Control Review

Control is a fun game with a solid mechanics, an addictive gameplay loop, and intriguing world-building hampered only slightly by an anti-climatic ending.

Firewatch and Writing

Firewatch, developed by Camp Santo and originally released in 2016, reminded me a lot of Dear Esther, the original Half Life 2 mod and not the commercially released and inferior “full game” version. You play as a man who walks around. He walks around in nature. He talks to himself. He talks to a woman on a handheld radio device. She talks back.

That’s the gist of the game, whose core gameplay loop consists of walking to places, choosing dialogue options on the radio, and occasionally picking things up in a somewhat cartoony looking world. The game shepherds you from one area to a next where you advance the story, largely through radio dialogue, occasional environmental cues, or handwritten notes.

A game like Firewatch, with very little interactivity, where the only control the player has is ferrying the main character, Henry, a volunteer fire lookout at a national park in Wyoming, from dialogue trigger to dialogue trigger, is centered around and thus completely reliant upon its writing. When the entire experience of the game hinges upon the writing, the writing needs to be better.

Spoilers to follow.

The Best of 2024

I watched 42 movies last year. Here are the ones I enjoyed the most:

• The Sacrifice (1986 dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)

With that, I have seen all of Tarkovsky’s theatrical films. What a genius.

• The Fog (1980 dir. John Carpenter)

A fun, spooky mystery.

• Lawrence of Arabia (1962 dir. David Lean)

A grand scale of production that will never be seen on silver screens again.

• After Hours (1985 dir. Martin Scorsese)

Marty’s silliest movie, set in an absurdist wasteland 1980’s New York City.

• Perfect Days (2023 dir. Wim Wenders)

Melodic, peaceful, human in Tokyo.

• Dune Part Two (2024 dir. Denis Villeneuve)

The only movie actually from this year to make this list.

Believe it or not, but I am literate as well. Here is a list of books I read for this first time this year that I enjoyed:

• The Bloodlands (2010, Timothy D. Snyder)

Interesting, well researched accounting of the deadliest place in the world.

• Capitalism and Freedom (1962, Milton Friedman)

Foundational text for certain branches of libertarianism.

• And Then There Were None (1939, Agatha Christie)

Short, fun mystery which doesn’t quite stick the landing. Original British title too racist even for 1930’s America.

• Say Nothing (2018, Patrick Radden Keefe)

The terrible insane violence of the Troubles, now a hit TV show (I read the book before the show came out).

• Pale Fire (1962, Vladomir Nabokov)

More of an interesting formal experiment than a great novel.

And here is every single game that I finished this year:

• Outer Wilds (2019, Mobius Digital)

Instills one of the best senses of adventure from any game I’ve ever played.

• Fallout New Vegas (2010, Obsidian Entertainment)

Apologies to my high school friend who recommended this game when it came out and whom I dismissed out of hand; holds up well even today.

• Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty (2020, CD Projekt Red)

It might have taken a couple of years, but CD Projekt got their act together and fixed up what was by all accounts a pretty disastrous launch. Fun action RPG, enjoyable combat.

As for anime, the best would be either would be either Frieren or Dan Da Dan.

The song I was most obsessed with was “Two Time” by Jack Stauber. Film soundtrack of the year goes to Dune 2.

That was my 2024. We shall see how 2025 goes!

Best of 2023

In 2023 I only watched 42 movies. Probably because I was trying to do a lot more reading. Quick list of the movies I enjoyed the most:

4. Asteroid City

3. Come and See

2. Oppenheimer

1. Killers of the Flower Moon

I watched a handful of anime as well. Chainsaw Man was fantastic, as was Jujutsu Kaisen. I also enjoyed Summertime Render and Inuyashiki.

For books, A Canticle for Leibowitz was my favorite. I also enjoyed Blood Meridian and Eugene Onegin. I appreciated As I Lay Dying.

I only beat two games this year, Cyberpunk and Fallout 4. Both were fine. Fallout became much more tolerable with the shorter loading times on the Xbox Series X (I first started it on the Xbox One when it came out but it just did not click with me.) Cd Projekt did a good job overhauling Cyberpunk, my playthrough was largely stable and problem free.

Thinking about what to award Song of the Year

Night Shift by Stephen King

I have for as long as I can remember dismissed Stephen King and his writing as non-challenging, mediocre crowd-pleasers destined for supermarket shelves. But I had never actually read the man. Why would I? I checked out Faulkner from the library. I owned Moby Dick in paperback. I saw Crime and Punishment in a bookstore. I am interested in “serious literature.” I only read one book a year, and I wasn’t going to waste it on Stephen King.

But wasn’t I being snooty? Prejudiced? How could I look down on the man’s writing if I had never read it? So I picked up Night Shift, King’s well regarded 1978 short story collection. Now, having actually read his work, I can say that I was 100% correct.

My Top Stuff of 2022

2022 was a bit of a dry year for me for movies. I’ve had some good years where I have a hard time putting together a top 10 (because I saw more than 10 great moves) and not so good years where I have a hard time putting together a top 10 (because I saw less than 10 great movies.) 2022 was one of those years. So I’ll include some other favorite things from the year.

Top Movies

6. Top Gun Maverick (2022 dir. Joseph Kosinksi)

5. Boogie Nights (1997 dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

4. Drive My Car (2021 dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

3. Pulse (2001 dir. Kiyoshi Kurasawa)
Moody and atmospheric. One incredibly unsettling scene.

2. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014 dir. Wes Anderson)
I quite liked this movie made by Wes Anderson.

1. Dune (2021, dir. Denis Villeneuve)
A filmmaker with a vision makes a blockbuster movie.

Top Books

3. The Creative Gene, Hideo Kojima

2. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote

1. Maus, Art Spiegelman
At once deeply personal and sweepingly historical, a searing secondhand account of the Holocaust.

Top Games

2. Halo Infinite
Played a lot of multiplayer for this one

1. The Outer Wilds
I didn’t get a chance to beat this one before they took it off Game Pass but I’ll probably just buy it. The sense of adventure and danger while exploring, the fun experimentation, the central mystery. Wanna-be astronauts pick this one up.

Top TV Shows

1. Frasier
I re-watched the entire series of Frasier.

Top Anime

2. Chainsaw Man
Great action, likable characters, interesting story. Most other years this would have easily been number 1 but…

1. Sonny Boy
This is the best anime I have seen in years. Brilliant. Fantastic soundtrack. Watch this show whether you like anime or not.

Top Song

1. “Curve and Light” – Mid-Air Thief
Amazing. I don’t even want to know what the lyrics mean. Feels like two entirely different songs joined together, both strengthened by the presence of the other. Otherworldly.

Sonny Boy

Sonny Boy is the kind of anime that first got me into anime.

Faces in the Window

It started after CERN opened up the Large Field Array beneath the Indian Ocean. It lasted less than 3 pico seconds they say, but that was enough to destroy eastern India, lower the sea level by 3 meters, and kick off the storms. The great rain storms which deluged the entire Earth with the re-condensing Indian ocean water, and the portal storms which seemed to come with them. Even in the thick cloud cover they were hard to miss, nonsensical radar readings and green bolts of lightning.

My Top Movies of 2021

I didn’t see too many films last year. I only saw 40, which averages to a bit more than one every ten days, which is the fewest I’ve seen since I started keeping track of every movie I watched in a year. Because I’m already four months late, here they are presented without comment, my top movies that I saw for the first time in 2021, not necessarily released in 2021:

7. It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012) dir. Don Hertzfeldt

6. Animal House (1978) dir. John Landis

5. Prisoners (2013) dir. Denis Villeneuve

4. A Scene at the Sea (1991) dir. Takeshi Kitano

3. Hard to Be a God (2013) dir. Aleksei German

2. Barry Lyndon (1975) dir. Stanley Kubrick

1. Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0 Thrice Upon a Time (2021) dir. Hideaki Anno

Song of the year this year is going to what if? by Shiro Sagisu. I’ll just go ahead and give the Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0 soundtrack the award for soundtrack of the year too. Also this is not an award thing, there are no awards.

Thoughts on Promised Neverland Season 2

Promised Neverland Season 2 was as much of a disappointment as everyone said it was. Season 2 was a train wreck; it’s the worst dip in quality between a first and second season since True Detective. But whereas Detective 2 was maliciously, purposefully bad for some kind of tax avoidance scheme (I’m assuming), Neverland 2 was simply put into a difficult position of following up a stellar first season that ended in a way that made producing a quality followup nearly impossible.

Here are my unstructured/unordered thoughts on Promised Neverland Part II: