Category: LEGO

Come on, this was just last year… it’s not fair that by the time this publishes, because we are bad at math when we started to schedule these, that it will be two years ago. This was the year where we really worked on changing the focus of the site, we brought on a new writer, and we talked about the Nintendo Switch… a lot.

For this series, we’re going to walk through the years and go through some of the touchpoints that we’ve been through in the big focuses of our site… movies, video game, and of course… LEGO.

Previous Years:
2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017

Video Games

Ace’s Pick: Like I said in the 2017 post, that was the year I started paying more attention to games. And I couldn’t have started at a better time because a year later, 2018 would turn up just some absolute stellar games. The top 4 for me are God of War, Spider-Man, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and Hollow Knight. While I still hold on to completing God of War on Give Me God of War difficulty as my crowning achievement in video gaming, I really have to give my favorite title of 2018 to:

I more or less retired from Splatoon 2 when Super Smash Bros. Ultimate came out. And for a game to make me stop playing that deserves some recognition.  And in a year of, like I said, stellar releases, this is one that I still get excited to play and gets my adrenaline going like no other.

Eric’s Pick: Somehow Ace has more hours on Smash Ultimate than I do, by double, so I’ll talk about my other favorite game of 2018.

Originally, I picked up Celeste for the Switch and played it while jogging on a treadmill. Which…none of that is the optimal way to experience this game. Maybe it’s just me, but I find Celeste to be nearly unplayable on the Joycons, and it feels like the precise input needed is always slightly off. So earlier this year, when Epic Games offered Celeste for free on PC, I grabbed it and played it with my Xbox One controller. And it’s crazy how much better an experience a good controller can make. Celeste quickly became one of my favorite platformers of all time, right up there next to the big boys: Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. It’s a game that is perfectly designed, and wickedly hard. I thought I was a bad boy being able to beat the main game in about an hour and a half, and then the new Chapter 9 DLC came out and beat me down again and again.

That isn’t to say the game is too hard. Celeste offers all sorts of accessability options, which in 2019’s all-inclusive gaming environment, is absolutely awesome. Even if you’re trash at platformers, I recommend giving Celeste a try. You can do it.

Nick’s Pick: I know it’s because it’s still fresh and all, but 2018 was just a bang-up year for gaming. Smash Ultimate came out and consumed Ace completely… it turns out that he has only been a virtual recreation, and hasn’t actually left his couch since it came out. Seriously, I just checked, and he’s put more than 500 hours into the game.

I don’t have a leg to stand on, I suppose, as I’ve 109 hours into Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, which came out in 2018. We got Octopath Traveler (probably at least 50 hours), Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu (40 hours), Red Dead Redemption 2, Far Cry 5 (30 hours), and a bunch of others. There were some real great indie games in 2018 as well, stuff like Donut County, Minit, the Messenger, and the amazing Celeste. There’s also Beat Saber, the only game to date that has made me actually consider getting a VR headset.

There were some real wet turds in 2018 as well… Fallout 76 was a game so bad that it looks to have done permanent damage to Bethesda (and deservedly so). Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 dropped the single player and a good chunk of the player base along with it (I gave up before WW2), sports games went full microtransaction, and Sea of Thieves was the best idea that ended up being just terrible.

For me, though, the game was defined by two different games, both PS4 exclusives, both single-player, that stand as not only the best games of the generation, but of probably the last decade or more. Yeah, I know, we pick one, but I came up with this insane idea, so I’m going to break my rules and pick them both: Marvel’s Spider-Man and God of War.

There is no reason for God of War to have been as good as it was… the first three games are non-stop action, violence, and bloodshed. When the teasers came out, it showed an older Kratos, which was fine… but also that he was responsible for a kid. There is no reality where Kratos should be allowed around a child, after, you know, being tricked into killing his wife and daughter before the first game.

Past the plot reasons, companions in games in general are awful a great portion of the time. When we got the game, it was a revelation. Not only was the companion not awful, Atreus was actually awesome and a hugely important part of the game. The gameplay was incredible, the story even more so… not only God of War a worthy new entry into the series, it is probably the best game of the series.

Spider-Man had the benefit of a pretty amazing-looking trailer that was shown at E3 earlier in the year. The only problem with it was that it was a comic book game, and those miss far more often than they end up hitting. Yet, after playing it… this is probably the best comic book game ever made. Not only is the story amazing, a faithful look at the mythos of Spider-Man in a different light, and an open world that actually makes you want to explore it… it makes the basic elements of gameplay: moving, swinging, travelling, just insanely rewarding and fun. I can’t think of another game that includes a fast travel, but you never want to use it.

Movies

Ace’s Pick: No contest:

Nothing even comes close. It’s on heavy rotation in my house. I love it, my kids love it, even my wife enjoyed it and she’s not really into super hero movies. I waxed poetic about Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse before in my write-up / review. Everything in there still holds true. The style, the story, the visuals, the soundtrack, pacing, characters, plot, voice acting, everything. There’s humor, there’s drama, there’s heart, there’s loss, there’s redemption. It is one of rare films where every aspect just shines through 100%. I mean, you are CRAZY if you haven’t seen this movie yet. It’s one of the best, if not THE BEST Marvel super hero movies ever made.

Eric’s Pick: Once again, I’m the odd man out between these other two guys. I talked about my favorite movie last year in my Best Of post, so just go read that to hear how much I love Molly’s Game.

Fun fact, this poster is horrible and barely conveys what this movie is about. Which is of course why I chose it.

Nick’s Pick: This is simultaneously the easiest and hardest pick I have to make in all of the years… 2018 had some good, even great, movies, but there are two that stand out… and both happen to be comic book movies: Black Panther and Spider-man: Into the Spider-Verse. I… honestly don’t know how to pick between the two of them.

A week ago, a coworker asked me during a discussion about movies, where I was being my normal critical and snarky self, if there was a movie that I couldn’t come up with anything I didn’t like about it. After thinking… I named Into the Spider-Verse. It may just be literally the perfect comic book movie, that absolutely nails the characters and continues to surprise throughout the film. Ace already said enough about it above, so just chalk up the rest of my stuff as “ditto.”

Black Panther, by contrast, does have a few things that I would quibble over, but at the same time… it’s what I still think is the absolute best the MCU film made to date. The characters are deep and complex, and the villain, Killmonger, is by miles the most fascinating “bad guy” that Marvel has ever given us. He was clearly bad, and a lot of what he did wrong… but the beauty of the movie is that he was also right. He was doing the wrong things for the right reasons, and it had a complexity and depth that the rest of the MCU, which I love, hasn’t ever aspired to.

LEGO

Ace’s Pick: One sub-theme of LEGO’s Creator line that I am really enjoying is the amusement park sub-theme, and in 2018 we were graced with this feat of engineering:

10261 Roller Coaster looks right at home next to the Ferris Wheel and Carousel sets for obvious reasons. This set is also just MASSIVE in the sense that you’ll need a wide area to accommodate its large footprint. The actual roller coaster cars moves smoothly and travels quite quickly down the tracks. The only flaw is that the set does not come with a motor, which is just criminal. There’s something quite satisfying watching the cars go up and around over and over again, even more so when two cars are going at once, without having to manually crank them up the incline.

Eric’s Pick: Oh, Harry Potter. Harry Potter. If you kept up with our Advent Calendar stuff this last month, then you know I love it. So when Lego announced a reboot of the Harry Potter series, I was all about it.

So the Collectable Minifigures, of course, are the best way to get a nice range of Harry Potter figures. The only tricky part is avoiding the god-awful Fantastic Beasts stuff. Plus, we got the introduction of the “teenage” legs, which is a big enough deal to warrant it’s own article that I never wrote. Currently, the “rebooted Harry Potter” Lego sets are for Goblet of Fire, so I’m looking forward to Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince sets, which we never got enough of the first time.

Nick’s Pick: I didn’t buy any LEGO in 2018 for myself. I probably got a few sets for my daughter as gifts, and I probably got my son Duplo for Christmas that year… but I didn’t buy myself anything that I remember. I’m taking a pass, as I just ignored LEGO for a year to focus on movies, video games, and other stuff.

We’re finally into the time where all of us likely have condiments in our fridge that expired in 2017 but we can’t bring ourselves to throw away. I mean, can mustard really even go bad? It was only two years ago, but at times, feels like an eternity and other times feels like it was just last week. Anyone else feel like that about most of these years? It could be we’ve just gotten old here at FBTB…

For this series, we’re going to walk through the years and go through some of the touchpoints that we’ve been through in the big focuses of our site… movies, video game, and of course… LEGO.

Previous Years:
2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016

Video Games

Ace’s Pick: 2017 saw the release of the Switch and it was about that time that coincidentally I was able to pick up one of my favorite pastimes on a more regular basis: video games. Sure, I had my 3DS on me, but  I wanted more. My kids were more self sufficient and required less attention; they were all in school and had regular schedules. Or maybe I believed that to make more time for games. WHO KNOWS?!?

I played more on the PS4 and made a focused effort on trying to reduce my game backlog. Yes, even though I wasn’t playing a lot, I still bought games. I fully attribute that to FOMO. But when that Switch came out, I was excited. I paid more attention to what games came out that year and it was a pretty stellar year: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, Horizon Zero Dawn, Nier: Automata, Overcooked!, etc. But there was one game that to this day is ranked #1 in terms of hours played:

I’ve clocked in 1,365 hours on Splatoon 2. I’ve more or less retired from playing it since Smash came out. Also, I want to play and complete different games but I can’t do that if I’m constantly in a ranked match or doing a Salmon Run. This game is so fun, I can’t wait for the next installment to pour another 1,000+ hours into.

While I’m still on my soapbox, I want to give a special mention to this particular game:

This was the swan song for the 3DS. Metroid: Samus Returns is a remake of the Game Boy game Metroid II: Return of Samus. As remakes go, it included a lot of quality of life improvements over the original such as an in-game map, map pins to mark locations, new game save structure, and sometimes overly-generous item drops. There’s a new melee counter move that was satisfying to land and functionally served another purpose in getting back some energy. Yes, other games came out after it, but no one cares about or even remembers any of those games. This was the last great game to the system and like Twilight Princess HD for the Wii U, it was a fine way to say farewell to the system.

Eric’s Pick: Since Nick’s talking about my actual favorite game of 2017 below, I figured I’d talk about second place, because, honestly, it deserves to be talked about.

As I mentioned in the Best of 2013 article, post-Skyward Sword, pre-BOTW Zelda was in a not great place. We were also in the period of time where pretty much every mainline Zelda game got a re-release or remaster, and some unexpected spinoffs like Tri-Force Heroes and Hyrule Warriors. So when BOTW finally released, well, critics were excited. I think it’s far from a perfect game (unlike a little Mario title that Nick talks about), but credit has to be given to how well the game shook up the games industry. I mean, developers like Sam Barlow, who made FMV detective game Her Story, and Traveller’s Tales themselves, who’s making the new Lego Star Wars game have credited inspiration to Breath of the Wild.

Which…seems a little sensational to me, but I do write for this site, so I’m cynical by nature. But I’d still say, next to 2011’s Dark Souls, BOTW is likely the most influential game of the decade, and it’s only been out for ~3 years.

But let me talk about the game – what’s good and what’s not so good.

Exploration, or, the main draw of the game, is done obviously really well. Jumping in with no clue where to go, just knowing that you have to eventually fight Ganon in Hyrule Castle, and going to go gear up, feels so cool. Finding a little village in the middle of nowhere, or a warm, relaxing stable is always a treat. The sidequests are pretty interesting a varied, though the rewards can be…lukewarm. The systems -magnetism, freezing water, stasis, and bombs – work together in incredibly interesting ways and allow for really creative solutions. The world, while not especially beautiful, has an atmosphere thicker than a rain storm in Florida. I think Nintendo had a very specific vision for how they wanted their world to look and feel, and they nailed it.

But! There are some problems that can crop up naturally because of this that Nintendo didn’t avoid. For one, eventually, many, many hours down the road, exploration itself can feel a bit repetitive. The shrines, which are like mini-dungeons, feel samey, and, in some cases, are literally the same. The main four / five dungeons themselves in the form of the Divine Beasts, while cool concepts, also suffer from sameness. The weapon durability has already been blasted into oblivion by the Internet, and I think an increased durability would have been a good solution. There are only 10 or so enemy designs that are palette-swapped out to have more HP / hit harder. And climbing. Man, I hate climbing in this game. It’s boring by itself, but add rain, which causes you to slide down the wall every few seconds, and it’s infuriating. Your options at that point are to: A.) try and keep climbing and hope you’ll eventually make it or B.) go make a campfire (somewhere covered by the rain) and wait it out. Neither are fun. Neither are good options. And there’s no food or clothing buff that can avoid this. So rain can just totally ruin your plans. In a game about exploration, adding this extremely inhibiting feature baffles me.

Okay, that’s a lot of negative. But despite all of that, Breath of the Wild is a magical game that I think anyone should try. You’ll be swept up in it so quickly and for quite a long time before you see the flaws. And that’s okay; I feel like I got my money’s worth in that time.

Nick’s Pick: I’ll be honest… I didn’t do a ton of gaming in 2017, compared to other years. There were a couple of reasons for this: my daughter and my (at the time) newborn son, who came along in 2017. If anything, the year ended up being a breaking point for me on a lot of titles… Battlefront II came out at the end of 2017 and laid the greed of the AAA industry bare for everyone to see. They got smacked down hard, but didn’t really change their behavior in the end.

Interestingly, this was the first year I didn’t buy a Call of Duty game in… as long as they have been making Call of Duty games. That series had been sliding downhill for a long time, and there was buzz about it being revitalized going back to its roots, but honestly, just couldn’t be bothered. That Activision|Blizzard would go on to be terrible wasn’t on my radar… I disliked Activision back then, but Blizzard seemed like it was okay. We all know how that turned out, though…

I came to the Switch a few months late, but my playtime in 2017 was dominated by it, and that really hasn’t changed ever since. There were several games that came out with it… and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was one that took a lot of my time, got me into a crippling amiibo addiction, and has me going back to play it yet again. I don’t think it was a perfect game, and had more than a few complaints about the durability and rain system… but I still love it. Yet… I don’t think it’s the best Switch game ever made.

That title goes to their flagship character’s first release on the Switch: Super Mario‘s Nipples Odyssey. Any game should be fun to play… but Odyssey was a game that was a joy to play. It rewarded you for playing the game and having fun. It encouraged you to try weird things, look around, explore, and just wander.

It wasn’t the depth that Breath of the Wild was for challenge… it wasn’t trying to be. Yet it somehow ended up being the best 3D Mario game ever made (Mario 64 loses the crown to Odyssey), and likely good enough to make it into the top 3 with SMB3 and Super Mario World. It’s just that good.

Movies

Ace’s Pick: Batman Batman Batman. He’s the crutch that the DC super hero movie genre leans heavily on. And the previous year’s Batman vs. Superman was less than stellar to put it mildly. Had the mythos of Batman lost its luster? Probably. But here came this heroine to make DC super hero movies relevant again:

Wonder Woman blew away my expectations. I still remember the feeling of sitting in the theater when the credits started rolling and just how much I enjoyed it. If DC never made another Batman movie, not sure I’d bat so much as an eye, pun not intended. But please keep making Wonder Woman movies.

Eric’s Pick: It’s likely that you’ve seen at least on Key and Peele sketch around the Internet, even secondhand. It’s such a popular show, and everyone loves at least one bit the show does. In 2016, the duo of Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele made Keanu, a movie about a cat. It wasn’t bad, just a fine comedy movie. But, in 2017, Peele flipped around and hit us with:

I’m a sucker for a good thriller, and I hate horror (which is a really fine line, I know), and Get Out nails it for me. Everything, literally everything in this movie is in service to the plot, from the music, to the sets, even little lines here and there. The symbolism is intensely strong. I don’t want to speak too much about it, because I went into this blind and fell in love, and I want to same for anyone reading this.

Nick’s Pick: Another just stacked year for movies that I love… 2017 gave us what was was both the best love letter and roast of Batman in the LEGO Batman Movie. It reinvented what Marvel Movies were going to be about by giving us the shockingly wonderful Thor: Ragnarok, one of the best war movies in years with Dunkirk, and what is by miles the best DCEU movie made in Wonder Woman. A movie that should have just been terrible, that literally no one asked for, in the Jumanji sequel/remake, ended up being pretty terrific.

Of course, we cannot let the year go by without acknowledging that Star Wars: The Last Jedi came out, and we saw the disgusting and toxic side of Star Wars fandom start to poison everything. I’ve given my thoughts on TLJ a lot of times… I loved it, but acknowledge the flaws within (casino planet at the top of said list). That being said, the attacks by all the toxic manbabies who are sad because girls are seen and heard or who knows what else, also meant that a ton of people who love Star Wars disengaged with the fandom.

I was hoping that they would have all drowned in their tears, alone and unloved, by now… but unfortunately they’ve still been out there harassing the actors and fans alike. I’m writing this the day before Rise of Skywalker comes out, but luckily I’ve managed to avoid most of their rantings, as I just don’t go to the places where they like to frequent. There are still good fan communities out there, full of people who liked, or didn’t like, movies like TLJ and the prequels and can talk about it like adults… but they are sadly rare.

As much as I liked TLJ, it’s not the movie I would pick as my favorite of 2017…

That honor goes to a movie that not nearly enough people saw… Logan Lucky. If you saw the trailer… you had no idea what this was going to be. Let’s see… we have James Bond with frosted tips speaking in an southern American accent. Kylo Ren has slow speech and a prosthetic hand. Magic Mike is… well, he’s still Magic. At its core, it’s a heist movie, something that I love. More than that, though, it has a thread of emotional impact that you absolutely will not see coming. I’m not ashamed to say that I teared up for a particular musical scene at the end… it was beautiful; it’s a “twist” in that a movie was able to deliver that sort of hit with the overall story being told. It’s also helped by being a pretty vicious takedown of the modern economic and corporate system, and subtly pokes holes at a lot of American preconceptions, so of course I was going to like it.

LEGO

Ace’s Pick: 2017 was the year I came clean about all my stuff. I wasn’t building as much, I was trying to not buy as much. Needless to say I was at a bit of a crossroads with LEGO in my life. Still, if I had to pick the one set I liked the most from this year, this would be it:

Seeing this thing on-screen in The LEGO Batman Movie split apart into 4 separate vehicles was bonkers. Seeing, building, and playing with the exact same set and have it do the exact same thing from the movie was even more bonkers. My favorite part was the motorcycle and how the wheels split apart. The black and the yellow color scheme is signature Batman-themed colors but the red highlights were a really nice accent. It’s massive, totally impractical, but so much fun.

Eric’s Pick: You guys remember the LEGO Ninjago Movie and how it came out in 2017? What? Not really, because no one saw it? Yeah, I feel that. Well, a handful of sets were released with the movie, including one great standout:

Coming from the straight-laced modular buildings, 70620 Ninjago City is so much more interesting just to look at. I love the old school / modern Japan aesthetic of the entire movie, and I’m glad it was reflected into this set. I don’t even have this set; I just like looking at it.

Nick’s Pick: 2016 broke me for Star Wars, but 2017 was the year that broke me for everything else. There were a few nice sets this year, like the Saturn V rocket… but 2017 marks the start of my “Dark Ages.” In all honesty, I don’t expect them to end… I’m mostly done with LEGO outside of the occasional purchase. The front part of the year (really, the end of 2016), was loaded with a lot of The LEGO Batman Movie sets… which I loved, but all had the problem of being overpriced.

I reviewed 70912 Arkham Asylum for the site, and gave it pretty rave reviews. I still have it, tucked away somewhere, along with all of the minifigs from this particular theme. I have all of the LEGO Batman Movie stuff… but none of it would I qualify as must have. A lot of the reason I’ve held on to my collection is that it often hasn’t felt worth the effort to part, build, reassemble, disassemble, and list everything. The recent change in ownership at Bricklink hasn’t enticed me much more, so eventually I’ll probably just do a big bulk sale and be done with them.

There’s always the question “why not save them for your kids?” The honest answer? Because my kids won’t care about them… kids love LEGO, but they don’t care about collecting sets, buying up all the different minifigures, etc. Well, I’m sure some do… but mine don’t. More than that… they want their own stuff, the things they love. 2017 is a bittersweet year for LEGO… it marked the closing of a chapter of my life. It turns out, when I was done with LEGO, I ended up not missing it like I thought I would. And that kind of makes me sad…

We’re starting to get into the range of years where they feel far more like “wait, isn’t it still such and such” or “wasn’t that just yesterday?” Honestly, for a lot of people, 2016 was a pretty tough year… there were some election and political changes worldwide that we are still dealing with the ramifications of today. I don’t want to turn every one of these intros into a downer, because in truth, no matter how bad the world feels, when you focus on the part around you, it’s likely better than you think. That’s been my coping mechanism, anyway… I can’t affect the world at large, but I can make sure my life is the best it can be.

For this series, we’re going to walk through the years and go through some of the touchpoints that we’ve been through in the big focuses of our site… movies, video game, and of course… LEGO.

Previous Years:
2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015

Video Games

Ace’s Pick: 2016 was the year that Nintendo was prepping for the Switch launch the following year. One of the launch titles for the Switch was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild that included amiibo support. If you scanned in a Wolf Link amiibo into the game, you could summon a Wolf Link as a companion. The Wolf Link only had three hearts worth of life but if you played through the Cave of Shadows in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD, you could get a Wolf Link with the maximum number of hearts to load into BotW. Which is exactly what I did!

I never played the GameCube version even though I have it. I think it’s still sealed too. But I heard/read great things about it. The amiibo functionality was a bit gimmicky, but it was all the convincing I needed to buy the bundle and try the game out. Sure there was a glitch where you could skip the Cave of Shadows and save a game file to the amiibo for the full 20 hearts, but I didn’t mind playing through the whole game. I saw what the fuss was all about and it lived up to my expectations. This was the very last game I played on the Wii U and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. It was a remarkable game to say farewell to the Wii U with.

Eric’s Pick:

I picked Hitman 2016 as my favorite game I played last year, and there’s not much more I can say about it, so I’ll just copy a piece of what I wrote last year:

Hitman gets better the more you do missions because you get better. And you want to. My first playthrough of that level took me about 2 hours. Now I can kill the two targets in about 3 minutes. You feel professional and like a proper assassin, which, as cliche as the “this game makes you feel like _____” saying is, it’s a completely earned feeling.

Unlike Metal Gear Solid V’s approach of “do the mission however you want”, Hitman plays more like a puzzle game of “how can you kill the targets in the quickest, stealthiest way, and get away with it”. The fun comes with the game not telling you how to do that at all, so you learn by trial and error.

Overwatch came out the same year, which I also talked about last year. Nowadays I’m not as much into it, but I still go back, despite my best wishes. Blizzard, to their credit (sorry Nick), added a Role Queue feature, which fixed up a lot of the multiplayer toxicity and annoyance that comes from having to play on a team with a bunch of random people. It’s still far from a perfect game, and we’ll see where it’s at next year.

Nick’s Pick: This might be the single hardest year to pick a single game as the best. 2016 gave us a gorgeous indie game in Firewatch, a sequel that had no business being good but was actually amazing in Uncharted 4, a game that has, for better or worse, been absolutely pivotal on how the AAA industry does money and how shooters are made in Overwatch, and the unbelievably fun (but sad to read about the development of) Stardew Valley. I have played so many of these games, and continue to play them still.

Doom, Dark Souls III, Civilization 6, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Hyper Light Drifter, World of Warcraft: Legion, The Witcher 3, Super Hot, Battlefield 1, Final Fantasy XV, Forza Horizon 3, and Dishonored 2 all came out this year. Even the disappointing games from that year, like No Man’s Sky and Pokemon Go, have been reinvented and continue to thrive. For the year, though, I’m going to call out the game that I mentioned in my review of JEDI: Fallen Order, and a studio that EA seems to just hate in how it launches its game in efforts to make them fail.

Titanfall 2 has one of the best single player shooter campaigns ever done. The original game was kind of a disappointment, since it showed so much promise, and ended up being a multiplayer only affair in a setting that demanded explanation and story. The first person platforming was, simply put, incredible… the mechanics never overstayed their welcome or felt forced, and it was just fluid and fun.

It’s only sin was the fact that EA simply buried it on the schedule. EA, in all of it’s idocry and arrogance, launched it a week after Battlefield 1, one of the most anticipated shooters at the time (which was okay, but overrated), and a week before Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (which was actually fun, but the start of CoD’s multiplayer imploding into gross imbalance). Even those of us that play a lot of games are going to balk at buying three similar titles, one week after the next, at full AAA prices. I ended up skipping Battlefield 1 until much later, and bought and enjoyed the crap out of Titanfall 2 (and did get Infinite Warfare, because my friend circle at the time played it a lot, but don’t think I put it in for a few weeks after purchase). I’ve never gone back to CoD:IW and only played about an hour of BF1 when I got around to getting it… but I’ll go back to Titanfall 2 every now and again and enjoying it all over again.

Movies

Ace’s Pick: This is a tough call. When writing these up, it’s usually pretty easy to come to a decision to picking my favorite for the year for whatever category. But my favorite movie from 2016 has had me going back and forth like no other year or category because this was the year that two of my favorite movies came out: La La Land and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. I’m going to have to tip my hat to La La Land and pick that as that is a more complete story.

I maintain that Rogue One is the best Star Wars movie ever made, but it’s in context to the opening of A New Hope. The events of that movie would have repercussions through the rest of the original trilogy. Not many prequels can do that without contradicting events of the already-told future, *cough*prequel trilogy*cough*, but Rogue One did it masterfully. It’s not perfect, but I can live with most of the issues. I do find myself wishing time and time again that they would skip most of the beginning and start right where Jyn gets rescued. I find that to be the actual start of the movie.

La La Land on the other hand, is more of a complete package and needs less armchair editing from me. I wasn’t sure what kind of movie it was going to be on my first viewing. I surely wasn’t expecting a lot from a love story. I certainly wasn’t expecting to cry, but there I was wiping away tears.

Eric’s Pick: My pick for 2016, without a doubt is A Monster Calls.

Basically no one has seen this movie, which is a shame. It barely broke even of its $43 million budget. It’s directed by J.A. Bayona, who directed The LEGO Batman Movie and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (ehhh). And yet the cast is stacked: Felicity Jones, Sigourney Weaver, and the ever-perfect Liam Neeson as basically a storytelling version of Groot.

The setup is this: a boy’s mother has cancer, and to help him deal with that trauma, a giant tree monster tells him stories during the night. Weird? Oh yeah. Wonderful? Yep yep.

I’ve never been emotionally destroyed by a movie quite like this one, and I just wish more people have seen it.

Nick’s Pick: At first glance, 2016 seems like a really off year for movies. There are certainly some good ones that I’ve watched several times, thanks to my kids, like Zootopia, Moana, and Finding Dory. There’s the “weakest” of the Captain America movies, Civil War, which is still a great movie, and Doctor Strange, which is good but still probably the weakest of the MCU movies after they finally hit their stride post Dark World / Age of Ultron / etc.

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that 2016 gifted us with the big fat turd that is still among my most hated movies of all time, one that I’ve spent thousands of words writing about on this site: Batman v Superman. Even the title is dumb, using v instead of vs. or versus. Even a bunch of polish and extending an already excessive runtime in the ultimate edition couldn’t fix the movie. DC really stunk it up that year, and gave us the “better by default but still boring as sin” Suicide Squad that made everyone collectively distrust trailers ever since.

When I was first writing this, I was debating between two movies… Rogue One and Arrival, both of which are amazing for completely different reasons. Rogue One because it somehow filled in blanks no one realized we needed or wanted filled in and gave us the best Star Wars story of the Disney era (I stick by this after seeing Rise of Skywalker and rewatching the others). Arrival is one of the best Science Fiction movies ever made, with an amazing story that demands you pay attention to follow and comprehend… and Amy Adams deserved far more accolades and awards for her performance than she ultimately got. All of that being said, there was a comic movie that came out in 2016 that absolutely got everything right about a character I love…

Deadpool started his life in Comics back in the 90s as a Rob Liefeld creation that was a straight-up ripoff of Deathstroke over at DC. He wasn’t notable or interesting in his debut, and showed up in early X-Force a couple of times… but later was turned into a 4th wall-breaking comic goofball when he got his own ongoing in the late 90s and has turned in some of the best, and funniest, comic series ever since (seriously, Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe and the various Cable & Deadpool comics are so worth your time). Fun fact, way back in that first Cable & Deadpool series, he describes himself as “Ryan Reynolds crossed with a Shar-Pei” – though Reynolds name gets misspelled.

In live action, the journey to the movie was a bit more rough. Reynolds turn as a superhero in Green Lantern was… let’s say… bad. Technically, the character was introduced in anything but name back in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a movie that is considered a crime in some states, and the director decided the way you best do the “merc with a mouth” is to remove his mouth entirely.

In very Deadpool-ian fashion, this movie was never supposed to be made – it had been killed by Fox and shot down until someone (likely Reynolds or Tim Miller) leaked a screen test for the character that became the only thing on the internet for a few days and created enough buzz that it got made. Fox then meddled and screwed with it, slashing their budget and forcing cuts, which somehow made the movie even better, and when it was released, it smashed apart all of the records, and made $738 million… against its $58 million budget… and stands out as the best example of “film execs do not understand their customers” to date.

Oh, and the movie is fantastic too.

LEGO

Ace’s Pick: This set gives me the heebie jeebies:

It’s just pure nightmare fuel. And one I never thought LEGO would ever release. It just seems so…. not LEGO to do. Venom always seemed creepy in the comics, and I likened it to a living mass of black tar. This rendition with the multiple heads though… just… ugh. Creepy as heck. I bought a couple but never got around to building it. Not sure I ever will.

Eric’s Pick: 95% of the Lego sets I received over my life have been licensed sets. I’ve never really cared about themes like Town, or Creator, and I think you can tell that this site, for the most part, reflects that. They’re fine-looking sets, but for adult collectors, I guess the appeal comes from licensed sets being recognizeable from other mediums. I mean, just look at our best of picks from the last years – there’s a trend. In 2016, though, I finally broke and grabbed a copy of 10251 Brick Bank.

I had such a blast putting it together and looking at it. It didn’t really pretend to be a playset, instead an intricate model. Until I finally tore it down in moving away, I always had a good time checking out the details, even if it was my 500th time seeing it. And, it’s gotten me interested in the other modular buildings, and wishing I had the funds to buy every release since they started in 2007.

Nick’s Pick: This was the year that first broke me on Star Wars LEGO. The supremely lackluster Hoth Rebel Base, the re-release of the Death Star Playset, and just the overall quality of the Force Awakens and Rogue One sets when compared to the price for them… I haven’t bought a Star Wars set since somewhere in the middle of that year. At the very end of the year, though, a ton of the LEGO Batman Movie sets came out, and I loved so many of them that I wish I had some shelf place to keep them displayed. True fact… when I had to tear down all my displays after my son was born, the LEGO Batman Movie was the last stuff to go.

I maintain that the LEGO Batman Movie is the best Batman movie ever made… at least in the sense of both loving and understanding the source material. If you are a fan of a wide variety of Batman stuff… from the comics to the 60s show to the Keaton movies and even to the shlock that feature Affleck, this movie hit so close to the spirit of the character, while also making fun of it in such a deserving way, that it was great. Sadly, the movie came out in 2017 so I couldn’t pick it above, but we started reviewing the sets in November of 2016 and 70905 The Batmobile was one of my absolute favorites.

The sets capture that same sort of over-the-top absurdity and love, and the insanely fun to build and even more fun to play with Batmobile just came out on top. While a bit pricey, it makes up for it on fun and style, and even as a display piece, I’d pick it up once a week to roll it around. It was a spectacular set that I need to build again, if no other reason than to let my kids play with it.

Ah, 2015… it feels like so long ago, and I suppose, for some, it was. For me, (Nick), it was when I switched jobs and switched states, so it was a big year of change and upheaval. In the long run, it’s been great for me, but it did have an unfortunate side effect of making it so I was always short on space… and that eventually led to me giving up my LEGO collection entirely. But hey, back then, there was all kinds of great stuff coming out.

For this series, we’re going to walk through the years and go through some of the touchpoints that we’ve been through in the big focuses of our site… movies, video game, and of course… LEGO.

Previous Years:
2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014

Video Games

Ace’s Pick: At some point I put down the 3DS and started playing more on the maligned Wii U, and that point was sometime in 2015 when this gem came out:

Holy smokes was it a great game. The mechanics of killing opponents were nothing I’ve ever seen in a shooter. Not only was the gameplay fun and unique, the in-game culture, the language, and the aesthetics of it all showed just how much work Nintendo invested in making this original IP stand out. And it paid off when it won multiple awards that year. It remains one of my favorite franchises.

Eric’s Pick: As Reggie Fils-Aimé said – “If it’s not fun, why bother?” There’s obviously a lot of counterpoints about that, but I get the spirit of what he’s saying.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is…an incredible game. The story is a complete mess, floating between messy and, uh, cringey. The open world is kinda empty, and while I’d say Kojima could have shrinken it down, it also feels really legitimate.

But the very fundamentals, the moment-to-moment gameplay is top-notch and the absolute freedom has never been match by anything. ANYTHING. I don’t care, Breath of the Wild, you didn’t come close. By, like, Mission 5, the amount of tools you have at your disposal is astounding. You can sneak into a base all stealthily via cardboard box. Or shoot out a light, distract a guard, and move while he’s distracted. Carefully tranquilize every guard and fulton extract them away. You could use D-Dog, your half-wolf, half-unknown, eyepatched friend, to bark really loud over in one place while you run the other way. You could use inflatable versions of yourself to distract guards. Or a charged up stun prosthetic arm. Or just go in shooting everyone. It ain’t stealthy, but it’ll work.

Of course, you could just use a sniper rifle from barely inside the mission area to pick off the target, and then you’re done in, like, three minutes.

The amount of systems in the game that work together to provide unique experiences is completely crazy. If you take too long, the shift could change and more guards could show up, which could mess you up if you’re going the tranquilizer route. But, if you checked the time and then parked your horse, D-Horse (yeah, I know) down the road where you know the car carrying guards will be coming from, that’ll buy you another five or so seconds. The more guards you kill, the more geared up they get, to the point where they have basically impenetrable body armor, and then you have to get really creative.

Some games that offer “freedom”, like Fallout (sorry, Nick), never really encourage you to change up your strategy. MGSV forces it, and it’s all the better for it, because there’s so much crazy stuff you could go with, and so many ways you can approach the missions.

Death Stranding, which I haven’t talked about on the site yet (and may not), offers a similar freedom, but it’s all focused on walking from point A to point B, and therefore the route itself never really changes, just the tools you use to get there. It’s a bit more restricted, but at the same time more refined.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Bloodborne as well. Everything about 2011’s Dark Souls has been transferred over to this new game and elevated – the atmosphere, the combat, the design. There’s a few issues, as with every game, but it’s an extremely solid – and very difficult – addition to the Soulsborne family. It’s a shorter, but more refined experience.

Nick’s Pick: I’m writing this before Ace, but I’m going to guess he puts Splatoon on this list. There are some truly great games that came out in 2015… Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain was Kojima at his best and Konami at their worst (for forcing him out, focusing on gambling machines, and shorting the game development). Undertale is one of the best, if not the best, indie game ever made. Bloodborne and The Witcher 3 are both classics that I wish I could have gotten in to more than I did.

Bethesda is a hot mess of a company that lies to our faces and is more than willing to destroy the shreds of its reputation for short term gains. Fallout 76 is a tire fire of a microtransaction front, and I have zero faith in whatever they come with next. Fallout 4 wasn’t a perfect game… it had great side quests and a messy main quest. The villages wouldn’t stay saved, Preston Garvey made me want to go evil and turn him into jerky… but I’ve still spent hundreds of hours in this game. The base building system, combined with mods on the PC, were fantastic, and it has a charm that I doubt Bethesda can ever produce again.

Movies

Ace’s Pick: This was a tough year to pick from as there were several stand out films that I still enjoy watching to this day. In spite of the current state of the franchise, I’m going with this one:

This was the first movie after the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm. Yes, this was more or less a reboot of A New Hope, but I’m okay with that. We’ve seen what George Lucas can do with the prequels and the constant edits of the original trilogy when given 100% control. It was time to pass the baton to someone else. If we ignore the majority of TLJ and assume ROS never happened, this movie is still enjoyable and fun to watch.

Eric’s Pick: Aaron Sorkin is my favorite writer, and Danny Boyle is one of my favorite directors, so when they came together for Steve Jobs…

It’s an incredibly well-written movie. It’s not 100% accurate to life, nor do the actors look exactly like the people they’re portraying, but it’s a movie. It’s elevated reality. I love both of the other two guys’ picks, but Steve Jobs is the only movie that could take place in an empty box and I would be completely enraptured. Hell, it basically does.

Nick’s Pick: There were several different contenders for the top movie in this year. The Martian was basically engineering porn, and I loved it (the book was good too). This was the year we got Star Wars: The Force Awakens, our first movie in years that set off the current renaissance in Star Wars (seriously, it’s so good to be a fan right now, toxic manbabies notwithstanding). Creed somehow managed to reinvent and revitalize a movie series that was played out after the underrated Rocky Balboa, and Inside Out gave us one of the best Pixar movies ever. There was, however, one movie released in 2015 that remains one of the most stunning visual achievements ever in film…

This movie is a spectacle and a visual feast. It may be called Mad Max, but it was the story of Furiosa and the Wives, and she was one of the most kick-ass characters in modern cinema. It showed the power of practical effects, and was likely a singular event in cinema we won’t see again.

LEGO

Ace’s Pick: And the pick goes to:

I had my copy built as part of a speed build. That may or may not explain why the cars keep hitting the side of the platform. Still, it’s one set I haven’t dismantled or even let dust collect on. The engineering is impressive and as long as you can get past the freakishly LOUD motor, it’s soothing to watch the wheel turn. It’s probably the only set I’ve considered buying an aftermarket light kit for.

Eric’s Pick: Alright, my dark period of Lego was over. It only lasted a year, but I came back swinging with:

This is the only set I’ve never dismantled. It’s a solid build for sure: it’s large, looks impressive, and it’s really fun to swoosh around. I’m not as big a fan of Return of the Jedi as Nick, but I’ve always enjoyed the scene when they descend down to Endor. Check out Nick’s review from back in 2015 – it pretty much lines up with how I feel.

Nick’s Pick: I was very tempted to pick the UCS TIE FIghter in this spot… I reviewed it for our site, and loved it. It was somehow swooshable, despite its size, and just drew your eye on the shelf. It was also one of the first sets that I sold when I decided to get out of collecting LEGO. I only have a handful of LEGO sets still put together… the UCS R2-D2, the Lunar Lander I reviewed earlier this year, and 21303 WALL-E.

One of the best Ideas sets ever made, even with the flaws that required a service pack to fix the headbanger fun, he just looks so sweet and innocent sitting on a shelf. What this build did so well was to capture the wonder of the character in the movie.

I did a bit of a Google search to try and come up with some interesting and fun fact to put at this blurb, but I’m finding that doing things like that make you remember how much of a mess the world has been for some time. I mean, that was the year that ISIS became a thing, a huge Ebola outbreak, and A Million Ways to Die in the West was released in theaters (two of those are worse than the others, but at least we got an Ebola vaccine out of it).

On the other hand, One World Trade Center finally opened, JAXA launched Hayabusa2, Sia would release Chandelier, and we got Baby Groot. Does the bad outweigh the good? Probably not, but it’s always important to keep some perspective that there’s always going to be bad in the world, just like there is going to be good. The world will keep on spinning, pop culture will keep on popping, and memes will outstay their welcome almost immediately. This is the way.

For this series, we’re going to walk through the years and go through some of the touchpoints that we’ve been through in the big focuses of our site… movies, video game, and of course… LEGO.

Previous Years:
2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013

Video Games

Ace’s Pick: No contest:

I used my 3DS a LOT. It was easy to carry around in my back pocket or thrown in a bag. Playing Smash is fun. Playing Smash while on the go is even funner. It’s an amazing feat of engineering to put that game on a portable device. The features were near-parity with the Wii U release and while I enjoyed the home console version just as much, nothing can beat one you can take with you. I poured a lot of time into this game. Runner-up: Last of Us Remastered for Playstation 4.

Eric’s Pick: In 2011, I went pretty hard about how much Dark Souls impacted me. And, in 2014, From Software released a second Dark Souls with some interesting behind-the-scenes development. Miyazaki, the director behind the first Dark Souls (and 2009’s Demon’s Souls, which not enough people talk about), was working on a little game that became 2015’s Bloodborne, so a second division was set up for Dark Souls II. Miyazaki instead took a back seat to supervise, and, according to plenty of Internet opinions, did not supervise enough.

(Yeah, I know this is Scholar of the First Sin. We’ll get there.)

While Dark Souls 2 had great ratings by critics – 9’s and 10’s across the board – it had several issues for Souls veterans. Bad hitboxes and laggy PvP, for two, but the bigger problem was that the game didn’t feel right. 2011 Dark Souls was a masterclass (the first half, at least) in great level design that couples perfectly with its gameplay. Dark Souls 2, on the other hand, well…at one point you take an elevator up from the top of a windmill to the bottom of a volcano. Yeah, up, I said. It seems like the team thought “wow, this would be cool, let’s throw this in” without thinking of how it exactly fits within the world.

But, honestly, Dark Souls 2 is my favorite of the Soulsborne games for one reason – it relaxes me. The other games are extremely hard for me, and require my full attention. But Dark Souls 2? I can beat it without dying. No problem.

I should note that all of the gameplay issues from the original Dark Souls 2 were entirely fixed with Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin, which is really the only way to experience the game.

Not to mention, Dark Souls 2 has three incredible DLCs – Crown of the Sunken King, Crown of the Old Ivory King, and Crown of the Old Iron King.

2011’s Dark Souls is an experience. But Dark Souls 2 is just a great game.

Nick’s Pick: You know, Hearthstone came out back in 2014, and it depresses me to see how far it’s fallen as a game and Blizzard has as a company. I’ve given up on it, though my daughter still asks to play it from time to time… but Magic the Gathering: Arena is my card game of choice. This was a pretty tough year, all things considered… I think most of my game playing was around MMOs and console titles. If anything, 2014 was marked by games I was excited for but ultimately disappointed by: Elder Scrolls Online, Civilization Beyond Earth, Titanfall, and Assassin’s Creed Unity were all games that could have been so much more. There was one title, a sequel, that really did latch on for me and my friends, though…

I’m not a huge car guy, and not that big into racing games. I used to play Gran Turismo 3 on my PS2, and liked the Forza games, but it was more like a diversion. Horizon, with its mix of arcade racing and an open world, scratch an itch I didn’t even realize I had. We had all sorts of “house rules” where we would tune up specific cars to specific classes and hit races with them. You haven’t seen the nature of this game until you get five other players in a King game using ludicrously over-tuned Wiley Jeeps.

Movies

Ace’s Pick: Without a doubt, for 2014, The LEGO Movie gets my pick:

I had serious doubts about this movie, but the script, style, and execution were so refreshing. The messages in the movie worked at both the micro level contained with the confines of the script, but also worked on a broader macro level beyond just what the average AFOL can understand, but regular people too albeit in a different context. Even though they worked on my previous favorite pick, 21 Jump Street, this was the movie that really cemented the names of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller into my mind. They were able to make a great movie about LEGO and because of that I looked forward to anything else they got their hands on.

Eric’s Pick: I’m edgy, so I’m gonna refer to this movie by it’s European title:

Staring my favorite Scientologist, LDR has everything I love in a sci-fi movie – awesome alien design, Tom Cruise acting confused and terrified, and Emily Blunt using a helicopter blade as a sword.

Oh, and time travel. Lots of time travel. It’s the best movie about video game speedrunning that has nothing to do with video games.

Nick’s Pick: I was tempted to pick the movie that ties in to my LEGO pick, Guardians of the Galaxy, in this spot. It marks a turning point for the Marvel Cinematic Universe after a couple of week entries (and one of the best, in Winter Soldier), where color became important and they started to lean into the silliness inherent to movies based on comic characters in tights.

But in 2014, there was a movie that holds a bit more sentimentality for me, and it is shockingly on topic for this site…

It’s weird to think that before The LEGO Movie came out, LEGO animated entertainment would be what one would call… not good. At first glance, this movie should have been awful… I mean, we all love (or have loved) LEGO here, but it’s a kid’s toy. It had the markings of a shameless two-hour long commercial. What we got, obviously, was so much more than that.

But, for sentimental reasons, this was a special movie because it was the first one I took my daughter to. She doesn’t remember it, because she was only one and a half, but she discovered popcorn that day and clapped at the bright stuff and songs. We’ve watched it since, and has enjoyed it… but it will always have a special place in my heart for it being what we watched together.

Fun side story… my son’s first movie was the LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part, and he was just about the same age my daughter was when she saw the first one.

LEGO

Ace’s Pick: Right along with the The LEGO Movie being my pick for best movie, it should come as no surprise that this is my favorite set:

Coming in at the climax of the movie, Benny is finally unleashed in building a spaceship and what a spaceship it is. A modernized entry in Classic Space with its signature blue coloring and yellow canopies, it’s large and quite a treat for the eyes. I picked mine up towards the end of the line for half-off, so it was a doubly nice set for me.

Eric’s Pick: I got literally one Lego set this year, in my Christmas stocking. So, by default, my pick is:

Yeah, I guess it’s cool. I was pretty checked out about Lego at this point.

Nick’s Pick: I don’t remember how much LEGO I bought back in 2014… I was probably still recovering from all the stuff I got the year before. Of course, in 2014, we finally got to see the Marvel Super Heroes line start to shine after the shlock that was the Iron Man 3 sets, and it didn’t get any better than 76021 The Milano Spaceship Rescue.

I reviewed the original set, and later the re-release for Vol. 2 (spoiler alert, I didn’t like the second one) – in fact, that second set was the one that just broke me for collecting LEGO, and was the last set I bought for myself for a couple of years. The first one, even with it’s weird color choices, remains the best jet/spaceship that the Super Heroes line has made, and is another entry on my “all-time favorites” list.

One of the most popular songs of 2013 was Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke, son of the late Growing Pains “star” Alan Thicke, and Pharrell Williams. The net effect of the song was that it was wildly overplayed, ripped off Marvin Gaye, and led to “wow, really” tabloid fodder for Thicke, making them both fall from grace, and for some reason end up as reality show judges on different shows. What does this have to do with LEGO, Video Games, or Movies? Nothing, the song was mindless pop fodder that no one has heard since; it just made for an interesting opening.

For this series, we’re going to walk through the years and go through some of the touchpoints that we’ve been through in the big focuses of our site… movies, video game, and of course… LEGO.

Previous Years:
2010 | 2011 | 2012

Video Games

This was a pretty important year for video games, with the release of the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One seeing the crown pass, yet again, between the big giants duking it out in the premium gaming space. Weirdly, though both systems came out that year, neither had a killer title that justified getting the console – unless you were a sucker (like Nick was) that purchased one or more of them on launch day and played alone because none of your friends made the jump.

Ace’s Pick: So yeah, not to sound like a broken record, but I had two very little kids at this time. One couldn’t walk. One was in preschool. But if I wasn’t holding my daughter’s hand or holding my son’s diaper, I had my 3DS on me. And there was one game that I just poured hours and hours into:

The Japanese audio, the delicious anime cut scenes, the hardcore mode, the relationships, the DLC, it all combined to create a great turn-based strategy game. It was my first Fire Emblem game and it did not disappoint.

Eric’s Pick: 2013? Not a great year for games, in my opinion. A couple of standout hits, but almost every game I see that came out – even the best of the best – have major flaws. Aside from the Last of Us, which really didn’t do much in terms of gameplay innovation, though it had a great story, there ain’t much there.

Oh wait except I forgot about:

Nowadays, everyone loves Zelda, but the series was in a funk back in 2013. The last mainline entry, Skyward Sword, was largely disliked (but now, of course, it’s all “10 things we should appreciate about Skyward Sword because people make me want to tear out my throat”). The game was accused of being way too formulaic, or, as I like to call it – boring and bad. Nintendo was also deep within the WiiU blunder years, releasing games that weren’t bad, but weren’t, you know, Super Mario 64. We were still four years off from the Switch.

So a Link Between Worlds was promoted as a return to basics (before the returner to basics of Breath of the Wild) – strip away all the BS from Skyward Sword, put gameplay first. And they delievered. This game is super streamlined, easy to understand and pick up, and, most importantly, doesn’t waste your time. You could raise some arguments about Nintendo reusing the world from A Link to the Past, but the wall-merge mechanic introduced, where Link can crawl along walls in 2D, was fresh enough to throw the whole map into a different context.

And, most importantly, A Link Between Worlds introduced the greatest Zelda song to date – the Minigame Theme – a.k.a. the song I will play at my wedding and also probably my funeral. We’ll have to see how the mood is.

Nick’s Pick: So, I’m going to talk about a video game that’s not my pick: 2013’s The Last of Us. If you haven’t played it… it’s some of the finest storytelling ever done and it’s well worth playing. It’s the opening, however, that packs a particular punch, and that punch is amplified a hundred fold if you are a parent playing the game. Penny Arcade had a comic that captured this feeling so well, and I felt the exact same thing when I played it. It was fantastic, and I’m excited about the sequel when it comes out next year… but there was one particular game that simply dominated my play time of 2013.

If you’re not familiar with the Saint’s Row games… they started out as an Xbox 360-exclusive Grand Theft Auto ripoff that actually had a pretty good story. The first two in the series had humor, but certainly took themselves seriously. The third entry, which was recently released on Switch, decided that you know, maybe they can lean into the camp a bit… and that led to a game that was legitimately fun to play, and funny as well. Comedy is an insanely hard thing to do in a video game.

Then came Saints Row IV, which was like one big, long, hold my beer answer to “how do you top the last game” question. Spoilers for the story, but there’s a part where you sneak into a terrorist compound, find a bunch of mutant super soldiers, try and fail to disarm a nuclear missile, climb aboard said missile when it launches (at which point Aerosmith’s Don’t Want to Miss a Thing starts playing) to disarm it in midair, after which you jump off sans parachute and land in the Oval office.

This amounts to the first twenty minutes of the game. Credits roll after you land, and at no point does it ever let up. Yeah, by the end, you can tell they are burning through literally every idea… but it’s wonderful mix of fun, funny, and parody that’s rare. Keith David is in the game and he’s playing himself. There’s a Dubstep gun… and a bat that’s just a giant adult toy. It’s stupid, silly, and was a blast to play.

Movies

Ace’s Pick: This was not a good year for movies. Not just because I saw maybe three of them that year, if that, but just overall looking at the field… it was not a good year. If I had to pick one though, here it is:

Elysium was Neill Blomkamp’s second major film. I had liked what he had done with District 9. And I’m a bit of a sucker for dystopian future films so combine the two and I’m in. It’s not your typical Hollywood, happy-ending kind of movie, but dystopian movies shouldn’t be like that anyway.

Eric’s Pick: A few of these picks I didn’t even know the year for, but I knew that they were already on the list. And Ace is right – 2013 kinda sucked for movies, though we did get Edgar Wright’s last Cornetto film The World’s End, and the surprisingly awesome Pacific Rim. And, of course:

If you don’t know the concept of About Time, let me break it down: it’s about time. Travel. Literally. The main character can travel through time, and he uses it in ways where I go “yeah, I would probably do that, too”. It’s earnest, it’s sweet, and it’s a time travel movie where you can’t think about it too much or it will fall apart. So calm down and turn on this delightful movie.

Nick’s Pick: You know, looking at my movie selections, perhaps I don’t have the most refined taste in movies. I mean, I was really thinking about picking Gravity here… it’s a stunning movie that drives you insane if you have a knowledge of orbital mechanics and a concept of the parking orbits of satellites and manned space stations.  Instead, I’m going to go for a movie that was a critically panned, but was still vastly better than the one that came before it…

I’m not certain if I’ve talked about G.I. Joe on the site before, but it was my toy of choice as a kid: more than LEGO, Transformers (which I wasn’t that big on), or anything else. I still have some of my original toys, I own the cartoon on bluray, and I read the comics from time to time. I love G.I. Joe.

2009’s G.I. Joe Rise of Cobra was a boring, tedious, mess. It took a few actors that should have done great in the role and squandered them for effects that make Michael Bay’s wingsuit obsession look better by comparison. It wasn’t ever going to be great art, but it should have been entertaining. So it was kind of a shock when they greenlit a sequel, and then made it clear they were serious about making it better by casting Dwayne Johnson into a role that he seemed literally born to play.

I won’t make an argument that it’s a great movie, it’s not… but it is entertaining and feels so much more like what the source material should be. It’s eye-rollingly cheesy at points, silly in others, and all camp. It sadly redeems a character from the first movie only to kill him off in the early act, and we never got another entry into the series, but it still stands as a movie that’s just fun to throw in from time to time for good action and laughs.

LEGO

Ace’s Pick: This may come as a surprise:

The Stagecoach Escape set gets my pick. Red Harrington remains as one of the most stylish minifigs ever created. This set gets you the Lone Ranger, Tonto, Red, and two bad guys. Well. I’ll be honest. I”m not sure if they’re the bad guys. I never saw the movie, but I assume they are and that they’re attacking the stagecoach that has the safe on it. Regardless, this $30 dollar set had everything going for it. Good guys vs. bad guys, great minifig selection, and you get both of the main characters from the movie it was based on. Plus the stagecoach itself wasn’t all that bad looking.

Eric’s Pick: When I was a kid, and really into collecting Lego minifigures, the one figure that always eluded me was the old sand green Jabba. Which, by today’s standards looks ugly and undetailed, but I wrote an entire essay last year on why that’s not a bad thing. And the little collection of sets that Jabba came in – Jabba’s Palace, Jabba’s Message, and Jabba’s Prize – were always on the top of my want list. But I never got them. In 2012, Lego released Jabba’s Palace Mk. II, a nice little set with 2012’s updated minifigs and building standards. But! BUT! In 2013 they turned it up a notch by showing us the Rancor Pit.

Which, cool set, right? Sure, but it ATTACHED TO THE 2012 JABBA’S PALACE. Which instantly sent me spinning back to those days 10 years earlier. It’s such a cool idea that really accentuated the whole “playset” part of Lego. It’s just a shame that this is one of the few examples in the Star Wars line.

Nick’s Pick: The only way it could have been harder to pick a set for this year would be if it was actually 2006 and we were focusing just on Star Wars. 2013 was the year that brought us 10232 Palace Cinema in the modular building lines, 10235 Winter Village Market in the Christmas theme, 10240 Red Five X-Wing Starfighter in the UCS Line, and 75021 Republic Gunship in the regular Star Wars Line. It was also the year that brought us Galaxy Squad in the Space lineup, and, of course, the Mandarin’s Golf Cart. But there was one set, one I reviewed for this site, that still stands out…

I’d be hard pressed to come up with a set that was more of just a joy to build than this set was. It was huge on a shelf, ridiculous to have around, and I just adore it. It’s on that list of sets I will never get rid of… hell, I will probably never get rid of a Return of the Jedi minifigure just because I will someday rebuild this set and put them all in the set. Because I can. Looking back on my years collecting and building LEGO, and 10236 Ewok Village is probably still one of my top five sets.

2011 feels both forever ago and just a few days ago… for me (Nick), it was a year that would come to represent the end of an era in my life – big changes were coming in 2012, which I’m sure I’ll talk about tomorrow. It was the year when planking was the latest thing (it’s only remembered now for a joke on The Office and exercise) and Jersey Shore was one of the most popular shows on a thing called “cable.”

For this series, we’re going to walk through the years and go through some of the touchpoints that we’ve been through in the big focuses of our site… movies, video game, and of course… LEGO.

Previous Year:

2010

Video Games

While 2010 was a game where it seemed like so many hits came out, 2011 feels like a year defined by highs, lows, and slow downhill slides. The last Star Wars game for quite some time, The Old Republic, an MMO, came out. I actually played a lot of games that year, but for some reason it didn’t stick out to me until I actually googled it. After doing that… wow, it was a year where sequels really dominated the landscape.

Ace’s Pick: At the risk of appearing lazy, I will refer you to Nick’s pick below as we have both picked the same game, he wrote up his pick before I got here, and we both liked it for the same reasons.

Eric’s Pick: Hoo boy. I get to write about Dark Souls.

Okay, so Dark Souls hit me at a really pivotal time in my young adult life, where I realized all sorts of important stuff. And to reflect that change was this gritty, dark, realistic game that beat you down time after time. After time. And yet with all the hundreds of deaths comes this overwhelming sense of victory that propels you forward. And you don’t stop because you know you can beat this boss, this area, this one stupid giant mushroom enemy. And when you do, when you spend literally – actually yes I did this – spend 10 hours one Saturday trying to fight Ornstein and Smough by yourself without summoning in any help, and when you succeed, you feel like you can do anything. It’s the game that changed my life, and for that I am overwhelmingly grateful.

Dark Souls also changed video gaming for me, as I imagine it changed gaming for anyone who’s tackled it. And by changed, I mean spoiled, because damn near every other game feels wasted and awkward by comparison. Not to say Dark Souls is a perfect game – it’s not. Many of the games on my list here are far from perfect; there are bumps and scratches all along them. Half of the game feels rushed and unfinished, and one area is so copy-pasted it feels like my high school essays. Compared to newer From Software games, the combat feels clunky. The movement janks sometimes, especially in regards to jumping or falling. The menu navigation is a bit tiresome. Some of the bosses are legitimately cheap. But there is so much good about it that all of those bads I just listed feel completely irrelevant.

Not to mention the killer DLC – Artorias of the Abyss, which added some of the best bosses in the series.

I won’t review Dark Souls. I don’t think I can, not the goods, anyway. Hundreds of game journalists have tried, and, I think, missed the mark in some way. Dark Souls is an innately personal experience, and it’s hard to describe it objectively. A great view, I think, is by YouTuber NakeyJakey, in his video Dark Souls Saved Me, where his life experience was completely different from mine, but I 100% understand what he’s describing.

Do yourself a favor, if you haven’t, and play Dark Souls. You’re only doing a disservice to yourself otherwise.

Nick’s Pick: There were some really heavy hitters that came out this year. The obvious choice might be Skyrim, a game that I have put an absurd amount of hours into yet never finished. Truth-be-told, while I like the Elder Scrolls games, a lot of that is in the customization and modding, not for the game. Uncharted 3 came out that year, and it’s a fantastic game, but still probably the weakest of the series.

One sequel among a sea of sequels, though, just stands out in 2011…

It’s weird to think of Portal 2 being eight years old. The original was a revelation of gameplay design, tight writing, and stupidly fun gameplay… which was all just amplified by the fact that Valve put it into a bundle exclusively at first because they were unsure it would sell well. Given that it, all by itself, was worth the price of the Orange Box… we can see how that went.

Following up to one of the greatest games ever made is always a shaky proposition, but back then, Valve actually made games and they had generally been great to excellent. Still, could they capture lightning in a bottle twice? Spoiler alert… yes.

There are a myriad of reasons that it worked, but the most amazing thing is that they managed to catch the charm of the original as much as the gameplay. J.K. Simmons as Cave Johnson is probably the greatest character to never actually appear as a character in a video game, and the game itself represents a rarity in a video game, where comedy worked so well. You know… I really should go play this game again.

Movies

While video games were all about sequels in 2011, there were actually a lot of new and unique films that hit in 2011… and also a lot of sequels. Harry Potter was still the biggest franchise going, and of course there was the still acclaimed Kung Fu Panda 2… yeah, I don’t know where that joke was going. It was the real explosion year for Marvel movies, as the last two pre-Avengers movies, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger, both came out. At the other end of the comic book spectrum, Green Lantern came back and people honestly wondered if Ryan Reynolds career was over. Some real hits like Hugo, Bridesmaids, and Super 8 were big but be honest… when was the last time you watch any of them?

Okay, I admit, I watched Bridesmaids just a few months ago. It’s still hilarious.

Ace’s Pick: Going over the list of movies released in 2011, the pickings were pretty slim. I didn’t get out to see movies much with a baby in the house, and still don’t have much time these days either. But looking it over, I’ll have to tip my hat to Super 8.

A modern-day (at the time) Goonies, it was highly enjoyable. Looking back, this could be considered a precursor to the Netflix series Stranger Things. I should go back and rewatch this as it’s been years since I’ve seen it. But I’ll stick to that claim.

Eric’s Pick: I’m a pretty simple guy. I like Tom Cruise when he’s acting, but not so much when he’s praising the cult of Scientology. Which is a shame, because from everything I’ve heard of Tom Cruise, minus that one tiny cult he’s in, he’s apparently the nicest guy ever. Anyway, this isn’t From Brick to Tom Cruise, so let me get back on topic.

I’ve already done my list for the entire decade, and this is my only franchise movie on this list, so looks like those two years of film school are really paying off. Anyway, I’ve seen every Mission Impossible multiple times, but I keep coming back to M:I4. M:I3 has the far better story, and M:I5 and M:I6 manage to keep things extremely fresh somehow in a 20 year old franchise. But M:I4, or so I don’t have to keep using colons, Ghost Protocol, is the perfect blend of thriller and action. As usual, the entire world is against Tom Cruise, and he gets to use that as an excuse to do things such as, you know, climb up the Burj Khalifa. It’s awesome. Here’s to you, Tom. If only you weren’t in a cult.

Nick’s Pick: Okay… I bet this is the movie pick that no one would have guessed coming from me. I might have mentioned a certain series that’s a guilty pleasure of mine before, and 2011 is the year when the series went from “oh, that’s fun” to “this is ridiculous and I LOVE it”… Fast Five.

I won’t pretend this is a great movie (but it is a great movie)… but it is a movie that knows exactly what it’s doing and going to be about. It’s unabashed stunts and action, with a plot that’s part heist movie, part “let’s stare at the Rock and get lost in those pecs.” I’ve long maintained that adding Dwayne Johnson to a movie is worth two letter grades, and it works perfectly here. When it comes to good action series that you just turn your brain down for a bit and enjoy, Fast & the Furious does it the best, and this is the movie where they started to turn it to 11.

LEGO

If this decade for LEGO could be defined with anything, it would be “licenses.” It’s strange to think that licenses have only been part of LEGO for twenty years, when Star Wars was first introduced. Even after Star Wars simply exploded, the licenses were more short lived and niche than anything. It was in 2011, though, when DC and Marvel Super Heroes was announced, Pirates of the Caribbean sets first arrived, as did Cars. It would only keep blowing up from there, with Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, and TMNT all showing up in the next year.

Ace’s Pick: Overall, not a lot of strong stuff to take note of in 2011 but there is one set that I still enjoy looking at to this day: 8677 Ultimate Build Mater.

There were three Ultimate Builds from the Cars line that year: Mater, Lightning McQueen, and Francesco. Mater was tops and his worn out, run down, rusty, aged look was captured perfectly in LEGO form. It was the best set in a theme riddled with terrible sets.

Nick’s Pick: Not going to lie… this was a rough year for quality LEGO stuff. The Collectible Minifigures were still going strong and hadn’t worn out their welcome yet, but Star Wars had a weak year. Even Modular Buildings, one of my go-tos for great sets, was down, as it had two Pet Shop and apartment two-part building… and remains one of the weakest modulars ever done.

There was one set, which I reviewed for the site, that I loved… 7962 Anakin’s and Sebulba’s Podracers.

I don’t know how a movie that I enjoy crapping on so much (though, I’m going to admit, I’ve softened on  in recent years) has produced so many sets that I really love. This was a huge upgrade over the original, introduced a lot of unique parts, and was just a swooshable joy to play with.

Eric’s Pick: I’m showing up on the bottom here because Nick and I have the same favorite set for this year. 2011 was the year right before I really stopped enjoy Legos as a kid, and this set captured a lot of the magic of Lego for me. A remake of the set I always wanted but was way too young to get at the time. A remake of the very rare Watto figurine. And, plus, the set ruled! To this day, this set reigns as one of my favorites.

As a side note, 2011 is the year I joined FBTB on the forums, and look at me now. Still nerding out of video games and Legos with the rest of you.