- DB
A Hand With Many Fingers | The West Wing, Season Five
Great potential ultimately squandered in entirely different ways.
MOVIES
- Investigating my movies in iTunes further since last week, I'm surprised just how many I haven't made a post about yet.
- To be clear though, it will be a re-watch of all the movies in that particular collection, although I haven't seen some for well over a decade.
GAMES
- A Hand With Many Fingers is a game that I think could provoke one of the widest ranges of responses from people ever.
- First off, the biggest piece of praise which is for the absolutely incredible atmosphere generated as you search for files.
- You're completely alone the entire time, but it never feels that way thanks to some incredible sound design, which might make things actually scary for some.
- The gameplay loop of finding the right files in the right boxes is fairly simple too if you're paying attention and follow the instructions, so it should be pretty simple for most people to pick up and play without issue.
- The biggest problem I had with the game is how very, very short it is and how underwhelming the ending feels compared to just how incredible an experience the rest of the game is.
- I added a whole load of photos and news clippings to a board, squeezing everything into a corner in what was ultimately a false expectation of the game lasting longer than it did.
- It's often said that it's best to finish things leaving people wanting more, but I really don't feel there was enough here to be a truly satisfying experience.
- I feel like having to fill the blanks in a report or something to test whether the player fully realised what they had uncovered, and giving the player a choice to expose what they found or to continue a cover-up, would have provided a final moment of tension rather than the game just ending as it does.
- A Hand With Many Fingers is incredibly short, but also very cheap even when not on sale and I would recommend trying it out as long as you keep in mind that it is an excellent, albeit very brief experience. [7/10]
TV
- Contrary to most people's opinions and even my own memory, watching The West Wing's fifth season again wasn't quite as bad an experience as I was fearing.
- On the other hand, it's also nowhere close to the standard of the first four seasons.
- The stories aren't as good and neither are the episodes, with the season heavily relying on the audience already being pre-disposed to having certain feelings for the characters we see.
- While there are a number of episodes I enjoyed watching, none of them ever felt as gratifying as even a 'regular' episode from previous seasons due to a lack of build-up.
- There are some huge events that happen in the fifth season, but they're generally confined to single episodes, which ultimately feels reductive and makes those events seem less important.
- That lack of any kind of vision or long-term planning is what defines this season and makes everything feel disconnected and non-essential.
- Honestly, there are a large number of episodes you could shuffle into any point of the season and not be confused because of how little connective tissue there is.
- The lack of any building towards the points and their consequent failure to prove memorable means that the season feels more negative than any other.
- There have always been plenty of arguments between characters, but these have always been smoothed out by the group triumphing at some point and that just never happens in this season.
- I think the reaction of 'fans' of the show wanting the series cancelled was well over the top, even if the drop in quality is still significant.
- The West Wing's fifth season isn't bad, but I don't think you can label it as good either, although I think that's more to the credit of the cast knowing their characters inside out than anything. [6/10]
