Hey all, 2022, huh? I cannot lie: this one was a rough one! We said goodbye to Jeff Gerstmann, we got sold to the fourth company that has owned Giant Bomb while we were still trying to figure out how to extricate ourselves technologically from the second company that has owned us, and Jesus Christ those fucking shirts. Editorially things are going well, but from a behind the scenes point of view, it’s definitely been a lot of lurching from emergency to emergency. Combine that with taking maybe 3 days off all year long, and you have a recipe for limping across the finish line of 2022! And as soon as 2023 starts, we get to do it all over with Fandom! So far they have been a very fun company to work for, but I can't stress enough that switching to whole new HR/benefits/expense reporting/contractor systems has been A LOT to deal with lately. Working on it! Gonna get that store back up as soon as I can in 2023!
2022 was a bit of an off year for games, in my opinion; my preference at this point is for the big, grand, flashy AAA games over the indie darlings, and this was certainly a year when the impact of quarantine seemed to hit the industry in myriad ways: games were delayed, games came out with substantial bugs, and overall it just felt like there were fewer huge games for me to sink my time into. The games I did play were more likely to be huge 50 or 80-hour adventures, so at least the stuff I actually got around to had some meat on their bones, but there were notably fewer of those this year than in years past.
There were a lot of games that I played that I don’t quite feel like throwing on this list, at least partially because sometimes I just want to talk about a game without people seeing it in here and thinking that it is a Game Of The Year for me. Like, Dying Light 2 was really fun but obviously felt half-baked in terms of the writing! I still really liked it but probably not enough to write much about it. V Rising! Peglin! Tunic! The Master of Magic remake! I bounced off of Dragonflight real quick! All of them and more are interesting but I’m probably not going to go out of my way to say much about them! There’s also just a ton of stuff I didn’t get around to trying at all, like Midnight Suns or Tinykin or Neon White. I’m busy!
As always, the game I spent the most time on this year was definitely Magic Arena on my desktop. I somehow clocked in over 2,000 games this year, over five a day, and that was during some bad times in the meta! It’s a constant companion on my desktop and I love being able to play Magic all day long for what might as well be the cost of “free” compared to the amount of playtime I get out of it. I won a whole 873 of those games, so I’m not the best Magic person around, but I have fun with it and that’s what counts.
And as always I’m going to intersperse this list with some of the other media that I’ve enjoyed this year. Not everything, mind you (do you really need another person to tell you to go watch Better Call Saul or Everything Everywhere All At Once?), but the stuff that stuck out at me. It was a good year for readin’ as I think I clocked in 40 or 50 books, but not many of them were brand new and I won’t go back and list them all. But I’ll point out some that I liked! By and large my media choices were basic bitch/comfort food territory this year; I didn’t get super experimental, so be forewarned. Also I guarantee that I left a couple of sentences unfinished here; let me know in the comments and I'll adjust.
I loved it! This game is more or less fantastic from beginning to end, especially in terms of dialogue. In most games I read the lines in the subtitles and skip through conversations as quick as I can just to get back to the gameplay, but for HFW I picked every conversation option and sat back and watched: Guerilla is insanely good at cutscene animation and while I have some issues with some of their choices here (the skill tree is probably too broad and there’s still no reason to really focus on melee combat), the good far outweighs the bad and it’s easily way up there on my GOTY list. You can read my full review here!
I have no idea how they're going to resolve that last-minute twist for the third game's villain; it almost seemed like someone just wanted to write this game and leave a huge problem for whoever writes the third! We'll see!
Confess Fletch
I didn’t go into this expecting much, having heard some bad word of mouth, but wound up thinking that it was maybe the funniest movie I’d seen all year, mostly thanks to the just ridiculous amount of mugging that Jon Hamm gets to pull off. No one needs to be told that Hamm is a very good actor, or that he’s very attractive, but for him to be this funny with little more than his expressions is a rare gift. Joss Whedon once said that he wrote a scene in every episode of Angel where David Boreanaz could just be petulant because that was what he was best at, and the director of this movie definitely leaned into the idea that Jon Hamm is at his funniest when he's just reacting to a bizarre situation with a funny face. It works!
It’s not a movie that holds up well if you think about the details, but it’s a fun screwball comedy and what more do you need? I honestly liked this more than Glass Onion!
I really wasn’t expecting to like this as much as I did, but surprise surprise: I kept booting this up for most of the summer and wound up clocking in around 90 hours on it. The mechanics are enjoyable enough that even doing the bog-standard gold runs were fun, and the difficulty was tuned enough that even the bosses that made you feel like you would never beat them eventually wound up conquerable after enough repetitions.
That’s honestly a hard balance to hit, so congratulations to the engineers here: the roguelite progression system is somewhat overwhelmingly broad, even when you’re regularly getting 50k or more gold every run, but it does let you focus on the classes that you like, at least.
In a year where I just wanted to boot something up for 20 minutes a few times a day to scratch my ADHD itches, Rogue Legacy 2 fit the bill perfectly. I doubt I’ll ever try and scratch too far down into the crazy post-game modifiers business, but it’s there if I need it.
The Banshees of Inisherin
We laughed, we cried, sometimes on the same weekend, and we bookended our watch of Confess, Fletch with a viewing of The Banshees of Inisherin and HOO BOY was that ever a study in contrasts. Banshees sets you up for a fun little comedy in the first fifteen minutes or so, but then it’s…just…back up the fuckin’ tissues truck, because you’re gonna need ‘em for the rest of the movie. It’s easy to refer to movies like this as “depressing,” but that feels inaccurate in this case: it’s more just a penetratingly sad movie.
I think most of us will have had friendships that have petered out or ended for no particular reason, or because of unintentional or intentional hurts or slights, so there’s something for everyone to see here, and it’s wonderfully well-acted and written. It’s just fucking sad in ways that you don’t see very often; you can compare it to stuff like The Sweet Hereafter or Three Colors: Blue, maybe. It’s excellent and brilliant and I’ll definitely see it again, but I’m going to need a bit of time to reset.
I started playing this in January so I’m counting it and you can’t stop me. I was pretty much enthralled by this game from start to finish, with a small break to wait for patch 1.3. It’s definitely the best-looking game I’ve ever played (on PC, at least), and it seemed extremely well-written, with a combat system that lets you just feel super powerful if you put the work in. I was mostly a stealth sniper with some quickhack abilities, and while most of the game was a cakewalk on Normal difficulty that quickly changed when I bumped everything up to Hard and had to really pick people off from a mile away to avoid dying. Of course, it helps when your sniper rifle has homing bullets.
I thought the character work was really exceptional here: everyone is sexy without being oversexualized (if you get my meaning), and the individual plotlines are really well-done. I really thought the conclusion to the Lucy storyline was great! It's like the opposite of when 50 Cent said "I'm into having sex, I'm not into making love," but it's in a video game and not a song. Really makes you think.
I really can’t speak highly enough of this game; I never played it at launch so I can’t speak to its playability then but it’s absolutely a masterpiece at this point and you should check it out if you have a good video card. Its expansion is one of my most-anticipated games of next year! I kinda want to play this again before it comes out!
Camp Cope: Running With The Hurricane
I love Camp Cope and I love the stylistic variances that they and Georgia Maq allow themselves: whilst nominally a punk band, Georgia Maq’s solo album was more of a dreampop or electropop record, and their newest album Running With The Hurricane is an eminently sing-along-able alt-country-ish kind of record. Loved this album and I loved seeing them live this year too!
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I played 20 hours of this, almost entirely within the month of January, and have barely touched it since, but it’s still a wonderful memory. I feel like I got what I needed out of the game at that point and at some point my attitude just became “Ok! I get it! I’ve seen enough.”
I haven’t really engaged with it beyond that, but I’m glad people seem to like it a lot and have placed it highly on their lists! At some point it’d be interesting to do a roundup stream of all the clones that have come along this year as there have been a lot of them.
Beach Bunny: Emotional Creature
I keep on wanting to slag on this album: It sounds like cut-rate Paramore! It feels like reading a 13-year-old’s diary! For all that, though, it’s some of the best indie pop I’ve heard in a while, if you don’t mind a collection of simple “fly/sky” kind of rhymes. As a bonus I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone smile this much in a music video!
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I also still haven’t finished this one - I ran out of steam just past the Fire Giant fight. But still, there’s no denying that this is an indelible experience in gaming: bizarre as all hell, but with dozens of memorable boss fights and some incredibly layered worldbuilding and architecture. It’s a grand experience in every sense of the word: amazing, possibly overdramatic, very self-absorbed in many ways, but still fascinating throughout. I think I am hitting a difficulty spike that might make it difficult for me to go back and finish it, but I’ll definitely try and give it a shot at some point!
Triangle of Sadness
Did you all know that rich people might be…bad? I feel like there’s been a bunch of movies satirizing the wealthy over the last few years and while I welcome our coming class war, it also feels like the discourse has become so overwhelming that it’s difficult to find new ways to mock our lords and ladys, to the manor born, without things just feeling forced.
I don’t know if Triangle of Sadness really pulls off what it’s attempting to do; it feels like someone watched a few Iannucci movies, then did a bunch of cocaine and turned the satire down and the slapstick humor sliders way up. There’s just kind of a lot of shit going on here, examining gender roles, servant/master relationships, income disparity, etc, etc. It’s extremely good but it also feels like it’s bashing you over the head more often than not with its themes, to the point where you could imagine some rich asshole watching it and laughing along without realizing they’re the butt of the joke. I suppose that’s true of Iannuci movies as well, though?
Anyway, the first 20 minutes of this movie are excruciatingly hard to get through, and I recommend it unequivocally. Show it to your parents and tell them it’s like Below Decks and see what happens!
Little Simz: No Thank You
A late arrival, having dropped only a couple of weeks ago, this starts off with a dope fucking track (please see above). After the heights of Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, absolutely one of the best albums of the last few years, this is a more straightforward, down-to-business collection of songs, but it’s still hitting all the notes of anxious braggadocio that you should expect from Simz. Gorilla, especially, is one of those rap songs that sounds like it might be some tossed-off freestyle but also sounds like it's probably a meticulously put-together track and, well, I like those.
I always get excited when a new Daniel Abraham book comes down the pipe; he’s obviously half of the team behind The Expanse novels, but I’ve also been an avid fan of his solo stuff, especially the Dagger and the Coin quintet, which is honestly one of my favorite fantasy series of all time. He’s starting up a new fantasy trilogy with Age of Ash and while it’s more about establishing characters and worldbuilding than it is about grand action, I can tell he’s got something big up his sleeves and I look forward to reading the rest of this trilogy when the next book arrives in 2023.
Rachika Nayar: Heaven Come Crashing
There’s a little joke I have with a friend of mine who is into electronic music about people who call themselves “composers,” but by and large I dig the experimental electronic music that’s been popping off over the last decade. You never really know what you’re going to get with some of these cats: one track is King Bromeliad, the next is some weirdo understated jazz piece; one album contains legit bangers, the next is all weird noises to help guide you on your ayahuasca trip. And then you get to the real weirdos like Nils Frahm making a three-hour album that features 20-minute tracks in which almost nothing changes. Still, I like what I like and I really liked Rachika Nayar’s album Heaven Come Crashing this year.
This isn't an easy album to describe: there's some club banger action in a couple of songs, but for the most part it's one of those "soundtrack to a movie that doesn't exist" kind of albums with swells and quiet bits and some really lovely guitar work. I like the ebb and flow of the whole piece and it all works together really well as an album. The overlying mood is somewhat ominous, like a Cliff Martinez score for a Soderbergh film, but it's really lovely overall and I highly recommend it.
I gotta give Alastair Reynolds credit for always keeping me guessing. This book is an odd collection of Gothic horror stories tied together around a central premise that I, at least, did not see coming at all. It's hard to describe it without giving away the plot but as always, Reynolds has something big in his bag and will wait until the very end to reveal it.
Andor
I have seen earnest responses to Andor complaining about the lack of lightsabers and force lightning and I just want to firmly grasp those people by the upper arms and shake them very firmly until whatever brainworms they have fall out of their ears. I know that a twelve-hour series about the doldrums of a revolution against fascism is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, and I’d never blame anyone for skipping it, but I’m glad to see that Lucasfilm has some shred of inspiration left for their treatments of Star Wars.
After The Rise of Skywalker and Obi-Wan and Boba Fett (aka One Big Fart Of A Show (gottem)), I was pretty well resigned to nothing but blaster fights and Skywalkers dueling with Vaders for the next 20 years of Disney oversight of the franchise, but Andor has to give everyone some hope that the corporate overlords are still willing to sign off on stuff that might be a bit daring or unusual to spend 100 million dollars on. I’m sure these kinds of tales were a natural fit in the Extended Universe, but to see something like this brought to life on screen was a special treat and I look forward to watching the whole thing again.
I threw in Luthen's speech up there because it's awesome but it also wound up being one of the weirder moments of the show for me: like there's no way this dude, at this time, would be able to come up with all of this off the cuff. It's showy in a way that I really appreciate though!
Kim Stanley Robinson: The High Sierra: A Love Story
Every year brings a new Kim Stanley Robinson and it’s usually a banner day in my household. The High Sierras is not a novel, though; it’s more of a history/memoir of the titular mountain range in California, but the book itself is a lovely full-color collection of maps and photos and KSR’s always-mesmerizing prose.
I also re-read Pacific Edge which is one of my favorite novels and which I highly recommend for pretty much everyone.
Prey
Speaking of franchise revivals, Prey was a lovely reintroduction to the Predator universe, anchored by a wonderful lead performance by Amber Midthunder. Some of the twists are goofy and I never quite bought the whole “I tied an axe to a rope and this is an entirely new thing!” development in the middle, but I thought it was one of the best movies in the entire franchise. Not that there have been a lot of them! I rewatched Predator 2 this year as well and HOO BOY that’s a stinker.
God of War: Ragnarok
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I confess that I am not too far into this, maybe 15 or 20 hours, but it’s all I wanted in a followup to one of the best games of the 2010s. My main issues here are the complexity of the battle systems: I mean, there's no way that anyone can keep the moveset for multiple weapons and a bunch of companions straight, right? I wind up just kind of mashing buttons most of the time and it's worked so far. I'm also mildly tilted at the more on-rails approach to moving through the world (at least in the early sections), but apart from that, it seems to be another masterclass in exploration and storytelling.
Looking forward to get through the rest of it (have to wait for my wife to be able to watch!).
Top Gun Maverick
This is not the pinnacle of filmmaking, but it just might be the most Hollywood movie in the last decade or so, especially since “Hollywood movie” has become more synonymous with “let’s make a movie about how Wonderful Cinema and/or The Creation of A Film is and maybe get some Oscar nominations.” (There are at least three of these fuckers this season!)
I really wish I had made the trip out to see this in IMAX because it’s goddamn great. The Americans among the readers of this will have seen this already - it is mandatory - but I recommend it to everyone else as well. It’s one long advertisement for manned fighter jets when it’s clear that those days are on the wane (why couldn’t they have done the final mission with a bunch of cheap drones?). The scene on the beach with Jennifer Connelly before the final missionwas such a weirdly perfect piece of filmmaking: just tugging at your heartstrings in the most manipulative way possible but also it just fucking works. Great movie and I kind of want to get a fancy Blu-Ray player just to watch it in the highest resolution possible.
I’m just gonna throw this author’s name here because I feel like I’ve read maybe five or six books of his this year and there are still dozens more in the bibliography to get to. I really don’t know how he manages to be so prolific but also so generally good in a variety of genres (well, mostly fantasy and sci-fi). He’d have made his name just by the Children of Time and Final Architecture series (both of which are still ongoing), but I also read Cage of Souls and The Guns of Dawn this year and am mid-way through Dogs of War and City of Lost Chances and there’s still a ten-novel fantasy series that I started and haven’t gotten far in…Judging by Amazon, he released four full novels this year and a very long novella (Ogres, which is probably the weakest book of his that I’ve read).
I can barely keep up but I generally like pretty much everything he puts out (Children of Time is a fine starting point if you want to jump off somewhere).
That's about all I got! I'm sure I forgot a bunch of stuff that I liked! Maybe check my blog in January if I did!
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