July 2025 media
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Donkey Kong Bananza: Before release, my concern about Bananza was that each level would be like a big tub of sand that you’d have to slowly scoop out to find all of its collectibles. And while there is an element of that, they do a good job of minimizing how frustrating it can get with clever design—you rarely find yourself digging aimlessly in practice, unless you enjoy it. And there’s a top-shelf Nintendo platformer in there too! It’s not quite Odyssey or Galaxy, for my money, but it’s very good. This is the “launch window” title that the Switch 2 really needed, I think; man cannot live by Mario Kart alone. I just hope we don’t have another multi-year wait for Nintendo EPD’s next big blockbuster.
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Umamusume: Pretty Derby: Yes, the horse girl one. A gacha game that’s themed around horse racing, filled with anime tropes, and also somehow an idol music thing feels like an almost radioactive combination—“a cigarette-themed slot machine,” as Jacob Geller put it. But I’ve been enjoying it so far, in the way that I enjoy lots of things that are probably bad for me, like fast food. I have a tolerance for gacha mechanics, but the fatal flaw for Umamusume will be the high time commitment: once the novelty wears off I’ll resent running its roguelike career mode every day, which is long even when fast-forwarded. When Genshin is fallow, I can do my dailies in five minutes and put it down…
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Close to Vermeer: A documentary about an Amsterdam museum putting on a Vermeer exhibition. I know nothing about the museum world behind the scenes, so it was fun to see some of that here: the scale model of the exhibit they use to determine the layout, the staff testing out how far people ought to stand from the paintings, the sophisticated analytical techniques, the politicking required to borrow art from other museums. There was also a great subplot about the authenticity of certain Vermeer pieces that exposed simmering tension between various groups—collectors and curators, Americans and Europeans, scientists and aesthetes. Really enjoyed this one!