Weird atemporal times to be living in that there are still articles being written about this.

Maybe I'm just jaded, but this wasn't that memorable compared to the rest of the game. I recall needing to read about it in the magazines to get past this part and feeling annoyed despite having what we now refer to as a "shared experience". Seemed gimmicky both then and now.

what I thought was interesting and creepy was the way it read your memory card and he makes comments based on games you played prior. At the time it would feel like magic

Oh totally, the Codec radio was way cooler.

Indeed. How do they handle that in modern versions of the game?

Tvtropes has a nice list of Fourth wall breaks in video games: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/BreakingTheFourthWall... (lots of spoilers, of course).