbc.com/news/article...

…while Yumi Matsutoya is celebrating her 40th anniversary by producing an album with AI to sound like her younger self; the gimmick being it’s an album recorded using a sci fi “Chrono Recording System” that can reach an alternate universe version herself. yuming-wormhole.jp

Two of the big uses of it seem to be interacting with their younger selves. Ayu did it earlier this year in a video depicting her modern self walking through a living museum of the past 27 years. youtu.be/d4NXu86Q3DE

Monster Hunter leap-frogging over everything was kind of amazing to see visualized. I knew it had blown up internationally in the last few years, but didn’t understand the scale!

Just out of curiosity, do games claimed as part of subscriptions like Game Pass and PS+ factor into this data?