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  • 2023 In Review: Nick’s Top Video Games, Media, Tabletop, and Even LEGO

    2023 In Review: Nick’s Top Video Games, Media, Tabletop, and Even LEGO

    No, that year is not a typo.

    So… I wrote this whole thing about a year ago and never got around to posting it. Here we are, at the end of 2024 and I’m working on my current year and so little feels like it hasn’t changed. So my 2024 review makes sense, I’m going to just post this and go from there. Below is the unedited post that I’d more or less wrapped up back in February. Look for this year’s “year in review stuff” soon, likely on New Year’s Eve. But who knows. I’m scheduling this to post at the start of December and a lot can go seriously wrong between now and then.

    Also, it’s just sad how much of this is the same, except worse.

    2023 can * bleep * right off. I don’t think that’s honestly a controversial opinion. Sure, 2020 gave us a Pandemic, and 2021 gave us it’s terrible sequel year. 2022 was the year where things looked like they were improving a little bit, but not really, while 2023 is where everything started to come apart at the seems. Not sure about you, but it’s the year where all the inflation caused by unchecked corporate greed, legislative inaction, and decades of tax breaks that benefit the .01% have made everything vastly more expensive than it has to be.

    Not gonna lie, this last year was absolutely brutal for me. I have scaled back my posting over the years just because… you know, life and what not, but this year there are a few more things pushing that. (Not at all) fun fact… I learned this year that long-term general anxiety can develop into full-on depression. You can probably guess how I learned that. So here we are, in mid-February, and I’m finally getting around to writing about last year.

    There’s a whole bunch of talk of “the economy” being good, except that honestly doesn’t feel true for the middle class (where I’m firmly seated). Where I live in Texas, houses went from “scrimp and save” to “you’re never gonna get one of these.” Groceries bills have more or less doubled, because that’s a spot where inflation has hit the hardest. So many companies that I like(d) or have purchased from have gone from “companies are not your friend” to “actively trying to destroy the world.” Oh, and obviously… Texas.

    So a lot of 2023 was spent treading water and spinning plates, desperately trying to keep them up… and by the end of the year, I’d mostly failed at that in the end. I won’t dump a whole lot here, that’s for when I talk to my therapist (seriously, y’all, therapy can help – it’s not a cure, but it helps)… more just saying why this list is what it is. There were also fun things like the vicious cycle of weight loss and gaining a lot of it back, some skin cancer and surgery to remove it (thankfully all gone), money troubles because of unexpected expenses, and working in technology when unchecked greed and corporations start laying of thousands for fun.

    It wasn’t all bad things, though, there were some legit fun things. I did more stuff this year in my core hobbies, and even may have purchased a toy or two for myself. Or one very expensive toy that 3D prints toys.

    LEGO Sets

    Wait, what? Since when do I get LEGO sets? True fact, I have a bunch of sets around that I need to take pictures of for reviews. Most didn’t come out this year, and my paralysis at getting things done has made some of them kind of pointless, since the sets are no longer available.

    LEGO Icons Atari 2600

    This is one of those reviews that I need to get done, because this might have become one of my favorite sets of all time now*. Which… is honestly saying something. The Atari has a weird place in my life… I never had one, but had a cousin that did. I was supposed to get one for a Christmas back in the early 80s, but my dick of a father decided to return it after I found the poorly hidden gift since it was “no longer a surprise.” Which, you know, is just a great thing to do to a five year old. Funny what memories you can remember despite it being several decades ago. Can’t remember what I did six months ago, can remember that as one of my earliest memories.

    While the Nintendo was a more formative part of my childhood, the Atari is what defined it early. I remember that ugly 2600 box and being blow away by the massive pixels of the machine and playing games with my cousin.

    More than that, though, as a LEGO set, this was simply a joy to build in a way that the Nintendo Entertainment System just… wasn’t. I still need to get the review done, but there’s so much to this set, so many little wonderful things, that are just fantastic. While I rated the NES highly, and love the set… the biggest knock on it was that it was more about the engineering than getting the little bits and touches. Fixed buttons, a cartridge insert that barely worked, and one Easter Egg that you wouldn’t ever see unless you knew it was there.

    This set, by contrast, is just dripping with those little touches and Easter Eggs. This set is designed as a celebration of the the set, rather than an engineering marvel of being able to turn a screen. There’s still some of that, with “working” switches and power buttons, but first and foremost, it’s about just being a beautiful celebration of when Atari wasn’t a shell of a company that just hawked its brand.

    This is a review i need to finish before the set gets retired, but since Icons stuff seems to hang around a lot longer than normal sets, it’ll likely stick around for some time.

    *For the record, I’d say my top five sets of all time are (in no particular order):

    Of course, if I had to build this list a week from now, it’d probably be full of different things. But those are sets that I have that get rebuilt and displayed occasionally, and I won’t ever get rid of.

    The Worst of LEGO

    It was very much a mixed bag for me in this little dabbling of LEGO, because honestly, most of them were just… not all that great? Either the set or the experience, or both. Most Star Wars and Marvel sets feel like “let’s throw this together and hit a price point” rather than builds that feel thought out and loved. The ones that are, like things in the UCS line, command prices that are just absurd and I wish no one would purchase at this point. The price escalation of LEGO overall should have killed it three or four times over, but they’ve strangled out so many other things, or hidden in a marketplace where people (i.e. adult nerds) have just started to accept forever escalating prices with less and less value.

    Marvel Collectable Minifigures Series 2

    This is another article that I never finished, but if you’re on our Discord, you know why I have a particular grudge against the CMF lines at this point. I stopped collecting them years ago, before i dropped other LEGO sets, mostly because the system was just… gross. It’s gatcha products, and they tie up too many interesting things

    Okay, so, I had a whole article that I never got around to finishing, about how bad my experience was. Spoiler for that article… but I bought 20 figures at a Target around me and got… four different minifigs in them. One of them was unique, the rest were repeats of just three figures. Clearly, it had been picked over or something like that, but they had just been put out on the cashwrap area when I got them.

    When these came out, there was a whole stream of articles for people who were buying up small portable scales to go and weigh the different boxes to figure out what’s inside, and clearly, I got the end result of that. I’ll go into this more in the article, but let me say this… if you’re an AFOL (or more likely a scalper) who does something like this – f*** you. Just, f*** you. You and the other “bag fondlers” that go through an entire store selection to strip out figures and leave the leftovers are a blight, and you’re no better than the people who buy up every set to sell on the aftermarket or parting them out so no one else can get them. In fact, people who go and strip out the minifigs are probably worse.

    I’m and adult and was buying these for myself, but I can easily imagine a parent getting a few figures for their kid while checking out. When said kid opens three of them and gets the same figure, likely someone they don’t even know… that kid’s day is kind of ruined and they’re never going to get another figure like this again. If I bought these for my kids and saw this, there’d be an outright “no, those things are a ripoff” line ready every time I saw a LEGO polybag.

    That there were honest discussions about bringing a scale and measuring these to find out what was inside, and that so few stepped back and asked themselves “wait a sec” is an indictment of that whole flavor of AFOL and the product in general.

    For my part, I completed my set after collaborating with someone in our Discord to get the ones I was missing after another trip to a different Target with fairly similar results. But those were the last CMF figures I will ever buy.

    Movies and Streaming

    Unlike last year, where I didn’t actually watch any new movies… I watched at three four* new movies this year. Okay, so, movies still aren’t really by thing to me anymore… most of my time is spent rewatching the old things I’ve always liked or just watching streaming shows or YouTube.

    *I forgot that I also saw Spider-Verse, but how about I don’t go into the fact that it was 90% awesome and 10% worst thing I watched all year.

    Super Mario Bros. 

    This was always going to be a movie that my family was going to see. My son loves Mario, and has loved him for a few years – though his favorite character from the series is Princess Peach, and his favorite Hot Wheel Mario Kart is Bowser. He was dressed as Mario for Halloween back in 2022 (he went as a Pokemon trainer this year)… owns a Cappy, and asked for a Mario-themed birthday party. So yeah, we were always going to watch it.

    It was surprisingly enjoyable… not saying that it’s going to win an Oscar or any real awards unless the Kid’s Choice Awards are still a thing (or a Grammy, cause, you know, Peaches).

    Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

    This is the first of three times that D&D is going to show up on this list, so I’ll save the “oh my god, Hasbro, you suck” for a later section. But as a thing, D&D was a sandwich wrapped in a layer of thin crap, with a terrible start and a terrible end to the year with some wonderful things in the middle.

    The D&D movie, Honor Among Thieves, was one of those things that should have just been awful. D&D as a whole hasn’t exactly translated well to… anything other than video games, really. The last D&D movie was… just god awful, and followed up on a cartoon from the 80s that’s remembered fondly for just how terrible it was. So when a new one was announced, everything was stacked against it.

    At the same time, though, there were some actual big names tied to the movie. Chris Pine was set to star, along with plenty of other big names. It also didn’t look like it was going to be a straight-up lowest effort movie, with actual effects and an existing setting. Honestly, a lot of this has been driven by stuff like Critical Role being genuinely good and loved, and D&D having gone firmly mainstream compared to the other efforts. Still, like most video game movies, the chances of this being awful were high.

    So when I watched it in the theater, and not only was it fun and entertaining, it could be called legitimately a good movie. It’s not going to win any awards, and it was full of all the tropes and so many things that are just inside jokes and fan service… but it still was just fun. They managed to create a movie stuffed to the brim with those things, yet could be watched by anyone and still be fun. The story only was enriched by knowing all the jokes, but not required. Unlike anything Marvel does, you didn’t have to do homework in order to watch the film.

    Barbie

    I’m too “old man” at this point to have cared even a little bit about the whole Barbieheimer or whatever happened this summer… so I saw this when it came out on Max a few weeks ago. I knew I’d like it, and I did. It certainly had a message, one I was perfectly fine with, and it was funny as well. Not perfect, but still pretty great.

    The Not So Good

    Obviously, I’m not the person to ask about the latest movies coming out. When I can count the number of movies I’ve watched – not just went to in the theater (though that number was two), but new movies in general. Most of that is driven by the fact that I’m just… over a lot of stuff. I’m not going to put Ahsoka on this list, because I’m not really tired of Star Wars, per se, I just don’t feel the need to immediately watch anything that’s not named Andor.

    All things Marvel and DC

    What I am tired of is basically everything Marvel and Disney are doing in that space right now. I haven’t watched anything this year, and don’t really plan to. The last thing I watched through and enjoyed was Hawkeye… so that’s two years or so where I just gave Marvel a complete pass. They aren’t helped by the fact they waited until the very last minute to drop a known abuser, waiting for an official court verdict, because obviously that’s the thing that a private company needs to do.

    Beyond that, though… it’s just honestly not interesting. The last thing I watched and loved was Peacemaker, something I’ve rewatched a couple of times. Gunn, now lording over the DCU and killing the things that are interesting (Henry Cavill clearly needs a hug after losing Superman, and I enthusiastically volunteer to be the one to give it to him; don’t feel bad though, he’s got 40k now) but needed help.

    Comic movies, as a genre, are basically gone. The next and likely only thing I’ll watch will be Deadpool 3, mostly because my wife and I will go and watch it together. Oh, I guess I did watch Spider-Verse, I was supremely disappointed in the ending and the fact that the movie didn’t bother to wrap things up before just… ending. It pissed me off then, and pisses me off now. That turned a movie that was a 10/10 into a firm 5/10, because it undermined the whole movie.

    Revivals of Old Things

    I never watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull… Last Crusade was a wonderful way to end the story and it always felt “done.” So when another movie in the series was announced, I wasn’t enthused. In fact, I’m still not, and haven’t watched it.

    If the previous decade was all about reboots, the current era seems to be much more about “restarts.” Shows that had been off the air for a decade or more were getting additional, often terrible, seasons. Frasier wasn’t ever my favorite show, but oh my god, the new one is so terrible that it’s just replacements of the old characters with new ones. I made it through one episode before I just noped out and wouldn’t watch it.

    Same with “That 90s Show,” which was a new season of “That 70s Show,” something I did like… and oh my god is was as bad as Frasier. I couldn’t finish the second episode, because it was about as funny as anything Aston Kutcher has done outside of the original show. The Futurama “uncancelled again” season was hit-or-miss, with the real highlights coming towards the end and some real awful things in the middle.

    Nostalgia is already a dangerous thing to play with, and it seems to be the only idea going for a lot of things out there. Which is odd in a year where we got the best adaptation of a video game ever, and other new shows that are legitimately funnier than just revisiting the old things.

    Video Games

    I’ve probably played more video games this year than I have in more recent years on record. This was bolstered, in part, by the fact that my daughter, officially a preteen now (which, WTF, time, stop it), has also gotten into games in a big, big, way. She’s also too smart for her own good and snarky, so, she takes after me in a lot of ways – though she’s probably smarter. Not all of them, though, I can’t get her to watch Star Wars or Star Trek.

    Vampire Survivors

    This was my game at the end of last year, when it came out, and dominated the start, middle, and end of my year as the new DLC came out. I’m not a huge fan of roguelike’s, and yet… this game just does all the things for me.

    There were multiple patches and DLCs put out in 2023, including a surprise crossover with Among Us in early December. It also landed on Switch in 2023, added free content, and continued to be worth every single cent you put into it. It was my game of choice on the Steam Deck, and I strongly suggest everyone get it. It’s just that good.

    Baldur’s Gate 3

    The second major highlight of the D&D year was arguably the best game released all year. Don’t trust me though, the Video Game Advertisements gave it an award too – but didn’t let them stay and talk about a team member who died because there were more trailers to show! Fun fact, apparently 41.5 minutes of the nearly 4 hour show was spent on award announcements and speeches. In other words, the Video Game Trailers Show sucks, Geoff Keighley is a pandering sack of shit that doesn’t care about video games, and Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the best games ever made.

    The original two games, and the spinoff Neverwinter Nights series, stand as some of the greatest RPGs ever made. The game Planescape: Torment, often tops the list of greatest ever, and arguably so (my personal top is Final Fantasy VI or Fallout New Vegas). It was simultaneously under-the-radar, while also being hugely hyped up, because as it got closer and closer to release, what was being said just became more and more bonkers.

    You know, like the bear sex.

    When the first reviews started to hit, the hype only increased, because people were overwhelmingly in love with the game. Part of that excitement is that Larian Studios made a game that didn’t have any microtransactions, day-0 DLC packs, or all the other crap that modern games “have to have.” It was just pay the money and you get to play the game, all of the game, and enjoy it. That aspect was so refreshing as to seem revolutionary, which is sad, because it’s how things used to work.

    That being said, the game itself is awesome, the hype is absolutely deserved. It’s a giant, sprawling, beautiful game. How you can play is unique almost every time, because there’s that D&D aspect of “rolls” tied in to checks, where you can be overpowered and still fail, or underpowered and succeed gloriously. Every quest had multiple, sometimes non-obvious, ways to solve and resolve them… better yet, sometimes, you could just fail and the game let you go on. The story was good and interesting, the companions were legitimately great and wonderful, and the gameplay managed to feel like D&D even with necessary changes to make it… not suck.

    And, of course, bear sex*.

    *Spoiler for this joke: it’s a druid companion you can romance, not an actual bear

    Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

    I didn’t get super far into this game, but it basically controlled a few weeks of my life, and currently dominates my daughter’s life. Discussions with her right now are 2% what’s going on for an eleven-year-old and 98% talking endlessly about Zelda. I get to go full “god, I’m old” in response and point out that “yes, I know, I played the original back in 86” when it comes to Zelda lore.

    Much like Baldur’s Gate 3, it was a complete game, not split off into a lot of cosmetic loot box or mini DLC nonsense. Of course, for a lot of Nintendo (but not all, their mobile offerings are pure gacha garbage)  games that’s normal. It didn’t fix most of the fundamental issues I had with Breath of the Wild – a great game but by no mean’s perfect. There was still terrible direction-setting of what to do and a flow of the game, weapon durability is still a garbage mechanic that serves no real purpose other than to annoy people, and it’s just as incomprehensible as any other Zelda game.

    Yet… the loop is so satisfying and it’s still a Zelda game. More than that, the biggest marvel, is that the game is just huge. More than triple the size of the original game, with new modes of play and unique things to it that make it so, so satisfying. There was so much to it that just… works. It also pushes the switch to the absolute max, making a legitimately gorgeous game on a console that was old and out of date when it launched.

    Bad Video Games and Worse Companies Making Them

    2023 was a garbage year for video games, despite the great stuff I listed above. Layoffs and studio closures dominated the industry, often not even for failed projects, but perfectly successful ones where the company needed to make a nickel and couldn’t dare cut CEO salary or stop doing stock buybacks, so they instead laid off thousands of workers.

    Even with that, though, there were some things that just stood out as games.

    Starfield

    I’m sure some people in our Discord knew that this game was going to end up here, because I was pretty vocal on all of my problems with the game as I was playing it. Which I did, a lot, because it’s a Bethesda game and they have some things that I genuinely like. Maybe. Or maybe not…

    Maybe it’s time to just acknowledge that Bethesda make kind of crappy games that rely on the community to make not suck. Skyrim was not a good game, but you could make it good. Honestly, think about it… how many of you that have played it can explain what the plot of Skyrim is? Or those who enjoyed it have memories you enjoy that are related at all to that plot… or was it all the other things you could do?

    It pains me to think that, because I like games like Fallout 3 and 4, but they’re also… you know… not good. Fallout 4’s main plot was infamously bad, the companions were memes, and the best parts of the game had nothing to do at all with playing the story. It was little side quests, building, or doing weird and random things. Fallout 3’s ending was so bad they had to program and charge everyone for a DLC to write a better one.

    An aside, but the last act of Baldur’s Gate 3 was much weaker than the first two, and a lot of players were unsatisfied with how some stories wrapped up. Larian listened to player feedback and… patched in new stuff to fix that for free. Bethesda on the other hand screwed over Fallout 3 players more than a decade ago by charging for DLC to undue the stupid ending.

    So this was a chance at redemption, to prove they could do something great… and they really didn’t. Starfield is their first new IP of this century (or as my daughter liked to twist the knife when I made my ’86 comment and pointed out that was “last millennium”) – and it was hyped for years, first being teased with a single title screen eight years ago.

    The end product is a devoid, lifeless, mostly boring husk. Remember how No Man’s Sky was overhyped and ultimately disappointing? This is worse, because that was just a small studio that clearly overcommitted… this is a major AAA company backed with Microsoft money who underdelivered and made a repetitive and pointless game.

    I should do a whole review of it, in fact I was planning on doing it, but ultimately couldn’t get the motivation to do it. So much of the game is just examples where things were quarter-assed to stick in, with clearly too many ideas and not enough refinement of them, and it all comes together as a jumbled, unfun mess.

    The worst part, for me, was coming to this game right after playing Baldur’s Gate 3. A game so full of choices and personality, with interesting and fantastic companions who were all distinct and unique, and a story that drew you in while not sitting you entirely on rails. Yes, one is an “open” (and empty) world game, while the other is a structured linear experience, but they are the two biggest RPGs of the year and couldn’t be further apart in underlying execution and quality.

    You legitimately build, grow, and earn trust with the people around you in Baldur’s Gate 3. It goes to great length to make you the “hero” but not call you the special. In fact, at one point, you find out that a good portion of your companions are getting the exact same “special one” things you are… you just happen to be the one that the game is centered on as POV.

    In Starfield, you’re immediately just trusted (or hated) by everyone. Strangers on the street, on a planet you’ve never been too, walk up and give you life details or quests. The intro is quite literally “here, take my ship, you’re the hero now” and that’s it. And often, there are clearly multiple ways something could be done, but because they didn’t design it that way, you only have one choice to make and one way to go. The only time you have options are when it explicitly gives you more than one.

    Which is all to say it’s a bad game that has already been mostly forgotten. But hey, their first big update will be adding “new ways to travel” between pointless planets where you can accomplish nothing. Maybe it’s telling that the best game in any of the modern Bethesda settings was the one not made by Bethesda.

    I spent a lot of hours in Starfield, even “beating” the main story, trying to find the good game. But it’s just not there. Also, before anyone jumps in that you have to play it “such and such” way, or play it for so long before it gets good… those are both things that terrible games do.

    Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

    It’s weird to put a game I play daily on the bad list, but I’ve talked about how this is a game with a satisfying loop and little else before. They put out a needless version this year of what was a hacked-together story no one remembers at this point, and the same fun multiplayer loop. Cheating is still rampant, there is both too much and not enough to do, and it’s stuffed to the gills with microtransactions.

    Really, it’s here because there was no reason for this to come out. MW2 was a solid game that was fun to play. MW3 was rushed and adds nothing of value overall. But still commanded a $70+ price tag supported by absurdly expensive cosmetic micro-transactions.

    Tabletop

    This will be a little bit different from the other sections, because my good and my bad for this category all stem from the same general places: Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro, Games Workshop, and Asmodee. Those are the three biggest “gaming” companies out there in the tabletop space, and the makers of the games that I deal with.

    Games Workshop Games

    I’ve been a player of almost everything that Games Workshop has done for years now. I’ve written about it here, covered it in depth with the calendars in 2022, and it’s been my primary hobby for several years. It started with Necromunda all the way back in 1996, which fun fact, I bought while I was traveling to Texas (I lived in the northern US back then) to visit a friend in the Army and drop off a car. We’d stopped off at a hobby store while going through Oklahoma City, saw it on the shelf, and figured it’d be fun to play with our friend while down there.

    That was a very expensive path to start down. That spiraled into Warhammer Fantasy, then Warhammer 40k, and I’ve taken several breaks over the years, but back in 2020, got back in, and play Necromunda (again, the new version), Warhammer 40k, Age of Sigmar, and several other games. Kill Team, and slow-planning an Old World army for when I see my friend again that I used to play Fantasy way back when.

    That being said… Games Workshop can be an absolutely infuriating company to be a fan and customer of. While a lot of their “fans” ascribe them to be some kind of sinister cabal and empire, they’re often the epitome of “don’t ascribe to malice what could be chalked up to incompetence.” They’re firmly stuck in the past, for better or worse, and they make decisions to protect their bottom line and sales.

    Capitalism sucks, and they are a company – not a friend, which means they will make decisions that will piss people off. Like releasing rules for free for 10th edition, which happened last year, only to start pulling them as books get released. Or constantly releasing and “patching” the game as they lean harder and harder into the more competitive modes of play, neglecting the casual and narrative players that make up the bulk of their player base.

  • Nick’s 2022 in Review – Streaming, Games, LEGO Sets, and All the Other Stuff

    Nick’s 2022 in Review – Streaming, Games, LEGO Sets, and All the Other Stuff

    It’s the in vogue thing to do to remember the year before it ends, but we’re not the most punctual here at FBTB, or more accurately, we all have lives and things to do, so we’re doing it after the first of the year. We have the recap post for our calendar still going to, just waiting for the final little touches as well, so start placing your bets on what month we’ll get that posted. My money is on March.

    I’m not sure that anyone is really going to mourn 2022, any more than we’re going to miss 2021, 2020, or the jokes about how this is just 2020 part 4 starting or whatever. Last year was a tire fire, because that’s the only type of year we get anymore. COVID is still a thing no matter how much we ignore it – and we got to add Monkeypox (yep, that was last year), Super-Strep, RSV, and so many other things on top of that along with it. Reading the news is more about “what is the scandal today” instead of being shocked by the news.

    We all cope in our own ways, through so many nerdy things, and I covered in my calendar review that a good deal of my tastes have changed in recent years. I don’t collect LEGO, and haven’t for some time. I do collect Warhammer, miniatures, and buy lots of things I don’t use a lot of. So, a lot of things haven’t changed.

    All that aside, 2022 wasn’t exactly an a terrible year for me. A lot of it, really, was mostly meh. My kids are doing good, and getting big. I’ll be talking about them plenty in here, because they’re influencing a lot of my choices anymore. I’m not going to talk about “New Years” resolutions in here, because I think they are stupid and you shouldn’t wait for an arbitrary day to improve yourself – that’s why my weight loss and health improvement plan started back in August. As of this writing, there is a third less of me in the world, and that’s always a good thing. There was entirely too much Nick around.

    That was my huge focus of the past few months, far more than gaming or anything else. Still working, and worrying, and anxiety, and every thing else, but mostly, just surviving, which is what everyone does anymore.

    LEGO and other Toys

    You know what, I bought more LEGO in 2022, for myself or for review, than I had in years. The AT-ST wasn’t even among that, because Ace sent that to me for review. Also, yes, I know, the Hoth AT-ST is different – still don’t care, my point about it being super niche is valid and sort of emphasizes that point. There are a bunch of sets I’ve snapped pictures for, and need to write reviews for, in the near future… it was going to come out after the advents.

    Shockingly, most of the sets are Star Wars, so you’ll have to wait and see. Nothing ground breaking, just chances for me to rant a bit. I got one big set in there, but I haven’t opened it yet. I also built one big set that I purchased last year and never got around to opening, so it will probably be the first review that I do. Yeah, I’m being vague. That’s what makes it so suspenseful!

    For other toys… I don’t know that I bought any, honestly. At least not any that weren’t an advent calendar or for a tabletop game. I don’t get action figures, and have sold off all of mine. I don’t even have any display shelves set up around me anymore, because I just don’t have the space for it. Truth is, I’m over most collectable swag and tat. It just takes up space, and don’t care for it.

    Movies, TV (Honestly, Streaming)

    So, I was going through the history of our posts to remember what I watched last year, to see that the Media post never got published because someone *cough* Ace *cough* never finished his part in it. Funny thing is that what I did last year also really reflected in this year.

    I had to dig through a lot of my streaming history to figure out if I actually watched a full, proper movie this year. My wife and I watched Parasite at one point, finally. I watched The Adam Project last March. We watch National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation every year for Christmas. I wouldn’t qualify the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special as a movie, but I did finally watch it. I don’t really count the dozens of movies I watched on Rifftrax and Mystery Science Theater 3000, but there are also those. Movie-wise, that’s about it. I didn’t watch any Marvel movies, or even rewatch any Marvel movies. I skimmed and skipped around a few Star Wars movies for reference, but that was more to find individual things.

    One thing I did not do, and never even made plans to do, was to go to a theater. Theaters, in general, are a thing that I don’t really enjoy. They’re too expensive, for me at least, especially around here. Taking my wife and kids to the movie, with popcorn, candy, and drinks, can very easily get above $100 for a matinee show. That being said, I know I’m going to at least one movie this year… the Super Mario Movie. My son is just crazy into Mario now, and honestly, I don’t think it looks all that bad. Disposable popcorn fare, sure, but that’s most movies to me anymore.

    That’s not to say I didn’t watch anything, though. I don’t watch movies, but I consumed a lot of shows and streaming this year. It’s easy to make jokes about how subscription services are just the new cable (and I’m pretty sure I made that point in articles years ago – this is basically what we were always going to get with the demand that we just be able to buy the channels we want). I have the Disney Plus subscription with Hulu, but also carry Paramount+ (because Star Trek and my son’s other favorite, Paw Patrol),

    Because we never posted our 2021 list – so I didn’t share the stuff that I discovered and started watching last year. Letterkenny, The Witcher, Only Murders in the Building, and What We Do in the Shadows were the shows that I started watching and loved in 2021, and they all got new seasons in 2022 (or very late 2021 and again in very late 2022 for Letterkenny).

    Peacemaker

    This may be the most NSFW thing I’ve ever shared on the site. Seriously, do not watch this around… anyone.

    I commented in my Advent Calendar Review that I didn’t watch a lot of comic stuff this year, or at least I didn’t watch a lot of Marvel comic stuff. I’d caught up on all the Marvel series last year through Hawkeye, which I really enjoyed (enough that it was on my 2021 list), but I’m just sort of over the MCU at this point. How do you get to Endgame and then keep upping the stakes? It gets tiring.

    You know what I did love, enough that I’ve watched it three times? Peacemaker. I’m not exactly enthused for Gunn’s actions on DC and all the stuff he’s done (even if it means that I get Cavill producing a Warhammer 40k universe launch over on Amazon). I never got around to reviewing it – and I really should – but I watched and actually liked the Snyder Justice League redo. Which is shocking, because I rather disliked Batman v Superman. I watched the Suicide Squad movie Gunn did, and it was… fine. The standout character in it was most certainly John Cena’s Peacemaker, who was the answer to the question “what would it be like if Captain America was a complete asshole?” – not like US Patriot, that’s more like misguided. This is taking the best and worse and going to 11. It’s honestly hard to describe.

    The stinger at the end of the movie where he seemingly died (I mean, spoilers, I guess, for a two year old film) set up the show, released at the start of 2022, and a lot of people were skeptical – myself included. Cena was a wrestler turned actor, and could he carry a show? The answer to that is a resounding yes. Not just in action, but there is absolute depth and so many facets to the characters on the show that you just need to watch. Peacemaker was an asshole you were supposed to hate in Suicide Squad, and you do, and still will, in the show. But you will also understand, hate, sympathize, and start to love him too. All of them, at once. There isn’t a weak performance on the show (well, except one unfortunate cameo at the end – but that’s more because of the actor).

    That and he plays piano on the show. It’s a brief scene, but it’s actually Cena doing it, and he taught himself to do it, just because he wanted to. That’s pretty cool.

    Shoresy

    I mentioned Letterkenny above, and I love that show – even if the recently released Season 11 is probably their weakest season. Still funny, absolutely, but lacking in the overall cohesive humor that most have. This past year also had the first big spinoff (other than the animated one from the main show) – Shoresy, starring Jared Kelso’s (show creator and the main character Wayne in Letterkenny) background character Shorsey leaving town and playing hockey elsewhere. On the main show, he was simply the comic character that was there to make fun of two other hockey players, Riely and Jonsey… you just sort of have to watch, and we never saw his face. It was just a running gag of him talking in a funny, high voice and often appearing bare-assed on screen and making “your mom” jokes.

    That’s what makes the spinoff show such a surprise. The crude and lowbrow humor is most certainly still there. It’s an essential part of what makes these things work. Humor that’s so basic yet sophisticated, full of fart and poop jokes that are somehow layered. More than that, though, compared to Letterkenny, this short series has a cohesive storyline and plot that runs through the season, and it gives both Kelso and the cast a lot more to do and act around. There’s depth to the characters that we don’t get in the main show. That’s not a knock on Letterkenny, because that’s part of the charm… the simplicity is the whole purpose of the small town, and often the reason the depth they have is simply stated and just happens.

    It’s all very, very Canadian – and continues that strange trend of how Canada has something like fifty thousand TV shows and only a thousand actors. Like everything Kelso does, it filmed on location in Canada, used a lot of Native actors for Native roles (far more than Letterkenny does, even), but kept the things that work well from the other show.

    Ted Lasso

    My wife and I were late to the game for Ted Lasso, and that sort of works in our favor. We missed the initial hype and the backlash that comes with all popular shows, so we got to enjoy it a lot. It’s surprisingly deep and enjoyable, a lot more than you’d think at first glance, and doesn’t shy away from some of the gut punches. Problem is that now we are on the boat with everyone else in wondering when season 3 is coming out. They missed the World Cup premiere, which seemed like the perfect time, and Apple isn’t known for actually… sharing anything.

    Star Trek: Prodigy

    This was… such a weird year for Star Trek. Discovery Season 4 started at the end of 2021 and… wasn’t great? I like Discovery, and anyone who feels like whining about new Trek can just go pound sand and continue to be delusional (and likely ignore the fact that they’re just repeating the same things said when TNG, DS9, and Voyager all came out). The actors in it are fantastic and I love the ship. Short Treks is legit fun and it brought that to us. But the latest season was uneven and rushed at best, and the story was just not all that enjoyable.

    Picard Season 2, which followed it was, and this is hard for me to say as an unabashed lover of Patrick Stewart and TNG, probably the worst Star Trek ever made this side of the Enterprise finale. I hated watching it, the plot, and just what it was doing. The whole idea of “let’s take the world right now, go two years in the future, and make it a little bit worse” was just bad. So very, very bad. Also, let’s give Picard some more secret Trauma, because the guy who’s been captured and tortured by the Cardassians and the Borg, used by the Borg to murder tens of thousands of his fellow Starfleet crewmen, and subject to dozens of other real and known things clearly needed more. It was just awful.

    Following on that, thankfully, we got Strange New Worlds, which gave us the thing that will make it so I will never hate Discovery no matter what it does, Anson Mount as Christopher Pike and the Enterprise pre-Kirk (well, mostly). This show was such a revelation and absolutely wonderful. We’re talking more of a shift going from The Motion Picture to Wrath of Khan. This is like going from Star Wars’ Holiday Special to Empire Strikes Back (which, I guess, also happened). That was quickly followed by Lower Decks, which is my favorite of the new Treks and gave us the wonderful DS9 episode everyone needs to watch.

    But this entry is about Prodigy, the Star Trek show aimed at kids and launched under the Nickelodeon brand. Everything about that sentence gave me pause, and led me to ignore it at first. And I did, until the next entry on my list got me to change my mind because I rapidly consumed everything I could and needed a next thing to watch.

    It has an uneven start, at least to an adult, because the thing you need to remind yourself is that it’s a kid’s show. It’s also a Star Trek show, and uneven starts and iffy first seasons are kind of what they do (unless you’re Strange New Worlds or Lower Decks – or parts of Voyager* and DS9**). The focal character, Dal, is extremely annoying when you meet him, something that doesn’t really change over several episodes. But that’s also kind of the point – the whole first season is about growth and change of these kids.

    Watching through the whole season, it’s hard to overstate just how well Prodigy captures the spirit of what Star Trek is, and how well the main characters exemplify it. The voice acting on the show, across the board, is superb, but a special callout for the incredible job that Kate Mulgrew does as Kathryn Janeways (not a typo). There is more character development and growth across the first season than in any other first season of Trek, and honestly, I’m willing to call it the best first season of Trek that’s ever been done. Yes, even better than Lower Deck’s season 1.

    *It was short, mostly because a chunk of the season one episodes were sprinkled in at the start of season 2, but overall more good than bad.

    **Emissary, Duet, In the Hands of the Prophets are all in the first season. So is The Forsaken, which has the absolute best moment you’ll ever get with Lwaxana Troi

    Andor

    I saved this one for last, because, holy crap. Just… holy crap. This is something we should review – not just because it’s Star Wars, but because I want an excuse to watch it all again. I’d been fairly burnt out on Star Wars since Rise of Skywalker crapped its way on to movie screens everywhere. I love Mandalorian, and I even liked Boba Fett, but they were also the sort of thing that I watched and was just kind of done with. I hadn’t gotten around to Resistance or Bad Batch, because of said burnout, and never got around to Obi-Wan either until after I started watching Andor and then it all just sort of exploded for me.

    I went back and immediately watched Obi-Wan (I enjoyed it, it’s fine, but more disposable) and Bad Batch (much better, and kind of like shades of seeing what is to come). Then I watched Andor again, because it’s absolutely amazing, and it makes you want to dive into the deep with Star Wars. It’s hard to dig into it too much without spoilers, and maybe I’ll do a third watch through to cover it here, because any show that makes woodwind-based marching band music tense-as-hell deserves your attention.

    Video Games

    2022 was a very strange year for Video Games for me. I… for about 95% of the year, I played the same few games I always paly – Call of Duty, sprinkled in with a bit of Star Trek Online and even a little bit of Star Wars the Old Republic. At some point in the middle of the year, the PlayStation 5 I’d ordered months before hand showed up and surprised me, so there was that, and I played Horizon Forbidden West for a bit before getting distracted. I never really went back to it.

    Part of the problem is that this year, my five-year-old son discovered two things: the Nintendo Switch and Super Mario games. The Switch, and by extension, the TV, have apparently become his now. So I don’t get on the TV all that much, as it’s shared between the whole family. I can jump on late at night, but don’t tend to. Most of my gaming as of late has been on the PC, and that just tends to be my guilty pleasure games, like throwing money to the terrible beast of Activision|Blizzard with CoD and World of Warcraft (yeah, I know, no ethical consumption in capitalism and all that… sometimes you just have to take the slime to make it so your brain can deal with the other crap).

    But at the end of the year, a few things changed. I decided I was going to do a couple of upgrades to my PC, which was pushing about four years old, and nabbed a deal for some parts. I may have also gone… a bit all out. I was able to get a bundle that put me at the top-edge of the AMD world, which, yeah, there are some trade-offs for that, but also, some upsides. So now I’m sitting on a Ryzen 7950X and a 7900XTX video card that can heat up my room pretty well when I feel like pushing it.

    My old rig was fine, it could still play any game out there, not even hitting the bottom rung of requirements. I have a PS5 and Xbox One X (though, aforementioned TV sharing issues – and we’re that weird family who only has one TV), but haven’t had a whole lot of things grabbing my attention on consoles as of late.

    Weirdly, the game that grabbed my attention and got me playing games again, admittedly after my computer upgrade (which wasn’t just about gaming, it was about a lot of other work too, and turning the old parts into a home server and storage box). It doesn’t come close to pushing this new machine. Or my old machine. Or my Steam Deck. Or my iPad.

    Vampire Survivors

    That game is Vampire Survivors, and it is amazing. It’s a game that has no business working as well as it does. It’s vaguely a rogue-like survival game, two genres which I don’t generally get all that enthused for (though I loved Hades last year). It’s an auto-attacker style game, which means you basically don’t do anything other than move. The graphics are all pixel-based and very basic, and it’s firmly in the indie scene.

    This starts to go a lot worse for me in a bit

    The design of the game is also built on top of a whole lot of gambling mechanics – the developer worked in the gambling and casino industry… but that’s the whole twist of the game. It’s random and hits like a slot machine, but there are no transactional elements to it. None whatsoever, and it’s designed to prevent it. In fact, the developer, in seeing that people were making crap knockoffs of the game and uploading them on mobile platforms, just went and developed a version and released it for free on iOS and Android. There are two optional ads that can be watched to support it – one to get a rez, one to get a bonus reward at the end. And that’s it.

    Sometimes, the game just decides it wants you dead. I swear, my character is in there somewhere.

    On PC, Mac, and consoles, it’s worth every cent. It’s a satisfying gameplay loop, and even though it looks like there’s just a little bit of content, but that’s not even close to true. See, the game is a true throwback, because it decides to do something quaint, and reward you for playing.

    You unlock characters by playing and doing things. You unlock stages by playing and doing things. You unlock different music by playing and doing things. Remember when that’s how you got stuff, and it wasn’t just a charge, or DLC, or something like that? Remember when you didn’t have to buy boosters or level bonus helpers or assistants or season passes? Remember when a game was just a game?

    It’s so satisfying for there to be a mechanic that’s just about rewarding you for opening something you earn in the game, and giving you something. And that’s it!

    Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters

    Square|Enix is a company that spent all of 2022 going “hold my beer” to every video game company getting bad press. They sold off most of their non-Final Fantasy games, have decided that NFTs are the future (spoiler: they are not, they have, and always will be, a ponzi scheme at best to sell to idiots, and if you like them or want to defend them, you are also an idiot). They’re still doing that, and even though Actiblizz is a shitshow, Ubisoft is just… terrible, EA predatory, Nintendo anti-competitive, and Microsoft is the Borg… Square|Enix somehow ends up being worse.

    Their business model, going forward, seems to be basically re-re-re-re-releasing the same things over and over. Luckily, though, they finally, at long last, released the Pixel Remaster versions on platforms other than the PC and mobile – hitting both Playstation and Switch in December (not coming to Xbox, sadly). To celebrate, they ended up on a very good sale on PC, and they work great on the Steam Deck, which as I mentioned above, I had picked up around Christmas. I’m likely going to end up writing about it because I got it for a pretty specific reason, which I’ve written about before here.

    I love these games, though, they’re a huge part of my childhood, so getting to play through them again is a big bonus. I’ve played through them on my iOS devices, and… they’re fine. But they belong on a console and controller. And now they can be.

    Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West

    I barely played one of these (Forbidden West), but have spent quite a bit of time playing the other – on my new computer build. I’d played the original game a lot on my PS4, it was fantastic and one of my favorite games of that whole generation. It’s been a great game to go back and just enjoy for the fun of it. I don’t have a whole lot to say on it, really, other than it’s weird to see Sony be slowly, begrudgingly, drug into the reality of supporting things outside of their console world.

    Also, I’m eventually going to get around to playing more Forbidden West, really. It was a good game. Also, I need to play the new God of War.

    Tabletop and Books

    If my Advent Calendar stuff wasn’t a hint, the tabletop was where I put a good portion of my year. Warhammer 40k and its offshoot games like Kill Team and Necromunda were my big mini games, along with a little bit of Age of Sigmar (the fantasy version), continued dabbling with Star Wars Legion and Marvel Crisis Protocol continuing, and completely checking out of Fallout Wasteland Warfare as well as a large chunk of my Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures (well before all of the kerfuffle with the OGL stuff, but more on that later).

    The first army I’m working on this year is my Necron force. They’re a great representation of the state of my hobby, as I’ve had a lot of these minis since I got back into 40k back when the Pandemic started…

    I also completely exited the 3D printing hobby – I just realized that it’s not something I like or enjoy doing. I really enjoy the maker space, I do, and I like dabbling and working with things. I am still going to do those things… but printing just isn’t here yet. It’s interesting, and it can be fun, but it’s also frustrating, messy, time consuming, and expensive. You end up spending more time troubleshooting, tweaking, and repairing than you do actually printing. Especially when you deal with the consumer-grade end of the spectrum. The support of companies that are big in the space are just the worst to deal with for what one would charitably call support.

    I also don’t print things for my main tabletop games – yeah, Warhammer is a very expensive hobby. So is LEGO. Much like how that doesn’t justify going out and stealing sets, or buying knock-off sets, it doesn’t justify buying recasts or the pure knockoffs either. Companies like LEGO and GW are not our friends, and they don’t need or have to price things to “be nice” or “fair.” Capitalism sucks, and it is inherently predatory. Those companies exist to make money, and they will often do baffling and annoying things, but the option for us is to always just “not buy it” and “not participate.”

    Some of these were painted in 2021, some of them were painted in 2022. What can I say, I like tanks.

    I don’t really begrudge the people who want to go and print custom armies, and have no issue with custom terrain or bits or the like – or even printing models for stuff that’s out of print. Where I take issue is when people start doing it instead of purchasing the products from smaller local stores that are the lifeblood of the hobby and local scene. Often with the justification of “I buy my paints there to support them.” Yeah, buying $20 worth of paints doesn’t make up for the amount those stores makes up off even one model kit, let alone an army. Support your local stores, even when that means you also have to buy from the company that kind of sucks. Unless that company is Wizards of the Coast, because f*** them.

    The year was started by working on my Orks. I didn’t finish them, but did get a fair number of them painted. Sadly, they got kinda nerfed pretty bad, but have since come back, so may have to dust them off. The picture is also blurry because I focused on the wrong thing but I’m not going to fix it. Cause I’m lazy.

    I played some Dungeons and Dragons this year, but my big, long-running homebrew campaign wrapped up late last year and I never started up another one as a DM. I sort of took the time off and haven’t worked on my homebrew setting at all. I sometimes miss it, but I often don’t, because it’s just so much extra work. Gaming while adult is hard… and goes something like this:

    When is everyone free? Okay, how about three weeks from now. Okay, let’s plan on that, I’ll send out something, let’s plan for this time. Send reminders for the next couple of week. Get notices at the last minute that people can’t make it. Frantically reschedule at the last minute. Shocked messages from a couple others that it was happening. Game gets postponed. Repeat process. 

    I have a group online where we do get together, but life just gets in the way, and our campaign became two or three mini-campaigns, one-shots, and things to try out. We did a little Spelljammer, a bit of Eberron, some stuff in the Critical Role setting, and a little bit of a custom world. I’m thinking of running some stuff this year with my fairly deep collection of other systems, like Star Trek Adventures, the Star Wars Narrative Dice System (Edge of the Empire / Age of Rebellion / Force and Destiny), Pathfinder, Starfinder, or maybe even some old-school D&D.

    This is a small sample of some of the potential books. What should I start with here, what would people like to see? Leave a comment or hit us up on the Discord and let me know.

    That was actually one of the things I was doing a lot of this year it was trying to hunt down, collect, and purchase older RPG, hobby, and general nerdy books. In part, because they’re just make me happy and bring up a lot of memories. But also, because I’m considering using them as part of a new content series, maybe something like Bothan Book Club or maybe Midlife Nerd Crisis or something like that. Doing Book Reviews or something like that for ancient books or old content, maybe torturing myself with old Extended Universe books, that sort of thing.

    Looking Forward to 2023

    I mean, it’s already 2023, so this is maybe looking down more than looking forward, so who knows. Last year, I put in a general rule of “not watching trailers” for a whole lot of stuff – especially for TV and Movies. I don’t know that I watched a movie trailer on purpose last year… if it happened, it was because I was watching something where it was on and couldn’t be skipped (like a football game in a commercial, etc.). They’re often too packaged or don’t represent what’s coming… that or, honestly, I just want to be surprised.

    I don’t even really care about spoilers (which are often unavoidable); in fact, if I know I’m not going to see something, which I usually won’t, I’ll just go spoil it for myself. But I want the experience to unfold in watching something, without the context or bias of the trailer. What that all means is that… I don’t really have any movies or shows I’m just waiting for, except for the next season of shows that I’ve already watched. Most don’t even have announcements yet. Shorsey is getting its second season in May, and eventually Ted Lasso is going to get it’s third and final season (which makes me a bit sad, but also I’m glad they’re just ending it).

    Picard Season 3 starts very soon, hopefully it doesn’t suck out loud like season 2 did, and there is more Trek coming after that I’m sure. I’m more excited about Mandalorian Season 3 coming back, and I put the trailer above, but going to be honest – I haven’t watched it (and won’t watch it). I’m going in as blind as possible to the show. We don’t know when Andor is starting back up, but oh my god, I will probably wake up in the middle of the night to watch the premier episode. We just got word that King of the Hill is returning, and so is Futurama, both on Hulu, but neither have a date and I don’t expect either to be this year.

    On the tabletop… things are kind of weird. Dungeons & Dragons maker Wizards of the Coast recent just absolutely crapped all over the bed and pissed off a huge chunk of their fans by giving them the finger, telling them all they were worth is their money, and saying they were going to shut down all the stuff they loved. Then being arrogant and declaring victory after it was revealed that about 90% of 3rd party creators would not use their new system.

    For my part, I’m likely going to fully embrace the worlds of Paizo and their Pathfinder Second Edition system as my fantasy tabletop game of choice. I didn’t mesh with Pathfinder 2E initially, but will give it another go and try to adapt my homebrew world to it. Yes, it’s currently published under the original OGL, which Wizards has now backtracked on and released under the Creative Commons license.

    The issue is that Wizards has lost all trust, and it’s clear that their next product is meant to kill off the existing game, their online tool Beyond D&D, and all of the purchased and created content. So whatever they’re making is bad for players and bad for the game – clearly, whatever is coming is a dead-end product and should be avoided. That means that other things are in order and it’s time to try them.

    For video games, I don’t keep up on a lot of the upcoming releases. I know that Star Wars: Jedi Survivor is coming out, and I’m tentatively looking forward to it. It’s still an EA game, and somehow they became the least evil company out there because they only do old fashioned evil and not all of the new abusive evil. There’s a new Legends of Zelda game we still know next to nothing about, and I probably will have to invest in a second switch by then because my kids have totally co-opted my Switch as their own.

    I’ve poked around all of the LEGO stuff… and yeah, not a whole lot that I’m likely to buy unless it’s explicitly for a review or they happen to make something that’s a big space set (which seems unlikely) or an old video game or computer system (also unlikely, because there’s not a lot left to mine there I don’t think). Mostly, I think, I’m just sort of keeping my 2023 open and going to be pleasantly surprised when something excites me and not let down because I didn’t set a lot of expectations.

  • A Superb Owl Trailer for the Falcon and the Winter Soldier

    A Superb Owl Trailer for the Falcon and the Winter Soldier

    Disney+ is still making sure that we’re going to keep the sweet, sweet, subscription dollars rolling by giving a preview of the next up for Marvel on the streaming service. I’ve been greatly enjoying WandaVision (even if a few fantastic surprises were spoiled for me in the past couple of weeks), and how it’s filling in a lot of the gaps from the movies.

    Based on what we’ve seen, and what we’re seeing in these previews, Falcon and the Winter Soldier is going to continue that. We get little hints on who’s in the show (Sharon Carter / Agent 13) and who’s the likely villain (and his lovely Purple mask getting some screen time finally). It’s right on the edge of showing us enough to tantalize but not give away major plot points (or at least give us enough that they make sense).

    Honestly, though, more of Sam and Bucky is good for everyone.

  • What We’re Looking Forward To In 2021

    What We’re Looking Forward To In 2021

    If there’s anything that everyone here is looking forward to, it’s got to be a vaccine and maybe, just maybe, the world getting back to normal. That being said, we’re only a few days into 2021 and we’ve already gotten Bean Dad, an attempted coup in the United States, and a multiple numbers of record deaths… so perhaps those hopes are in vain. It hasn’t even been a week yet, you don’t need to spend so much time telling last year to hold your beer, 2021!

    Still, there’s plenty of stuff to look forward to. From Marvel streaming on Disney+ to video games finally showing up on the next generation consoles, there’s stuff coming in 2021 even if it’s hard to remember in the day-to-day. It’s still early, and it’s already been a long year, but hey, we need something to look forward to, right?

    ACE

    I remember a couple of things I was looking forward to last year: getting a PlayStation 5, Metroid Prime 4, and Wonder Woman 1984. Well, I got my PS5 and burned through the only launch title I wanted to play (Miles Morales) in short order. I might pick up Demon’s Souls but other than that, the number of available PS5 games that is pretty low so it’s good time for me to work on my backlog. I don’t have anything on pre-order so this may be the year. As far as Metroid Prime 4, I didn’t expect the game to launch but wanted at least some kind of news or trailer or something, ANYTHING really. I’m chomping at the bit for that one. There’s a rumor that Metroid Prime 1-3 would be released as an HD collection for the Switch. I would love for that to be true. And Wonder Woman was… less than stellar.

    Looking forward to 2021, let’s see here… as far as video games go, I guess I’d still welcome anything Metroid-related. That may just be something that will permanently reside on this sort of list. Returnal on PS5 is coming out near my birthday. Stray is from a studio that I am paying more attention to (Annapurna Interactive). Gran Turismo 7 for PS5 will get me back into that series again. I’m sure there are going to be other games sprinkled about here and there, but those are what immediately come to mind.

    Even Neo knew there’d be a fourth movie.

    Movies are no longer a regular activity for me. It’s just not the same now, you know. They used to be an event, something to put on the calendar, maybe meet up with some friends to go see, you know, something to plan. But now, it’s taken the same role as a streaming tv service. I just kind of get around to it whenever I can. It’s just not the same anymore. I know there are some high profile, big blockbuster movies slated for 2021, but it just doesn’t hold the same draw for me. Matrix 4 might be the only one I half pay attention to when it becomes available.

    For TV, I’m hoping Stranger Things will be on the schedule for this year but wouldn’t be surprised in the least if it’s been delayed. The Book of Boba Fett looks promising. Actually, Star Wars Media in general looks pretty promising. My interest in the Star Wars universe has definitely turned around and is on the rise because of The Mandalorian show. God bless Favreau and Filoni. I may even read one of the new High Republic books or play Fallen Jedi.

    There are some board games I supported on Kickstarter that will be coming out this year assuming there are no further delays: Frosthaven which I mentioned in the previous post, Terraforming Mars Big Box set, and Sleeping Gods by Ryan Laukat. And in the past few days since I started my portion of this post to now, Nick showed me this: The Animation Collection from CMON on Kickstarter. I wholly blame him for my bank account dipping a little lower. The other thing I’m looking forward to is playing more board games with the family.

    As far as LEGO, I tend to stay away from rumors, and this weird place I’m in with the hobby doesn’t seem to be changing. I’ve made a pledge this year though to see if I can find that spark again. We’ll see how that goes.

    ERIC

    I love the way Ace described movies above: something to get around to. In my endless struggle to remove the anxiety of choice from my life, I’ve created something much, much worse.

    This horrible, ever-growing List.

    The List. 311 movies and counting. I’ve had this list since 2017 and it’s grown by 10 movies every month or so. So for 2021, I’m not looking forward to any new movies. I don’t think I physically can. I need to make up some serious ground on this list, or I will drown in a vat of unseen movies.

    Video games, though, are free reign. That backlog will keep getting bigger.

    Elden. Ring. From. Software. I will play any game these guys make without question. This one’s supposed to be open world, with lore by George R. R. Martin, and while both of those sound like buzzwords from 2015, I trust From Software to deliver a unique and fast paced experience.

    Hitman 3 will literally be more of the same, and that’s not a bad thing. Six more extremely detailed levels with tons of choice in how to complete a mission. I’m still waiting to see any Hitman level beat the thrill of the Paris fashion show mission, and if there were ever a time, it would be at the conclusion of the trilogy.

    Now, if someone could tell me why IOI went with Roman numerals for this one when Hitman 2 used English numerals.

    Deathloop, like Hitman, is my favorite type of game. You’re given a mission, and you complete it however you see fit. In this case, you have to figure out how to murder eight people before the day resets. It’s like Metal Gear Solid V and The Outer Wilds (two of my favorite games) combined. Oh, and you’re being hunted by an assassin.

    I have mixed feelings towards Arkane Studios’ games. I loved Prey, and while I like Dishonored in concept, I don’t think stealth works particularly well in first person. Still, with a gameplay loop as solid as Deathloop, I have little doubt this game’s gonna be great.

    It took me so long to get confident enough to play Resident Evil 7. I kept hearing how scary it was. But I played it, and in retrospect I should have had more faith in Capcom. Resident Evil has gone through so many weird tonal changes, but now that it’s back in its stride with RE7, RE2R, and RE3R, I’m all in for more Resident Evil.

    I just hope Jill or Claire show up. I’m sick of Chris.

    The only Kickstarter I ever funded, I’ve been keeping an eye on Little Devil Inside for the better part of a decade. I’m so happy to see it shown off for PS5. I’m still not 100% sure what the game itself is about, but the visual comedy and art style are extremely eye-catching. It looks so interesting that I’m getting this on day one.

    I like Left 4 Dead. I like World War Z. It’s more of the same. I can’t wait to dip into this with my friends.

    So here’s hoping there won’t be another pandemic that will delay a bunch of games.

    NICK

    What’s it count for when most of the things I was looking forward to last year didn’t actually come out? Hellblade II: Seluna’s Saga wasn’t a launch title, as I’d originally guessed, and they’ve been really cagey about giving a release date or any sort of sizable preview… so who knows. There’s the next Halo, which got delayed to this year, but I’ve never been a big Halo player. It’s a fine series, but not something I’d buy a console for (I’m in the minority for that, though).

    Maybe I’ll be able to get a PlayStation 5 at some point this year, and actually play a few of the upcoming games. I haven’t gotten around to Miles Morales yet, and there’s the upcoming Horizon 2 and a new God of War title (though I’ll be shocked if that actually shows up), as well as the now Microsoft-owned PS5 exclusive Deathloop. Everwild is supposedly targeted for this year, but there’s been little to show up.

    Honestly, though, the only game I’m sort of excited to get this year is, bizarrely, a Bioware and EA title…

    I mean, yeah, EA sucks. And I’ve played all of these games dozens of times… they are some of my favorite games of all time. It remains to be seen if they’ll be making updates and tweaks, or just uprezzing (here’s hoping for some retconning of that ending). At a minimum, hopefully they level out the control scheme between the games, similar to what Naughty Dog did with their Uncharted remaster.

    For TV, it’s going to be a Marvel sort of year. WandaVision kicks off the year in a week, followed by Falcon and the Winter Soldier in March and Loki in May, and likely several more shows after that.

    There may be a billion Star Wars projects in development, but none are scheduled to be on the service until December at the earliest as of right now (Bad Batch may show up sooner, but they’ve not announced a date other than “2021” for it). Of course, there are a lot of other media for Star Wars, with comics and the new High Republic books. I picked up Light of the Jedi last night, and started reading it, and may come around for a little book review on it to talk about the new property.

    With boardgames… is it weird that I’ve already paid for most of the board games I’m really excited for this year. I backed a few on Kickstarter last year that are scheduled for release in 2021… CMON’s Massive Darkness 2 (which will also come with some optional Zombicide tie-ins) and Resident Evil 3 come to mind. Both of them were for the minis more than the game, but still should be fun to play as well.

    I’ve never been especially interested in a regular bonsai tree, but this seems to be one that’d look nice and be fairly easy to care for.

    For LEGO… I got nothing. I’ve made no secret that LEGO just doesn’t excite me all that much anymore, and I don’t pay that close of attention to upcoming releases unless I have to post them. If I was going to pick something that I may buy, it’s already come out… the botanical sets that were part of the start of the year.

    I’m looking forward to 2021 surprising me, and hopefully starting to do it with something other than horror. There’s hope the pandemic will end, hope that maybe Canada will finally annex the US and help us get things in order, and hope that there will be plenty of good shows to stream between now and the zombie apocalypse that’s scheduled for October.

  • FBTB Staff’s Best of 2020 – The Rest

    FBTB Staff’s Best of 2020 – The Rest

    If there’s anything that can be taken out of 2020, the year that may have finally broken us all, it’s that everyone had some hobby (or ten) that they just drilled in to. Everyone has watched more, read more, or done more stuff than they likely did in previous years (while still lamenting that there’s nowhere near enough time to do any of it – or just curling up into a ball and lying in bed, it is still 2020 after all).

    Ace

    When we started talking about the “best of 2020” series of posts, I kind of had an idea of what to put down for the most part. I kinda struggled with LEGO for reasons I’ve stated before which I won’t get into here. This post, for “the rest” was supposed to be a catchall sort of opportunity to talk about things we really got into this year that doesn’t necessarily fit in the format of this site (though I have always been encouraging the staff to feel free to write and post whatever they fancy). This post is the one I’m really struggling with.

    Look, pardon my language, but 2020 was just an absolute shit year and 2021 isn’t off to a great start either. I’ve been taking lockdown quite seriously to the point where if L.A. County issues a new stay at home order, it really doesn’t change anything for us since we’re pretty much staying away from humans as much as possible. I gained weight, I’ve been become lazy, and I’ve pretty much buried myself in video games and trying to keep my kids entertained enough to distract them from the fact that we’re stuck at home for so long.

    But it’s not all fire and brimstone. My segment in this post is first, but I’m the last one to contribute, so I cheated a little and read over what Eric and Nick wrote to see if I can get inspired. It helped a little, enough for me to focus in some of the new things I tried last year that I enjoyed. Like…

    My bacon / turkey / cheddar / mayo / black pepper / butter sandwich on toasted white bread that my daughter loves so much.

    Cooking! Now that I’m spending more time at home and less time stuck in traffic whilst commuting to and from work, I decided to try and pick up cooking. I’ve seen those gifs by Tasty and thought you know, I can probably make this or that. And I have! There’s a calmness about all the prep work that I’ve enjoyed. It’s certainly analogous to building a LEGO set except you can’t eat the fruits of your labor with LEGO.

    Pizza bombs from a Tasty recipe. This is an older picture, but I’m getting better at making them look and taste better.

    I don’t have a lot of recipes I’m comfortable enough making without reading over the steps again and again, but I’m slowly getting there. What’s most important is if my kids eat the stuff I make. And they do! Well, mostly anyway. I’ve been refining some of the things I’ve been making to make it taste better for them. It’s a process but one I can see myself getting into more and more.

    I guess I should also mention board games. It’s something I’ve gotten more and more into. I’m trying not to do the same thing it that I did with LEGO, which is to stockpile them, but that isn’t going so well. That picture above is just tiny slice of the games I’m hoping to play with the kids some day, or some other adults even. COVID isn’t helping there. I had found a group of guys that I was able to board game with but haven’t been able to do so for almost a year now. Our Gloomhaven campaign is on indefinite hiatus, but someday, someday we’ll be able to finish that one up. And then it’s on to Frosthaven!

    If you’re into board games, stay away from Kickstarter. And I mean that in the most helpful way. Kickstarter’s become a haven for designers to get their games funded and for board gamers to find a gem here and there. It’s great if you’re looking to support the designers directly, get in on some Kickstarter-exclusive perks, or find some new addition to your game library provided you can wait up to a year and half, maybe two, before taking delivery. I say stay away because it’s super easy to get caught up in FOMO there. It’s not something I can truly recommend. I’ve pledged to a couple of flops but thankfully I feel like I’ve gotten more winners than losers. Even then, I’ve dialed my Kickstarter activity way, WAY back but I made an exception for Frosthaven. Gloomhaven was born on Kickstarter and the game’s creator launched its follow up, Frosthaven, last year and I pledged my support to it on day one, no question.

    So yeah, cooking and board games. I’m not sure if what I put down here is following the spirit of the headline prompt of “the best of the rest”, but they are what I’ve been getting into outside of the usual video games, LEGO, and media.

    Eric

    When quarantine hit, I learned how to juggle. I also wrote and directed my own film completely by myself, and drove myself to near insanity. I had to call it quits for my own mental health.

    Later on, I bought a Xiao flute and a 70 inch longbow. You know, for fun. My main hobby this year was the same as always, playing video games. If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, you’re probably sick of hearing me talk about them. So I’ll talk about some other stuff.

    Books!

    I have 145 books (as of last count) to get around to reading, and I wish I could say I really took the opportunity to sink into reading this year. But I didn’t, no more than usual. Still, I read two books I simply must recommend.

    The power has one of my favorite concepts for a story. Take the present world, add something magical, and see how culture responds to it. In this case, young women (in the teenage range) discover they have the ability to shock people with their hands.

    This has some consequences, but what I find fascinating is how quickly things change. Women, unfortunately, have historically been put in lesser positions of power in nearly every facet of life, and while things are changing for the better (slowly, but changing), having things immediately change, where women are now the ones with power, has such an incredible (and not necessarily good) effect on the world.

    This book is brutal, but it does a wonderful job of exploring the positions and powers of sexes in our society.

    On a lighter note:

    The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is one of, if not my favorite movie. But I’d always dismissed the books. I read them when I was a kid (3rd grade or so), and a lot of it flew over my head. I’d try every few years, and just get bored. Slogging through the poems, waiting for the Hobbits to stop wandering around, and wishing that Aragorn was as cool as he was in the movies. But, for some reason, this year, it really clicked with me. Maybe I just needed a fully immersive book in a world I’m very comfortable with. But I also found the writing incredible, compared to finding it boring in the past. The chapters are pretty bite-sized, and the poems / songs are actually really good. I even started singing them aloud, giving them a tune. I’d still say these books aren’t for everyone, and I’d probably still recommend the audiobooks read by Rob Inglis as the best way to experience them. But, hey, it was the book I needed in 2020, and I’m glad it’s there.

    Nick

    I was tempted to put on a bunch of stuff about masks, how we should all be wearing them, or how masks are the new socks (they are by the way). I’ve gotten a bunch of different masks to wear when I need to go out, and maybe I’ll just use them to sprinkle in pictures in the future. Instead, I’m going to focus on the stuff that’s been really dominating up my time in lockdown now that March is hitting day 320 or something like that.

    I started my lockdown by making a pretty critical, but fun, mistake… and purchased myself a Resin 3D printer. So I’ve been able to spend a lot of time printing way more miniatures than I could ever hope to paint. Because I could only paint so many… and because, as I mentioned in my Zombicide post, I just love miniatures and miniature games, I did something exceptionally stupid. I decided to buy some Game’s Workshop Warhammer stuff again. Oh, and Star Wars Legion, and Marvel Crisis Protocol, and Fallout Wasteland Warfare to go along with all those Zombicide miniatures.

    Because I am an idiot.

    None of these are my 3D printed figures, these are all from other games.

    COVID, and being a responsible adult that thinks masks and staying healthy is important, means that I haven’t been able to get with anyone else to play any games. I’m working on building some 40k and Age of Sigmar armies, Necromunda gangs, and just painting up some troopers so I can put together Star Wars stuff and make blaster sounds. I’m going to try and cover some of this stuff in the future, right after I wrap up the other posts on Skirmish games, and show off my average at best painting skills. But 2020 has been all about the miniatures for me, more than it was video games or LEGO.

    I have issues with Games Workshop as a company… their stuff is overpriced compared to similar goods (though it’s hard to argue with the quality and fidelity of it), they had been litigious wankers in the past in protecting copyrights they didn’t have, and generally just being pretty awful at communication and fan interaction. Yet the game itself was always fun, and the stuff is enjoyable to build in paint, and while their paint delivery mechanisms are awful (seriously, paint pots suck), the actual paint is pretty good and easy to find.

    If you’re gonna go, go all out. I’m not going to put in a picture of my pile of shame and all the models I’ve bought, built, but haven’t painted yet.

    I’ve gone to my usual level of excess and extreme with it, not just dipping in to paint some models I like, but trying to plan how to play in bigger games. There’s a great community around here, and I’ve been needing some hobby I can get into. Plus, there’s a lot more support in the games now than when I played last (mid 00s), with skirmish games like Warcry and Killteam.

    More than that, though, they revived one of my favorite games back when I was much younger, Necromunda. Yeah, they brought it back in 2017, but it caught my notice this year with the new lore and support. I wish I had the old box sets I had from the original game. I actually had two full boxes, a fully painted Van Saar gang, and a whole lot of backstory for my armies. I loved the games, and some friends and I had an absurd amount of fun with it.

    This is one of my “ebay” wishes, to go and get an original box set of the game. I had multiple copies, and we created some absolutely bonkers Underhive setups

    A lot of these games I’m getting into again as a way to connect with some old friends, as well. My best friend growing up and I have lived on opposite ends of the country for over a decade, and we rarely get to see each other. This has been a way to reconnect, as he was the one who first got me into the hobby, and was my main opponent/victim back when we played in those earlier days. We’re still hundreds of miles apart, but this has given us something to connect with again. Eventually, we’ll meet up and play, assuming the world can stop ending.

    Sure, a lot of this is mostly more games I won’t play, and more things than I have time to paint or play with… but right now, it brings a bit of comfort. Sometime in the future, I’ll decide to slim up the collection and sell a decent bit of it, but for now, it makes me happy. And while Games Workshop has been doing some weird things with their allocations to stores, I’m privileged enough to live in a place where there are plenty of local shops that I can hit up to find what I want (including multiple GW stores). Now all I need is time to paint, the ability to play, and some more restraint in buying this stuff.

    I also get a lot of books that aren’t D&D…

    I’ve also kept up my D&D habits, and tried to pivot to playing it online, which is something that I haven’t ever really done before that. I’d played maybe one or two games online before lockdown, but since March, my regular-ish D&D game, which I am the DM for, has been exclusively online. It’s very different, but still like sitting at a table in some ways.

    That’s meant that I spend as much time trying to figure out how to build online encounters, writing notes, and finding art as I do actually writing adventures and content. Oh, and even though I don’t need them, I still get minis to use in games, try to work on building terrain, and generally enjoying the fun. Eventually, my games will be in person again, but this year has brought about a lot of changes and several of my players have ended up moving in the pandemic, so maybe this will just be how it is going forward.

    It was such a weird year for D&D, though… from a product standpoint, it was pretty awesome. We got two setting books, Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount (based on the wildly popular Critical Role) and Mythic Odyssey of Theros (a Magic: the Gathering setting). There was another hybrid Adventure/Setting book in Icewind Dale – Rime of the Frostmaiden, which was welcome, as the area hadn’t been covered all that much in recent D&D. The highlight, though, is Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, where D&D actually starts changing the game out of it’s iffy 70s roots (if only by a very tiny bit – their solution is basically “just make it up”).

    Okay, maybe one picture of shame; it has nothing to do with D&D, but figured I’d put it here. This is by no means all of the miniatures I have around that I need to paint. Not by a long shot…

    I mean, I love D&D, but the very first homebrew rule at my table is that “inherently evil races are dumb.” Yeah, that exists in Warhammer too, but that game is also being drug ever so slightly into a more modern view. But in D&D, there’s something especially odious that the only dark-skinned race is nearly universally evil and craven, and has been so since it’s inception. I have my own theory on why that is, but not going to go into that here, but let’s just say that it’s stupid. Alignment is a stupid mechanic that should have been left out several editions ago. As a storytelling framework, sure… but the idea that morals, ethics, and decisions are confined to such a rigid structure is asinine. It hampers good roleplaying and creating rich characters.

    From a legal standpoint… this wasn’t a great year for Wizards. They saw multiple lawsuits against their creators, including two stalwarts that helped define the genre, Margret Weis and Tracy Hickman (creator of Ravenloft and Dragonlance). That was the biggest one, but not only, as also went after partners that were producing goods for them, like Gale Force 9. They made some small token changes to more problematic settings, like Ravenloft, but they were minor and did little but just remove a few sentences from the book. Worse, they continue to sell a lot of the older stuff that is very, very, problematic.

    This was one of my favorite settings as a kid, but it’s impossible to see it as anything but problematic now. Ditto to a lot of the other sub-Forgotten Realms things, like Oriental Adventures, Maztica, etc.

    The bigger issue, though, was the fact that a lot of ugliness about the company, and the product, came out… culminating with a Wired expose posted a the beginning of 2021 that details a lot of the issues. They were called out by their own writers and partners, including Orion Black, a writer that they basically pandered to and marginalized while ignoring any of the things that it’d take to actually improve. They’re big and lumbering, so some of that takes time, but it’s unfortunate to know the culture at yet another company that makes something I love is pretty rotten.

    I don’t know how to fix that, but really wish I did…

  • FBTB Staff’s Best of 2020 – TV / Movies / Streaming

    FBTB Staff’s Best of 2020 – TV / Movies / Streaming

    Any other year and maybe we break these into other categories, but when the highest grossing film of the year in the US turns out to be Bad Boys for Life and Sonic the Hedgehog, things have taken a turn and you gotta open up the category a bit. If you want a feeling of exactly how long 2020 has been… remember that Tiger King came out in March of this year. March was eleven years ago, so it’s kind of insane when you think about it.

    Ace

    Man, I was soooo looking forward to Wonder Woman 1984. I was so sure that I’d like it that when we were concocting our best of lists in early December, I had slated WW1984 as my Best Movie of 2020 but I can’t do that in good conscious anymore.

    And to the point Nick was alluding to in the opening paragraph, this year has just been this amorphous blob of time. It feels like lockdown just started a few weeks ago and a few years ago all at once. It’s hard to believe that 10 months have passed since corona became a real threat that forced people into lockdown. During that time there was a lot of TV watching. Well, I assume there was a lot of TV watching cause we certainly weren’t going out anywhere and doing anything outside of the house. There are two shows that I watched that I can wholeheartedly recommend. I’m sure I’ve watch more than these two shows but try as I might I can’t really think of anything else. Maybe because the quality of the shows and movies I watch are all equally good and so nothing is really that great? I don’t know. But here are my picks.

    There is something oddly compelling about Queen’s Gambit (Netflix). A series about an orphan girl becoming a force to be reckoned with in the mostly male world of chess. I don’t play chess, I know enough about the rules to play a game but I wouldn’t say I’m any good at it. So even with my rudimentary knowledge I still enjoyed this show. Even my wife who knows less about the game was hooked. And that’s really a good indication of how good this show is: the chess is really just the backdrop. Or, really, a vehicle that transports you into this biopic of a chess prodigy. I can’t explain what it is. I certainly can’t think of anything bad to say about it. It is just a great show.

    The Mandalorian is the best thing to happen to Star Wars since Rogue One, hands down. I’ve said that before and I’ll keep on saying it. I may be behind in my recaps but that is not a sign of my lack of interest. I haven’t been this excited for a TV show or even Star Wars for that matter in FOREVER. And it felt good, you know, despite COVID and being under lockdown. During a year of little to look forward to, it was nice to have that feeling again. Which goes to show that having a weekly release for a streaming TV show isn’t all that bad of an idea despite streaming audiences becoming acclimated to the binge watch culture.

    Honorable Mentions

    Speaking of which, our family watched Rogue One over the holiday break because my kids had a lot of questions about The Mandalorian. So I’m making them watch it in release order but prefaced all of it with Rogue One. I used to think that the movie should have cut off the first 20 minutes or so and start when Jyn gets rescued from the prisoner transport. I still do but I’m more okay slogging through the beginning now. The way I see it, the first 20 minutes is truckloads better than what Ep. IX ended up being.

    I got on the Cobra Kai bandwagon a little late, but it’s been fun. Johnny’s irreverance towards pretty much everything is refreshing to watch in this PC world. Season 3 just started and I’m already almost done with that one. There is definitely some cheese parts that will make a rock physically cringe but it’s not bad. The funny moments far outweigh the the bad ones. You can certainly waste your time watching stupider things. And if you haven’t watched all of the Karate Kid movies, no worries, they flashback all the highlights so you can keep up with minimal effort.

    And lastly, I finished watching The Office for the third time while it was Netflix. Because it going to Peacock or whatever? Screw that, I don’t need to sign up for another streaming service.

    Eric

    I started this year off with Regal’s Unlimited Pass, which let me watch, you guessed it, unlimited movies in theaters. I got a good two months of that under my belt. And, you know, looking back, I didn’t see a single movie during that time I would recommend. And I saw every movie during that time. And since I don’t have Disney+ nor any desire to, I haven’t seen any of the latetst lazy remakes they’re putting out. So for this yar, I’m skipping my movie pick.

    Oh, also, I’m skipping my TV pick, because I’m 23 and don’t have cable.

    But streaming! I’m also skipping. Kinda.

    I only watched one show I really fell in love with – and it’s Amazon Prime’s The Boys.

    It’s not really a secret that here at FBTB we’re fans of comic book movies. And also, sometimes not a fan. So what The Boys does so well is takes my favorite philosophy – post-modernism – and applies it to this swath of comic book movies we’ve seen over the last decade. Now, The Boys is based on a comic itself, though it’s far more edgy and just…way more cringe-fest early-2000s than the show. Which the show could have done, but it updated the show and even the message to critique not only modern day superhero ideology, but modern day society’s ideology itself. A large corporation dips its toes in manipulating U.S. Congressmen. A mega-church movement’s empassioned leader (and Mr. Fantastic-like stretchy guy) is shown to be a massive sexual deviant. A new recruit of the superhero gang is pressured into giving sexual favor to another member to “really fit in”. The show isn’t neccessarily subtle in the ways it reflect’s modern day, but the addition of superheroes being the ones doing these things add such an interesting angle that it’s difficult to turn away.

    So the story? Well, basically, The Boys (not superheroes themselves) want to go kill the Justice League. Which aside from the incredible character development along the way, is so entertaining in and of itself that the episodes fly by. Every single character in the show, good or bad, is so interesting, complex, and pretty much crazy in their own way, and it adds up to some incredibly wonderful set pieces.

    I would be remissed not to mention probably the best character, Homelander, who is The Boys universe’s Superman. This guy is crazy, like, actually insane. And he’s painted as the obvious antagonist, and there’s nothing quiet as fearful as trying to hide from a guy with X-ray vision, supersonic hearing, flight, and laser eyes. He’s like the Terminator. An insane, very charismatic Terminator.

    Man this show is cool.

    Nick

    I didn’t watch all that many “new” movies this year. The one that stands out the most in my mind was Bird’s of Prey, which was fine, though I wasn’t the target audience for the film (which is awesome, there need to be more movies like this made). I’ve got a few others I want to watch, like the new Bill & Ted movie, but just haven’t felt much in the mood for new movies. Instead, I watch old ones. Lots of them. Again… comfort food. Well, that and a lot of terrible movies, via Rifftrax and MST3K.

    When it comes to television, or honestly, streaming, there was a whole ton of stuff I watched this year. My wife and I have been burning throughs several shows on streaming, like Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Schitt’s Creek, and The Good Place. If you haven’t watched those, you absolutely should. I’ve gotten through more of Marvel Agent’s of S.H.I.E.L.D., but still haven’t gotten around to finishing it. There was Netflix’s GLOW (awesome – but sadly the 4th season was a victim of COVID and Netflix’s insistance on killing great shows), and BoJack Horseman early in the year capping off an ending that only that show could manage.

    Turns out a lot of shows that I watched this year were also coming to an end this year, whcih makes me kind of sad. Most of the stuff I was really looking forward to ended up getting pushed later, like the huge slate of Marvel shows that will start up in January with WandaVision.

    Obviously, there was the Mandalorian, which I have a feeling got talked about by Ace above (I’m writing this before he added his stuff), and as a huge fan of Rebels and Clone Wars, I absolutely adored the second season. I didn’t mind the CGI character at the end, I thought it looked okay, and I thought the actual fight was incredible. The start of the season felt a bit slow, but when it hit the gear, it hit it hard and stuck the landing. Plus, as we know now, we’re going to get eleven million new Star Wars shows over the next few years.

    That being said, I’m going to cheat and call out three shows from a rival franchise as my favorite. I’ve mentioned before that I’m as much of a Star Trek fan as I am a Star Wars fan… honestly, maybe even more. I grew up watching TOS in syndication, watched TNG when it premiered, and stuck with watching it even though it was just god awful in its first season.

    There was more new Star Trek this year than we’ve ever really gotten before… the closest before this would have been 1996, when we got First Contact (okay), DS9’s 4th season (amazing) and Voyager’s 2nd season (not so much). More than that, there was more great Star Trek this year than we’d gotten, which pushed the franchise in a bunch of new and different directions. When Picard ends up being your weakest entry, and still was great, you’re probably doing something good.

    Lower Decks is the shows that really stands out among the others… in part because it was so radically different from anything that Trek has ever done. It was funny, interesting… but still intrinsically Star Trek. More than that, at the end of the season, it actually introduced some real stakes, and had some deep moral questions about the Star Trek universe in general. That’s been a theme with everything that came out in the shows this year, in fact.

    I really like the move to actually make the enjoyment of the people in Starfleet feel more varied than TNG ever managed

    Star Trek Picard brought back a beloved character, for good reason, and took it into a completely different direction than a lot of people were expecting. We didn’t have the noble and unshakable Picard, it was a broken, and frankly, defeated, Picard. We saw a Picard who failed, and a bit of conspiracy with it. There were some things to the first season that didn’t land quite right, but there were some moments that so absolutely did. Picard talking to Seven of Nine about dealing with the trauma of the Borg, Kestra in general, Riker and Picard sitting together, and saying goodbye to Data (and somehow making up for the travesty that was Nemesis).

    Lower Decks somehow managed to do something that was seemingly impossible… make a Star Trek comedy show. The worry was that it’d be too Rick & Morty (given that it’s showrunner was a producer on Rick & Morty), or something more Akin to Family Guy. It wasn’t either of those. Yeah, it was funny, and sometimes goofy… it had jokes that sometimes didn’t land and sometimes it used dialog that sounded more like a fan than it was a Starfleet officer. Then again, when you look at Boimler as the ultimate Starfleet fan, which he was, the line “That guy is like a Kirk sundae with Trip Tucker sprinkles” makes a bit more sense. And also, I totally get it.

    One of my favorite aspects about DS9 was that they made the Federation feel less invulnerable than other shows had. We saw that on display at the end of Lower Decks, as well

    But the last episode, more than anything, blew up the show around it and gave the promise of something new and different in the second season. It wasn’t afraid to kill a character, even if it was a supporting one. More than that, though, it showed what the show had been talking about all season, that the Federation is terrible at keeping up on things and people in need, or second contact, or just keeping tabs on all the things that happened in other shows under control. It was the Pakled, a joke character from TNG’s Samaratin Snare (and background characters on DS9), that ended up being capable of destroying multiple Federation ships and killing hundreds of Starfleet Officers.

    Discovery’s third season is continuing its upward trend… I’ve liked all of the seasons for different reasons, but the first one spent too long in the Mirror Universe. The second one gave us Anson Mount as Pike (all is forgiven for Inhumans, Anson), but sort of plodded along trying to find its overall story

    And to think, there are only maybe half as many Star Trek shows in development as Star Trek, but that’s still like half a dozen shows

    . The third one has been a lot more together than I was expecting, to be honest, and giving us a different view of the Trek universe by putting them so far into the future.

     

    Surprisingly, it wasn’t about them trying to constantly get back to their own time, it’s been all about them acclimating to the future. While it still focuses a lot of its time on Burnham, a lot of the secondary characters have been given a chance to grow and shine. It’s not perfect, and it rushes some beats and takes some undeserved moments… but it’s still very enjoyable. I could probably go on another few thousand words, but this thing is long enough… needless to say, it’s a great time to be a Trek fan (and a great time to be a Star Wars fan).

  • Disney announces so many New Marvel shows and teasers

    Disney announces so many New Marvel shows and teasers

    It wasn’t just Star Wars announced by Disney, since they’re apparently trying to overwhelm all of my nerd sensibilities. Between the Star Wars news, all the stuff at the Game Awards, and now the various Marvel Stuff… I’m gonna be busy with the nerdverse.

    Ms. Marvel sizzle real, with some behind the scenes look. One of my favorite characters, and easily the thing I’m most excited for. The look and feel of it feels just spot-on, and I’m curious how they’ll work in some of the other characters that fit in her little corner of Jersey.

    I mean, honestly, these all look awesome, but the What If…? series looks to be singularly unique. I like the different stories they can bring in, and how animation will let them tell stories and get actors back to do voices.

    Loki looks suitably bonkers, as befitting the character. I love the homage to Vote Loki in there, that was a great comic miniseries, and it looks like there will be some time-travel-ish shenanigans or the like. There’s also some rainbow bridge action, which will be… strange.

    Coming in March to Disney+. Apparently flying through Captain Marvel canyon at some point, and bringing together two characters I want more of. They have the sort of Charisma that works, and I’m curious if they’ll take some of the risks in this that the comic books were willing to take with both characters.

    She’s pregnant at one point. That does not end well for… the universe. This is the first show we’re getting in January, and I think I love everything I see in it.

     

     

  • Marvel announces Kamala Khan actress and new documentary series on Disney+ called 616

    Marvel announces Kamala Khan actress and new documentary series on Disney+ called 616

    Over the past couple of days, Marvel has been continuing to churn along with their casting and streaming news. They may not be releasing anything in the theaters anytime soon, but it looks like their slate on Disney+ is going to be absolutely loaded. Even the little nod to the fans with the title, 616 (the universe number for the Marvel Prime universe in their whole convoluted multiverse), feels right.

    The first episode looks to cover “Japanese Spider-man,” a licensed version of the character that’s very unique and nearly unknown outside of Japan. Other filmmakers include Paul Scheer, Gillian Jacobs, Clay Jeter, Andrew Rossi, Sarah Ramos, Brian Oakes, and Alison Brie, and it looks like it’s going to run from the 90s boom, the amazing cosplayers of today, and the impact that comics have in diversity (and a lovely flex against known jackass Ike Perlmutter) among artists and writers.

    616 will be available on November 10th… weirdly making it the first MCU show to come to Disney+.

    Deadline has also announced that 18-year-old Canadian actress, Iman Vellani, has been cast in the title role for the Ms. Marvel / Kamala Khan series. She doesn’t have any credits to her name, but honestly, that’s not much to judge a young actor on. She looks the part of the character, and given the answers she gave to a panel at the Toronto International Film Festival… she’s going to just nail the nerd aspect (her answer to “who would play you in a movie?” was “Iron Man… duh”).

  • The BAMF Himself is Returning for a Nick Fury Disney+ Show

    The BAMF Himself is Returning for a Nick Fury Disney+ Show

    I remember sitting in the theater during Iron Man with a friend, and watching the stinger at the end that revealed Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, and effectively redefined the modern blockbuster. Iron Man was seen as a shot-in-the-dark movie at the time, and while the original still stands as the best, in large part to the perfect casting of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark… it was Nick Fury coming out at the end that made the Marvel Cinematic Universe a thing.

    Variety reports that he’s tapped for the new series, but details are sparse past that. We do know, thanks to Spider-Man: Far From Home*, that Fury is currently cruising around Outer Space with the Skrulls, doing whatever it is that Nick Fury does. We don’t know for how long (though we can assume it was post-Civil War, probably post-Age of Ultron), or what he was up two (likely founding S.W.O.R.D.).

    For those keeping score at home… this now makes for something like the fifty-third (or 8th) show announced, and thus far, exactly none of them have come out. WandaVision will be showing up in December, but that’s the only one with anything even coming close to a release date. Look, Disney+, you already have my money… you don’t need to keep sweetening the pot. Just put something out!

    *Interesting trivia fact… Tom Holland was a couple thousand miles from his home where Spider-Man homecoming was filmed, and a few miles from it in Spider-Man Far From Home.

  • WandaVision Official Trailer Brings the Weird

    WandaVision Official Trailer Brings the Weird

    Okay, yeah… that was, something. Actually, if you’re a fan of Marvel Comics and have been following them for awhile, it was specifically two somethings sort of fused together: the incredible House of M crossover event from 2005, and the somehow even more incredible The Vision 12-issue series from 2015. The influences are obvious from both of those, along with so many Easter Eggs that it could cause a bit of whiplash finding them all.

    Of course, after we saw the couple sharing dinner with Wanda and Vision, I was just left wishing that Kirkwood Smith would have been there.