Welcome to 2018, everyone! Maybe this year won't suck quite as bad! I feel like we could probably use that statement for every year from now on as the new replacement for "Happy New Year". At least we can make the best of January with this weekend's Awesome Games Done Quick event, which always starts the year on a positive and charitable note, and spend the quiet Winter months checking out some of the prior year's best games now that all the GOTY results are in.

January's also a time for resolutions. I don't make those often, because I rarely keep them, but I have two this year that I plan to fold into my blogging to some extent. They relate to the fact that, while I spent a lot of free time gaming last year, I let my other passions of TV and movies fall to the wayside a little. 2017 was a good year for both those media too, even if the proliferation of quality video games did ultimately overshadow them, and there's a lot I still need to catch up on. The Twin Peaks reboot, for one, and the new seasons of Stranger Things, Mr. Robot, Black Mirror and Star Wars: Rebels. There's also a huge amount of great TV I've yet to even start into as well, including a few anime series people have been recommending in the blogging community here (shout-outs to @zombiepie, @arbitrarywater, Hamst3r and @dochaus for their rundowns). Likewise, I still need to see Logan, Arrival, Baby Driver, Kubo and the Two Strings, Mary and the Witch's Flower, Your Name, Coco, Valerian and The City of a Thousand Planets, The Nice Guys and a bunch of other 2016-17 movies. My perfectly reasonable New Year's resolutions, then, are to watch at least one new movie every week and a new season of TV every fortnight. Like the Indie Game of the Week, it's really just an excuse to do more of what I already enjoy; hardly the same as quitting booze or doing more volunteer work. I suppose that's what's going to make them easier to hold on to.

Speaking of using my time wisely, how about a quick glance at all the blogging I didn't do this week?

• I wasn't ready to launch into my new replacement feature for the now concluded The Top Shelf on Tuesday the 2nd of January, for what I hope are obvious reasons, so the only regularly scheduled blog feature this time was the triumphant return of Indie Game of the Week. With its new season on the way, the fifty-first entry concerns Telltale Games's fantasy noir serial The Wolf Among Us, on which I'll have plenty more to say in its sub-section below. If, like me, it's taken you a very long time to get around to it, I recommend just reading the non-spoilery IGotW appraisal and skipping the in-depth stuff further down the page.
• That was the only blog, but I have been busy making some lists this week too. The first is the obligatory "List of Shame 2018" list, which is once again half backlog items and half highly-rated 2017 games I'll be looking to sweep up in sales/price drops and try out in the following year. The second is my "GOTY 2016 (Adjusted)" list, which updates last year's GOTY top ten to include all the 2016 games I caught up with in the subsequent twelve months. I'm planning to update my GOTY 2014 (Adjusted) and GOTY 2015 (Adjusted) lists for 2017 too, but all in good time.

Addenda

In addition to games I played that week, I'm also going to start adding a paragraph or two for the movies and TV I've been consuming, as per my above commitment to watching more of both this year. It's a form of self-encouragement to keep my resolutions, though I recognize that it will make these Summaries even longer. I'll have to consider how best to slim these down in the coming weeks...

Star Wars: Episode VIII: The Last Jedi

(I swear, there's no story spoilers here.)

In retrospect, I was incredibly fortunate to not have this movie spoiled after procrastinating about watching it for two weeks. Without getting into plot details, I feel mostly the same way about The Last Jedi that I do about The Force Awakens: the Star Wars universe still feels like this oddly anodyne and bathetically sincere place, where it's garnered so much respect and a really persnickety fanbase that no-one wants to offend that every director since Lucas has played it completely safe. It's why it's still a shame that Lord and Miller (of Clone High and The Lego Movie fame) couldn't make the goofy young Han Solo movie they wanted, and Disney left it to Ron Howard to strip of any personality. The Last Jedi's a little more iconoclastic than The Force Awakens, at least, since it doesn't feel like a shot-for-shot recreation of an earlier movie in the franchise, but it's still short on moments of earned levity, big on totally earnest messages about oppression and redemption and the meaning of heroism and learning from past failures.

That latter theme actually makes this movie an interesting take on the typical "dark middle chapter" of these trilogies: it's less to do with everything going wrong for the heroes because the suddenly competent bad guys need to prove how scary they are, but more to do with the fact that the heroes themselves keep messing up and are learning to become better people from those experiences. It's like if the pivotal thing to take away from The Empire Strikes Back was that Han was an idiot for trusting Lando explicitly or Luke was an idiot for going after Vader before his training was complete - we tend to think of TESB as being the movie where the Empire gets their shit together and starts getting the drop on the heroes, largely because it's right there in the movie's subtitle, but it's mostly the heroes' own screw-ups that puts them in that dire situation leading into the third movie.

All the same, the movie has a lot of baggage, a lot of unnecessary characters (mostly Benicio del Toro's morally gray nothing of a hacker character; Kelly Marie Tran's Rose Tico and Laura Dern's Admiral Holdo were both fine, even if I liked one more the further into the movie I got and the other less), some odd decisions concerning the older cast, and it drags quite a bit during its side-stories. Not this incredible new benchmark for the franchiser, but not the harbinger of doom some fans are making it out to be, and probably slightly better made than The Force Awakens overall. I'm guessing anyone reading this has already made up their mind whether or not they want (if not need) to see the new Star Wars, but if you're generally apathetic about the franchise or have been avoiding it since The Phantom Menace you could probably safely maintain that pattern.

Super Mario Odyssey

I could probably stretch out the effusive praise I have for the new Mario game for several thousand words, making this particular entry of the Saturday Summaries untenable in its verbosity, but I'm not sure I need to. Super Mario Odyssey is my perfect 3D Mario game - one that perfectly recreates the feeling of discovery and accomplishment that the original Super Mario 64 did, as well as magically recreating the sense of wonder and surprise that game regularly doled out whenever you uncovered a new secret or were tasked with completing a challenge you'd never seen before. The persistent hunt for new collectibles from every nook and cranny from every one of its enormous open stages was like catnip to me; I've never had this much fun with a collectathon platformer, and if nothing else it's an indication that the biggest issue with Donkey Kong 64 wasn't that it had too much junk to collect, but so little variation in how you go about collecting them. By the time I finished Super Mario Odyssey I had over 900 Power Moons - an insane number of collectibles - but somehow the game never lost its spark or creative ingenuity for the entire time it took to accumulate them all.

There's other elements I could commend: the music's fantastic; the visuals are sharp and has a distinctive style for each of its worlds; there's a brilliant use for the Switch's built-in screenshot function as you take snaps of treasure hunt clues to find later; there's a post-game achievement system that - naturally enough - rewards moons for certain milestones; New Donk City is one of the best 3D Mario maps I've ever seen, and not just because of how surreal it is to run and jump around regular-looking people and vehicles; the capture mechanic offers a huge array of puzzles and challenges to overcome as well as silly jokes like waddling around as a quivering mass of meat or a boulder; the almost demoralizing way the game regularly invents mechanics that could be used to power an entire Indie game but are just employed here for a single bonus room or two; how Mario's many costumes were a cosmetic treat filled with nostalgic references; the game went all-in on its occasional 2D sections even recreating the above costumes for the classic 8-bit Super Mario Bros. era Mario sprite; the method in which the game expands its own content almost twofold after the conclusion of the story for all those not ready to put the game down quite yet; that the game painstakingly recreates all of Mario's many techniques from Super Mario 64 and then adds even more abilities like a ground-pound jump and a fast roll (take that, Sonic), not to mention the various new moves Cappy affords you; and really just the sheer level of detail lovingly put into every iota of the game. There's a lot here, and I feel I owe it to readers to list them out if I'm going to be making hyperbolic statements like "best 3D Mario ever", but it's really all part of a grand tapestry that is the design geniuses at Nintendo getting absolutely everything right with this game. From what I heard, 2017 was that kind of year for them.

Every time the Mario series sets a new bar - whether that's Bros. 3's map system, World's secret exits, 64's new 3D playgrounds, Sunshine's jetpacking and fluid mechanics, or Galaxy's shaky relationship with gravity - it's impossible to imagine how they could top it, and yet they continue to do so. I really hope this means a return to the endlessly inventive collectathon Mario format, and that the Switch continues to see games of this calibre for the next half decade at least. Next up: Let's see if this new Zelda feels just as vital to the evolution of that franchise too...

The Wolf Among Us

This will be spoiler-central, since I'll be getting into plot details and the choices I made. If you're still looking for a non-spoilery take on The Wolf Among Us some four years after its release, check out the Indie Game of the Week link above.

That'll do it for this week that was. I hope to roll out the new blog feature next week as well as maintain this little side-line of new TV shows and movies to talk about. Been a while since I flexed my critic muscles for those particular media, and I hope it makes for some edifying reading. Until next time, peeps.