I've been mulling over whether or not to write an awards blog this year, and the conclusion I keep coming to is that there's nothing I could write that hasn't been said about numerous games before, particularly by great bloggers on this very website. I would, however, like to put my own little stamp on what has to be one of the bigger years in gaming. I'm not sure what this blog will be about specifically. I want to ramble and think aloud, so bear with me if I'm a bit flighty throughout this one.

2014 left me exhausted and not a little disgusted by humanity. It was a hard fucking year to be a mod on Giant Bomb, but it was also a hard year personally for reasons I have no interest in going into here. When we left 2014, The Incident That Shall Not Be Named left me bitter and not a little salty. People can be dicks, let's put it that way. I came into 2015 determined to have a better year - in fact, that was my secret New Year's resolution, to come out of 2015 feeling better emotionally and physically than I did entering it.

You know what? I actually succeeded for once. Thanks to a diagnosis in January-ish of ankylosing spondylitis, I know now what was causing a lot of physical discomfort and outright pain for me. And thanks to twice-a-month treatments, I feel physically better than I have in years. I'm more energetic. I've actually lost some weight - only about ten pounds or so, but still, it's a start. I've gained quite a bit of muscle mass and I find myself enjoying lifting my dumbbells on a semi-regular basis. I'm up to walking about half a mile every day, which is half a mile more than I was walking at the beginning of the year.

Normally, I'd be reluctant to share personal details of my life like that here, but I think it's exactly the sort of thing I should be talking about. Feeling down? Just try doing a couple of little things every day to make yourself feel better about you. Screw what anyone else thinks. Don't do this for someone you care for, don't do it because it's trendy, do it because you want to wake up tomorrow with just a little bit more of a smile on your face. I really recommend the walking part in particular. Getting out in the summer and walking, even if it was just a quarter of a mile at the start, really gave me time to get out, say hi to people, get some sunshine and some air, and help myself feel better as I pushed myself little by little to walk more and more.

And in the winter, improvise. If you're like me and living in the firigd ass end of nowhere, walking outside might not be an option. I've been keeping myself entertained by bumping up my dog's playtime, and making it a priority. We play fetch until he gets exhausted, then I sit and work out with my dumbbells for about fifteen to twenty minutes. At first, this was a little hard to do. Prioritizing it over playing a game or watching TV is still something I struggle with, but it's becoming easier and easier with every passing day.

And I can't stress enough how much cooking for one's own self makes all the difference in the world. I'm a bad cook, but I've got a handful of recipes I really like and I try to make those frequently as a supplement to the usual crap food I keep around the house. Taking the time to make chicken and a rice side makes me feel much more sated and happy at the end of a day rather than just nuking a frozen whatever and calling it quits. I've also been eating tons more fruits and vegetables as opposed to snack foods. It's hard to break from them, and I'm still not entirely successful, but I've made progress.

So yeah... that's my personal goal again for 2016. Feel better. It's simple, but it works.

Outside of games, entertainment wise, I can't recall a single book from 2015 I read. I mean, I read plenty in the year, just nothing from the year itself. I've got Jenny Lawson and David Wong's in the pipeline, but there just wasn't much else that really interested me this year. I spend a good portion of the year having to read very slowly, since my glasses were crapping out on me and replacing them isn't as easy as going to an ophthalmologist. New glasses for me run upwards of $500. I did get some reading done, just not as much as I'd like. I kept it mostly to some personal not-so-guilty pleasures like early John Sandford. On a recommendation from Matt Rorie from either a blog or some conversation or another, I also checked out Ancillary Justice and the first in the Dagger and Coin series. Both were solid recommendations. If you have anything fun you've read this year, please feel free to drop a comment below and we'll talk books until the cows come home to roost.

TV-wise, I've had some really fun moments this year with X-Files, Z Nation, Dark Matter, and some British shows like Broadchurch and Black Mirror. I think Black Mirror takes the cake for the best overall quality show I watched this year. It's a really great, dark variant on the old Twilight Zone shows, with more of a nod towards technology and modern fears. It is superbly acted, and each episode is pretty terrific. I'm also fond of Jessica Jones and Daredevil, though I think the second seasons of both should deliver more on the promises of what those characters can be when they're not embroiled in origin story filler.

Z Nation and Dark Matter are my b-show shlock favorites from this year. Z Nation is dumb, silly, poorly acted, poorly directed, and has zombies on Viagra. I cannot stress that enough - zombies on fucking Viagra. Dark Matter is a poor man's Firefly, but unlike that show, it wasn't canceled and there aren't a billion twerpy little shits crying about it a decade later. Therefore, it wins. Seriously, Serenity fans, stay the fuck away from my Dark Matter. Don't ruin this for me. Go watch Star Wars or something I don't really care about. It's basically about a ship crewed by pirate-types who've lost their memories and try to band together despite their violent, untrustworthy tendencies. It has the television budget equivalent of a Banquet dinner, except in this case, you get home, unwrap the dinner, and realize you've bought solid gold covered in terrible gravy. Except that the gold in this case is Canadian and probably actually silver or maybe brass and... you know what? Just go watch it. Unless you're a Firefly fan, in which case go put back on your brown coat and cry in the corner of your shower for another decade. Let. It. Go. Firefly is dead. You hear me? Dead.

Movie-wise, I've seen nothing at all significant from this year. I watched some good stuff, like Kingsman, but none of it really stands out in my mind. Maybe 500 MPH Storm, with Casper Van Diem. I dunno. That was all right.

So let's talk games.

2015 was full of 'em, am I right? I've never had a GOTY list as big as this year's. There were honestly twelve or thirteen good candidates for my list, and a couple of games I saw that I knew would probably make it on there had I time to play or see more of them. Of particular note in that regard are Splatoon and Xenoblade Chronicles X. Xenoblade looks like a world I really want to sink my teeth into, just not on a damn Wii U, because screw that console. It leaves me really curious what the NX will be, but I've talked about that at length elsewhere. Suffice it to say I think Nintendo will be the most interesting game maker to watch this coming year.

I continue to be happy with my PS4 purchase. Games like Forza and Halo make me real curious about what Xbone prices will do this coming year, but I might wait to see if the Xnext winds up having backwards compatibility and just go for that. As it stands, I'm perfectly fine with one modern console. With all the titles hitting PSn every week and better sales this generation, I have lots to play and little reason to diversify my systems.

And while a gaming PC is always enticing, seeing the difficult font sizes on a beast of a rig owned by @upperdecker leaves me perfectly content with being a console guy. For now. That doesn't mean I'm not going to drop some money in the bank for an eventual PC purchase, but I'm totally fine with that being a few years down the line. And for those of you who are chomping at the bit to say, "Build your own," there's taxi money on the night stand. Don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out. Some people don't want to build PCs. I'm very much one of them. Screw that.

In terms of individual games, I've listed my highlights in my Top Whatever list, but my favorite two were Tales from the Borderlands and Witcher 3. I had a few let-downs this year, most notably Arkham Knight, which I thought was a gasoline-soaked jacuzzi full of piss and fire. That game sucked the life out of me and I wound up actively hating it more than any other title this year - and this is a year in which I played a godawful Quest for Glory clone with rampant gay and sexist jokes. It was that bad. Damn, I hate Arkham Knight and I feel Batmanned out, utterly and completely. "Let's take great gameplay and crap all over it with forced driving sequences and a shitty Pac-Man knockoff... and then we'll make people run stupid obstacle courses and have them fight more tanks - in the fog!" And they all clapped each other on the backs and declared it to be the finest video game ideas ever in the history of mankind.

Stop making shitty game design decisions and sticking to them. Stop it. You can change your game. We'll allow you the time. Just make something good and ask yourself, "Is this fun?" If the answer's no, then chuck the idea out the window into your dumpster of bad game babies.

Overall though, what a year for games. Yeah, modern consoles are getting lots of ports and what not, but the quality of the selection on these consoles is undeniably good. I've had more satisfactory shoot-and-loot experiences this year than in any year before hand. There was a solid month of weekly RPG releases on the PS4 (see: October). If there's a genre out there you want to play, some game company or another has you covered on an indie front. Games have never been more diverse and awesome as they have been this year. It's the trend I want to see continue the most going forward.

I don't know. I'm content in a way I wasn't at the end of 2014, both personally and game-wise. I hope this finds all of you either feeling the same way or working towards it. Let's have fun and be cool duders this coming year.