Best O' 2015

2015 was a huge year for me. I got a new job at Phil Collins Magazine, met a lot of cool new people, and moved to a New York City. But as all that was going on, I still had time to consume, and even create, some new media. Here are the best.

Best Video Game that Almost Made My Eyes Bleed- StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void

Some other cool games- Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Super Mario Maker, Splatoon, Her Story

Best Movie that Almost Made My Eyes Water- Creed


Some other cool movies- Mad Max: Fury Road, The Big Short, Anomalisa, Star Wars: The Force Awakens (the best Daniel Craig film of 2015)

Best Parody of the Best TV Show Ending of 2015- Don Draper Invents Pizza Bagels



Best Wholly Legitimate Phrase of 2015- Famous Star Wars Franchise Character Emperor Sheev Palpatine

Best Things I Wrote in 2015-

The Cards Against Humanity Tabletop Deathmatch Interviews

Valve’s Movie Brats: Inside the Source Filmmaker Community

Heroes of the Storm Review (or Why MOBAs are Bad and You Should Feel Bad)

Games to Go (Video Reviews of Cool Mobile Games)



Of Art and Oven Mitts: The Death and Life of Followers (a Postmortem on the Tortured Production of My Silly Student Short Film)

Four Years of 148Apps, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love iOS Games


Best Time I Spit On Camera

Followers, Finally

I'll have more in-depth thoughts to share on this soon enough, because who wouldn't after spending nearly four years on a creative project, but for now, please watch, share, and enjoy my silly short film "Followers."

The Lego Movie's secret gaming roots

When The Lego Movie came out last year I was curious if the creators had been influenced by the similarly wacky storytelling of the Lego video games. So I did some investigating. What did I find? Read this feature on Geek.com, a site I've been recently writing for, to find out!

http://www.geek.com/games/the-lego-movies-secret-gaming-roots-1615688/

Best O' 2014

Obligatory Blog. Obligatory Awards.

Top 5 Games of 2014

5. Mario Kart 8

It’s the most beautiful Wii U game, it’s the best playing Mario Kart to date, the DLC is fantastic, and it dominated my free time towards the end of my college career. Too bad they ruined battle mode.

4. Transistor

I didn’t love Bastion as much as everyone else did. It was pretty and sounded nice but the style was incoherent and the fighting was dull. Transistor took everything good about that game and fixed all the flaws with a brilliant, creative combat system and haunting, ruined, yet still classy cyber world.

3. Bayonetta 2

Above all else, I am a fan of ridiculousness, and there was no other game this year that featured more, better ridiculousness than the continuing adventures of gaming’s favorite sexy librarian dominatrix bullet hair witch in Bayonetta 2.

2. Threes!

You can read my thoughts on why this is the best mobile game of the year over on 148Apps.

1. Super Smash Bros. for Wii U

Still hate the name, but Super Smash Bros. for Wii U is the best entry in my favorite series so how could it not top my list, even if its 3DS counterpart doesn’t feel entirely necessary.



More after the break.

Best O' 2013

Another year over, another collection of media to judge…

So I Saw Spring Breakers...

Spring Breakers is a movie I think everyone should see, and not just because it’s perfectly timed for spring break season. Whether your reaction to its incomprehensible art-house sleaze is positive or negative, it’s worth having an opinion of just the same. You may not get it or if you do you still may be put off by it. However, I loved it and that’s because it deals with so many of my own personal cinematic fixations. It’s almost as if Harmony Korine made it for me.

Stuff I Did This Week 3/15/2013

Oscar Recap

Grow Dammit! Review

Astro Shark HD Review



James Franco is the new Nic Cage

Also it's finals/Spring Break/Easter time so no updates for a bit.

Mind Dump 8-bit

Back from the dead!

While learning about the PS4 was great and everything the real lesson of that press conference was that the police aren’t there to protect us.

I’m constantly thinking about games and watching the Oscars last night got me thinking about art too. While increasingly cinematic games like Assassin’s Creed, Deus Ex, and even Warcraft seem like easy targets for film adaptations, my definition of an art game is still a game where the narrative of the interactivity is what matters.

Examples include: Frog Fractions, Curiosity, the Kanye West Twitter game, the upcoming Team Meat joint Mew-Genics and, of course, No-Apps The Game.

What if they made a summer camp where the kids could learn about game writing? That’d be weird.

Fire Emblem Awakening is pretty great.

My Upcoming Weekend

The Oscars

If anybody wants to know what I thought about Django Unchained

Great soundtrack.

Great dialogue.

Like Inglourious Basterds it's a revenge fantasy but a great one.

It's very violent but honesty it could have been worse. Maybe I just really wanted to see white people get torn apart by whips.

Its story structure is a little meandering but it's so entertaining who cares?

It's probably the best movie I've seen this year.

As for the heavier stuff...

They say the N word a lot but come on, it's 1850s Mississippi. If you can handle "The Boondocks" you can handle this. Not everyone can though.

As for the other potential racial/sociological issues, there's a serious discussion to be had about how problematic they may be. Honestly though, it's provocative quality is appreciated and its heart is in the right place.

Plus it's just awesome.

Stuff O' 2012

2012 is almost over. Here's some stuff about it I liked.

Game O' 2012- Frog Fractions. Just play it. I hate this stupid spoilerphobic media culture we live in but to say literally anything about Frog Fractions besides "you should play it" would ruin it.

http://twinbeardstudios.com/frog-fractions

Movie O' 2012- TBD. I just haven't seen enough stuff to make this decision. Lincoln, Argo, Skyfall, The Dark Knight Rises, Looper, The Master, all great movies but with stuff like Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty still out there unseen I feel my opinion isn't fully informed yet.

Jam O' 2012- Skyfall Instrumental. It's a great song no matter what but the instrumental is perfect writing music for a top secret project I'm working on that may never actually turn into anything.

Show O' 2012- "Veep." Between this, In the Loop, and "The Thick of It," Armando Iannucci has proven that anything he makes about politics, no matter what country or position is targeted, will be brilliant and hilarious.

Book O' 2012- Books?




Pam Grier

Stuff I Did This Week 11/2/2012

Armed Beasts Review

LINGsCARS Review

New Star Wars? Why the Hell Not

Cheeseless and Chastised 

Bond Bonus Bit: Baby you’re the Best

Adele’s “Skyfall” theme song is now available and it’s awesome and everyone should listen to it.


Plus, it’s as good a reason as any for me to name my other favorite James Bond songs, in no particular order.

In Which I Come to Terms with Comic Book Movies

I don’t read comics. I sort of know a lot about them but trying to maintain decades’ worth of inter-connected fictions has created worlds as impenetrable as they are ridiculous. I used to watch a lot of comic book cartoons though and I still do watch a lot of comic book movies. They give the interesting characters and ideas a more comprehensible place to shine. However, now that this summer’s Avengers, Spider-Man, Batman triumvirate has come and gone, I find myself far less excited for the future of the genre.

I’m Pretty Excited About Anchorman 2

That title is an understatement. While I’m usually not one to get irrationally excited for a movie, if only because that inevitably leads to disappointment and stupid fanboy butthurt, I’m really, really, really excited about Anchorman 2’s official existence. I went into the first Anchorman with no expectations at a very impressionable point in my life. Therefore, so much of who I am now is a result of that movie. Everything from my love of nonsense humor to my love of journalism to even my love of movies can be directly traced back to that 2004 classic. It has even allowed me to be totally okay with the fact that Will Ferrell plays the same character in mostly everything he does. Endlessly quotable and funny as hell, Anchorman has consistently been my favorite movie of all time.

So how do you top that? I actually don’t think it’ll be that hard. Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay have pretty much spent the last eight years making sequels to Anchorman just with different premises. Go watch Talladega Nights, Step Brothers and The Other Guys and try to tell me I’m wrong. The thing is though, those movies are all great. As long as Anchorman 2 is at least as funny as they are but with jazz flute playing and retarded weathermen it should be just fine.

I’m Jordan Minor?

The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard is pretty good too.

Two Horses

Bonjour, Diamond Jims!

Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie is in theaters now. It’s been out on demand for a while now and I’ve already seen it twice. However, all of you out there reading this should see it on the big screen with Schlaaang sound just as it was intended. Also, you probably shouldn’t see it. Reviews of this movie are essentially useless as literally everyone already knows whether or not they like Tim and Eric. If you don’t then that’s perfectly understandable. If you do though, you probably already saw it. If you still need convincing though, know that it’s got moments you’d expect like this...



But the real reason to see it is this song right here...


Questions?


#shrim

The osCars

Who needs structure (or proofreading)? Here are my random Oscar thoughts.

Turns out last year's show wasn't better just because James Franco's irony is funnier than Billy Crystal's everything. No, last year just featured way more interesting movies. There was Inception, Social Network, Black Swan, 127 Hours, Toy Story 3 and pretty much everything but The King's Speech, which by the way wasn't bad but just too safe. Out of this year's bunch I only really got into Moneyball and Midnight in Paris. I saw Tree of Life but don't have enough time to get into here (long story short it's very pretty but either too crazy or not crazy enough and Brad Pitt is really good in it too.) The Help and The Artist are meh for their own reasons and unfortunately I did not have the chance to see the remaining nominees.

So I Saw The Artist...

Time for another series of observations in a post that barely qualifies as a review.

While my movie of last year may have been Drive, it seems like the academy's will be The Artist. After seeing it that's understandable, and luckily it's not bad.

Movie O' 2011: Drive

I don't buy many physical copies of movies these days because why would I. However, after seeing Drive for the second time a few weeks I ago realized that I wanted to own it and at that moment I realized it was my top movie of last year.

So I Saw the Muppets

(The Toy Story short in the beginning of this is worth it just for the puns alone like Tae Kwon Doe, a fighting female deer)

This will be even less of a review than my other "sort of reviews."

Weirdly enough, the first time I remember seeing The Muppets they weren't in their original puppet forms. Instead, I grew up loving the "Muppet Babies" cartoon of all things. Eventually though I learned to love Kermit and company in their original felt forms.

I think part of the appeal of The Muppets, and puppets in general, is that they are like cartoons that actually exist. Kermit is a talking frog who can light a real match. That's that crazy Jim Henson, hippie social change stuff right there.