Year in Review and Best of 2016 Part 3 - Music

If you haven't had a chance to read them, I poured out thousands of words about every 2016 movie I watched and every 2016 game I played earlier this month. 2017's already felt surreal on both a global and personal scale; the global elements are obvious to anyone living through it right now, with the personal being much more pleasant! My daughter was born a little over three weeks ago, entering this world a little early and making quite a show of it. We're thankfully all doing well now.

Life's slowly getting back to normal and I've taken a moment to finish up my 2016 Year in Review series with a look back at the new music I checked out. As with last year's piece, this is more of a bonus article. I lack the language to write in depth about music and my scope is limited; I missed out on many of the year's big releases. I spent more time continuing to listen to Marina and the Diamonds' three albums than branching out much this year. Still, it's fun to try!

Year in Review and Best of 2016 Part 2 - Games

The Year in Review continues! This time I'm looking at the games I played in 2016. I'm skipping straight ports of games I'd previously played (The PS4 ports of A Boy and His Blob and Dead Rising) but including titles such as Gone Home and Kholat, which hadn't seen console releases until this year.

2016 saw the release of two titles that had been long, long, long delayed: The Last Guardian, which began development in 2007, and Final Fantasy XV, whose troubled development started out as the confusingly named Final Fantasy Versus XIII in 2006. This year, Sony launched the PS4 Pro and Microsoft launched the Xbox One S, mid-generation upgrades to their current platforms, while Nintendo prepares to launch their new handheld-console hybrid the Nintendo Switch, set for release in March of 2017. A new Pokemon game was released on 3DS to high praise while the smartphone title Pokemon Go became a cultural phenomenon for a short while. Sony and Sega announced that Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami, and Yakuza 6 would all be getting English releases, and the world was made a little brighter.

What games did I like this year? Surprisingly, my top three are all first-person games! I'm someone that usually gets a little motion sick from first-person cameras in games, but these three were so good that I was able to overlook that. Let's take a look at the rankings!

Year in Review and Best of 2016 Part 1 - Movies

It's become trendy to personify 2016 as a sentient boogeyman, a grim reaper stealing childhood icons and ushering in a bizarre cultural era in which Pepe the Frog played a non-zero role in a US presidential election. It's a year that's been defined by an eclectic mix of fear, paranoia, and idiocy. It's a year where no matter what you make up, someone will believe you, as long as it's posted on Twitter. It's the Year of the Snake People.

In spite of the flood of national sorrows, triumphs, and explosions of stupid, 2016 was a mercifully quieter year for me than 2015. My work on Kaiju Big Battle: Fighto Fantasy really took off, including a trip to PAX East to present the game as part of a panel back in April. In addition to my new day job, Kaiju work ate up a lot of the time I'd normally spend writing, so you, my wobblers, have been neglected. I apologize. I'm hoping to launch the game in the first half of 2017, though we'll see if life has other plans; I've got a daughter due any day now!

Even with all that, I still saw a huge number of movies this year, whether at home or in theaters. I even liked most of them! Here's a look at them, divided into tiered lists and sorted alphabetically. As usual, this is an evolving document which I'll be updating as I see the final movies I missed out on. Let's talk movies!

Resident Evil 7: Beginning Hour (2016, PS4) - Phantasmic Tribute

The mainline Resident Evil series has gone through some interesting transitions, forming two pretty clear trilogies: Resident Evil 1-3 are horror-action games with a b-movie aesthetic, focused on tight inventory management and nutty puzzles. Resident Evil 4-6 keep some horror elements but shift the focus, and the camera angle, to a much more action-oriented one, with our heroes punching boulders and suplexing monsters instead of running around finding puzzle pieces. With Resident Evil 7, Capcom looks to once again shake things up in a major way, with a new, first-person view and a focus on exploration over combat. It also has the most cleverly designed title text of the series, and finally unites the series' western name with its Japanese origin, Biohazard.

The Witness (2016, PS4) - Some Kind of Wonderful

 

Jonathan Blow made a big splash when Braid, his debut indie game, released on the Xbox 360 in 2008. One of the first high-profile independent releases on the Xbox Live Arcade storefront, Braid received critical acclaim and Blow became a big name in the indie circuit. Some treat him as a visionary, others as a bogeyman. Personal feelings aside, his influence on the medium is evident, as a wave of artsy, independent platformers molded in Braid's image would follow in its wake.

Blow could have cheaply and easily cashed in on a dozen sequels (The Five Nights at Freddy's formula) that remixed his hit game's time-bending, platforming formula. Instead, he began work in 2009 on a very different sort of game, a first-person puzzle/adventure designed around solving mazes. After years of waiting, The Witness finally hit PCs and the Playstation 4 in early 2016, and after having spent hours in its world I'm convinced that it's one of the best puzzle games I've played in years.