The Anubis Gates
Steamboy, Blade II, Dune, Repo! The Genetic Opera soundtrack, Endless Ocean
Repo! The Genetic Opera
Kingdom Hospital
Watchmen
Scott Pilgrim, Crecy, Hellspawn, Sky Doll, the Walking Dead
MadWorld and House of the Dead: Overkill
Tokyo Gore Police
Ultimate Wolverine Vs Hulk
Mother 3
PS3 demos for Dante’s Inferno and Bayonetta
Stalker
…Damn, that’s a lot more than I remember doing.
Anyways! We’re not going to do things the way I did last time. We’ll review things differently.
MOVIES:
District 9- This is my favorite movie of the year, and in my opinion the best. I wanted to do a full review for it so badly, but never got the chance. Tight, fast-paced, realistic, gruesome, smart, there is nothing wrong with this film in my eyes.
Friday the 13th- I almost forgot I saw this. Why did I see this? Have you seen the other Friday the 13th films? Then you know what to expect.
Star Trek- Tied with the next movie for my second/third favorite of the year. Sleek, extremely entertaining, and successful in making Star Trek relevant again.
Zombieland- The funniest movie I’ve seen in a long time, breathing fresh life into the overstuffed and stale zombie genre. Zombie films are getting to be a dime a dozen these days, but this one is so worth watching.
Coraline- A grand stop-motion animated adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s children’s novel. Very pretty stuff.
Avatar- 3D. Very epic. Lots of action and explosions, 8-foot blue cat-like aliens, and a dumb story. Worth seeing once, but that’s it.
This was also the year I decided that I love body horror. How I didn’t realize it before thanks to films like Tetsuo the Iron Man and Slither, I don’t know, but Wikus Van der Merwe’s transformation over the course of District 9, David Cronenburg’s fucked up classic Videodrome, and my review of Tokyo Gore Police confirmed this, along with a novel I’ll mention later.
VIDEOGAMES:
New Super Mario Bros. Wii- Only halfway through it, but so far it’s incredibly fun, and the multiplayer aspect makes things equal parts more fun and frustrating. Teamwork wins, but it can also send friendships crashing and burning. Quite possibly my Game of the Year.
Muramasa: The Demon Blade- Runner-up for GOTY, considering how many hours I put into it. Yeah, this side scrolling hack-n’-slash is a bit repetitive and the environments repeat themselves, but it’s a beautiful game with a unique story, great classical Japanese style, and addicting and simple combat.
Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure- Best DS game of the year, and I bet you didn’t play it. Great little side scrolling platformer with a puzzle twist to it. EA has started making stunningly original games lately, but no one seems to pay much attention.
Retro Game Challenge- Another one nobody really played, but still great. 5 super-retro games in one, including a dazzling vertical spaceship shooter that I love a lot, which brings back a lot of memories of playing videogames as a little kid.
Bit.Trip Beat & Bit.Trip Core- This Wiiware-exclusive series is excellent. Core is much stronger than Beat, but both are quite challenging and unique, while serving as great throwbacks to old Atari games and a personal favorite of mine, Rez.
Scribblenauts- When I first bought it, I thought it was the best thing ever. YOU CAN SUMMON CTHULHU. And make him kill stuff! But after going through the first handful of worlds, it just started getting tedious, annoyingly repetitive, and just dumb, so I never finished it. All that hype and potential, squandered.
MUSIC:
I bought three new albums this year, all with a lot of promise, but faltering nevertheless. Mastodon’s Crack the Skye ditched the band’s usual hardcore metal style and got a lot more prog, with longer songs that rambled too much and lacked the brutality evident in their previous album. The Mars Volta’s album Octahedron is most definitely their softest, tamest album, with very little meandering chaos and madness, and while it has a couple of my new favorite songs by the band, it still feels a bit lackluster, but is nevertheless solid. Gallows came out with a second album, Grey Britain, and it’s miles above their first album, much tighter, more focused and aggressive, less grating on the ears, but it can wear out its welcome pretty quickly. I spent most of this year just getting videogame music and digging through Radiohead’s entire body of work, along with getting into K.M.F.D.M. and Portishead, yes.
COMICS:
This is the year I finally grew sick of superhero comics, or more specifically, the river of crap being spat out by Marvel and DC, with the exception of Wednesday Comics, but I only picked all of that up after it hit the dollar bins. My comic of the year happens to be the second volume of the Umbrella Academy, Dallas. I consider the first volume, Apocalypse Suite, to be one of the best damn comics ever written, and Dallas manages to top it. Great art, brilliant twists, great characters, crazy ideas, and exceptional pacing. This comic blows me away. The fifth volume of Scott Pilgrim was also phenomenal, and really leaves me worried about what is going to happen in the sixth and final volume. Both books really get you invested in their characters in ways few other comics do. Growing weary of superhero stuff, I’ve started wading through more obscure, weirder stuff. Lots of foreign sci fi comics were acquired, several issues of Heavy Metal and Epic Illustrated, stuff like that, none of it as satisfying as I would have hoped, but still better than I imagine Dark Reign is.
NOVELS:
I read two new novels that came out this year. Well, one and a half. First was the Strain, written by one of my favorite directors, Guillermo del Toro, alongside Chuck Hogan. It’s a more realistic look at vampires, and it starts off in a very brilliant, terrifying way, but loses a lot of steam thanks to awkward pacing and characters I just really didn’t care for. I only got halfway through it. Second, we have the Death of Bunny Munro, written by Nick Cave. It’s strange, dark, depressing, perverted, pretty much like Nick Cave’s music, only not quite as engrossing or satisfying. I went through a few older sci fi novels this year, though, my favorite being Antibodies by David J. Skal. It’s sci fi with a few doses of body horror shot in for good measure, fast, bleak, decadent, and relentless. Excellent stuff.
…Aaaaaannnndddd that’s it. I wonder what my first review for 2010 will be?
[Brett]
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