Year in Review and Best of 2017 Part 3 - Music

Time to talk music! If you missed them, check out my previous Year in Review articles for movies and games. As with last year's music piece, this is more of a bonus article. I lack the language to write in depth about music and my scope is limited to around a dozen albums a year. I'd love to get album recommendations so I can check out great stuff I missed! Each album has links to my favorite tracks when available.

Year in Review and Best of 2017 Part 2 - Games

The Year in Review continues as I look at all of the games I played in 2017. I'm honestly surprised I got through this many lengthy titles, but having a newborn sleeping on top of me for weeks certainly helped with that.

This year really belongs to Nintendo. The Switch has been a massive comeback after the Wii U performed so poorly and this year saw new, phenomenally good Mario and Zelda titles as well as touched-up ports like Mario Kart 8. I've heard nothing but good things about Splatoon 2 and Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle and I've been curious about ARMS, but I haven't been able to check them out yet.

I only managed to play a single game that I thought was awful, and even then, it was charmingly terrible rather than irredeemable. Some titles I was less warm on than average players (looking at you, Sonic Mania), but even then I didn't think they were bad games, just titles that didn't fully click with me.

It was tough picking a top five! The line between some of my Top Tier choices and Excellent choices is very thin this year. It's been an all around excellent year for video games, one of the best in recent memory. Let's see what we've got!

All titles are listed in alphabetical order in each tier category and the system on which I played is listed after the title.

Year in Review and Best of 2017 Part 1 - Movies

2017 was one for the ages. News cycles became dominated by political stories that would have been deemed too stupid or unlikely to use in fiction. Warner Bros replaced parts of Henry Cavill's face with bad CGI. Nintendo had a surprising comeback with the Switch, rising from the remains of the sadly unloved Wii U.

Most importantly for my family was the birth of my daughter in early January. Being a new parent has been a surreal, wonderful, terrifying experience. Back in March, my wife wrote an essay on David Lynch's Eraserhead and the connection to it that we felt as new parents. Be sure to check it out!

On game development, work on Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy continues, inching closer and closer to release. There's a playable demo out now! For more on that, check out my write up here.

Surprisingly, I still managed to check out a whole lot of new movies this year, though more of them were watched at home than in theaters. 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!