Well that time of year again, I’m typing this up in the first week of January. When I actually finish and post it is anyone’s guess. 2015 was a pretty solid year in terms of gaming as a whole. Lots of great games were released, several of which will easily become “classics”. Most major publishers and platform holders started making serious moves towards promoting VR. Sony had perhaps the greatest E3 ever. Several white whales were spotted and beached (Shenmue 3, FFVII Remake, Last Guardian alive and well). Overall a solid year. But it was also the year of the delay, so many titles got pushed back 2016. Which, when you add in the titles planned for 2016, makes the upcoming year look like a monster. Continue reading…
Tag: bestof
Best of 2014 – Anime
Now you might be thinking upon seeing that title, “Hey isn’t this about three months late?”, maybe you should instead be thinking “It sure would be a shame if asking all these questions forced Mick to mess up my pretty face”. Just a friendly suggestion. Indeed it is a little late, due in part to laziness but also due to an inevitability outlined below. Continue reading…
Best of 2014 – Videogames
2014 felt like a very long year in terms of gaming, yet I didn’t really get through a whole pile of games. Perhaps my memory is going. What a sweet release. Or perhaps it was just that my pattern of play as it were changed quite a bit this year. I covered my thoughts on last year’s spending on games over here. I suppose one final note on that point was that I hit the deal hunter thing hard. Making solid use of sites like http://isthereanydeal.com/, http://www.cheapshark.com/, http://www.reddit.com/r/GameDeals/, etc. as well as (the now sadly neutered) Steam trading sites like http://dispenser.tf/ and http://www.tf2outpost.com/ and importing I got as much gaming bang for my buck as I possibly could. Continue reading…
Best of 2013 – Barebones ashcan edition
Offered with no explanation and in no particular order. I’ll probably come back and flesh it out when I shrug off this endless ennui. Continue reading…
Best of 2012 – Games, Anime & Manga – An abandoned post
Planned to have these three finished in January. That clearly did not happen. I no longer have the motivation, or seemingly the ability, to put together even a mini-review for stuff. I think I’ve spent too long wallowing in the extremely toxic environment of online anime and gaming forums. Where “discussion” is largely people screaming at one another about their subjective opinions. It’s driven me to a standpoint where I just want to enjoy what I enjoy without having to explain or justify why I enjoy it. I may get around to filling in the missing entries when I re-read/watch/play the stuff in them. But some of them I havent looked at in over a year (I really should do rolling Top X lists as it would be easier to keep stuff fresh in my mind). The gaming part is mostly complete, 7 out of 10 more or less complete. Anime and Manga are more or less just list/links. Continue reading…
Top 25 (recent) Anime for people who dont watch anime
What’s this all about then? Well this is some suggested viewing for people who are only passingly familiar with anime in general or with anime thats come out in the last few years. If the last time you watched some anime it was prefaced by this:
or the words “Studio Ghibli” then this list is for you. If you think all anime is shallow super powered adventures aimed at teenage boys or heaving tits and demon penises, then this list is for you. I’ve tried to cover as many of the major genre’s as I could (so now you have no fucking excuse for referring to anime as if its a genre rather than a medium ;)) without a) sacrificng quality or b) sacrificing accessibility. So the majority of shows listed here require no prior knowledge of or familiarity with anime or japanese culture in general to fully enjoy. If you do end up checking any of them out let me know what you think. Continue reading…
Best of 2011 – Anime – Unfinished
Note: This isnt done (well theres a full top 10, just not a full entry for each), but I’m not going to finish it and I’m sick of seeing it floating around in Drafts
I thought I’d watched a lot of anime this year. But looking back I only watched around fifty shows, actually, I suppose that’s nearly one a week. Is that a lot? Who can say. Not I anyhow. Well, whether I watched a lot or not is really secondary to the main issue, which is quality and based on that metric it was an excellent year for anime. It’s been a while since its been a meaningful chore to decide what to include. But this year it really was a struggle and some great stuff didnt make it, like C – The Money of Soul and Possibility, Highschool of the Dead, Code Geass, One Out’s, etc. To be honest there was so much good stuff out there that I would suggest taking a look at my complete anime list over on Myanimelist if you need some viewing suggestions. Of course, I only watch an anime when its complete, which means that some great looking stuff wasnt even eligible for inclusion (I’m looking at you Persona 4 Animation and Fate/Stay Zero, among others). Continue reading…
Best of 2011 – Manga
It’s currently September 29th, if past years are anything to go by that means that I should get this posted sometime mid-2012, possibly in June as an early birthday present to myself. Then again starting three months early may actually mean that this is one of my rare yearly round-ups that make it out at an appropriate time. Despite the tragic intervention of an MSc into my life of lazy media consumption I have already read what could fairly be described as too much this year. So much in fact that I’m rather apprehensive of adding up exactly how much. Went and added them up, 16543 chapters read since January. Not counting that a large number are monthly releases (i.e. generally twice as long) lets assume a weekly chapter size of 20 pages, that’s 330,860 pages. Around 135 individual titles. Seems a bit excessive if I do say so myself. On the other hand though its been an awesome year, lots of long-running series finally finished scanlation and I got around to reading a large number of the “classics” that I had avoided or missed (including the “Big Three” – Bleach, Naruto and One Piece). This means that paring this list down to ten was an even bigger pain in the arse than it usually is. Continue reading…
Best of 2011 – Games
I summed up video gaming in 2010 in one word, disappointment. For 2011 I’ll bump it up to two words, excellent and disappointing. There were a large number of releases I was looking forward to and thankfully the majority of them delivered, though not always as well as I was hoping. As always this list is a composite of things I’ve played in the year in question, not just what was released in the year, it probably doesn’t matter in the long run. As well as the Top 10 list itself I’ve also included an appendix of sorts where I give a line or two (and the first implementation of my new rating system, ooh the excitement) to all the game’s I’ve completed this year (and perhaps the ones I’ve played enough off to be comfortable making a judgement on). Also returning to education, in tandem with commuting, has eaten up a lot of prime game playing time, as such I’m a bit behind with the games I’ve played. I may get some of the backlog finished by the end of the month (currently December 6th). Continue reading…
(Planned) October Viewing – Anime edition
Even when I had nothing to do apart from some part time hours in Vodafone I never managed to get through the (admittedly unrealistic) thirty potential shows listed in these things. Now that I’m in college every day and in work all weekend I get the feeling I’ll be lucky to get one show watched a week, never mind the one a day thirty would demand. Of course I list thirty more because I find it a good line between “Watch only this” and “Watch whatever you want”, as such I’m going to stick with that number. I suppose I should write a bit about what I’ve watched in between the last one of these and the beginning of October. But I think that can wait for another time, something else that can wait for another time is switching out the AnimeNewsNetwork links used below for AniDB.net links. Continue reading…