Thus I am faced with with the grim prospect of another year and the inevitable tedium it will bring. But first, let's review the inevitable tedium of the year gone by, as is our custom. As ever the criteria for inclusion is simply stuff that I got, did, played, watched, listened to or otherwise experienced in the past year. Whether or not it was actually released, or indeed bears the slightest relevance to that time period at all, is up to the whims of fate.
Music
It's a tricky category for me this year as my advancing old age means that I'm buying less and less new music every year. Well, that and the fact that most of the CD budget went to Big Finish instead because they kept having sales. But that's not to say that the year was entirely devoid of promising releases.
We're gonna start with Blutmonds The Revolution Is Dead. A surprising piece of... Ummm... Music. A slice of progressive modern Black Metal with themes of urban isolation and paranoia. Kinda like Void, but also employing some neat moments of female vocal and saxaphone that evoke Fleurety. Kinda. Anyway, the point is that it's bold and fresh in a genre that, if we're being honest, can get rather stale and repetitive.
Following up on that theme I've also got to mention MachiNation by Blacklodge. They'd dropped off my radar a bit, but stormed back in a big way with this slab of Black Industrial Metal. I first heard these guys an age ago when they supported Aborym. And they were fucking good. But I've never felt that either of their previous albums quite captured the strength of that performance. But now I think they've got it set. Great stuff.
Then there was the new Marilyn Manson album Born Villain. I admit that this took a couple of listens before it clicked, perhaps less immediately personal for me than The High End Of Low. It's a curious album, with this weird old school vibe somehow. Hard to explain for a man of my limited vocabulary, but with some crack good songs that somehow evoke the good old days before underground became a dirty word at the hand of the hipsters.
There's been a few good releases on the J-Rock front. I picked up some great singles by Yousei Teikoku and 9Goats Black Out at the beginning of the year. And there have been cool new releases from The Sound Bee HD & Suicide Ali. But if I had to pick just one that caught my attention and refused to let go then it's going to have to be BABYMETAL. An incredible fusion of sweet schoolgirl pop vocals and full on metal music, it's simply amazingly catchy whilst still being entirely mosh worthy. Indeed, I'm surprised no one's really done it before. Well, when Moon Kana had that French thrash metal group as her backing band on tour maybe. But she never released anything with them on CD unfortunately. This group looks set to fill that particular void with a vengeance.
Film & TV
Well, this is tricky. See, outside of Doctor Who you know what I've actually watched on TV this year? The fucking prequel trilogy. And that's certainly not going down as a highlight. The main problem is that I've been mainly playing games instead of watching stuff. Only lately have I been managing to watch anything off and on. And that's only because I got a highly bootleg set of original Japanese Yu-Gi-Oh episodes. And I'm only up to Dungeon Dice Monsters, so I'm not sure I can even put that down.
The new Dr Who series, whilst slightly uneven, was generally pretty good. But let's be honest, I ALWAYS say that. If I'd at least gotten around to buying more classic series DVD's I could put Dragonfire down and end this section on a cliffhanger. But I didn't, so I guess the Kamelion Tales boxset is going to win by default.
Reading
Hey, you know how every year I say I really need to make more of an effort to spend more time reading?
YEAH. THAT.
Seriously though, the year has not been entirely without the blessing of the written word. After all I re read the entire New Jedi Order series, as well as a whole bunch of Shadowrun novels. But as we all know these sort of franchised products can be rather... uneven. But there are at least a couple of new things that I found to be pretty damn good.
First up, and proving that I am incapable of doing ANYTHING unless it is at least tangentially connected to Doctor Who we have the Rivers Of London series by Ben Aaronovitch. A good friend got me the first book for christmas last year, although it took me a while to get around to reading it I'm glad I did, as the first thing I did upon finishing was nip onto amazon and order the next two. Story wise it's a strange fusion of police procedural drama and modern fantasy. Indeed, with the themes of resurgent magic intruding onto the modern world one could almost use it as a precursor to the Shadowrun setting. It should certainly appeal to fans of that genre. If it weren't for the excessive amount of shagging in the second book I'd totally lend the series to my mum, who is known to enjoy both a bit of Harry Potter and a wide variety of grisly crime fiction.
The thing about these books is that they're just written really well. Characters are well constructed, likeable and relatable, and everything just kinda WORKS. The only real problem I had with the series is that I didn't notice that book 3 was a bloody hardback, and thus throws my shelves out.
Secondly we have the amazing adventures of Atomic Robo. Again this is one where, on finishing the first volume I immediately had to track down the other available volumes. It's good, funny, dramatic, action packed and all the other things you could really want in a comic book. It's also REALLY hard to talk about without instantly comparing it to Hellboy. Because really, the 2 titles do have a lot in common. From the famous non human hero who fights monsters to the evil Nazi scientists, robot zombies and extra dimensional malevolent entities. But Atomic Robo is still, somehow, very much it's own entity. It has many of the same ingredients but the overall flavour is quite distinct. After all, as much as I love Hellboy, you'd never see anything quite like Dr Dinosaur in it's pages.
Gaming
As I've subtly hinted elsewhere, this has been a year for the playing of video games. I bought an Xbox and my productivity utterly collapsed. Not that it's all been miserably grinding away at shitty games for gamerscore. Indeed, I can only think of one game I actually had to grind for any achievements, and that was one I actually really liked.
Yeah, that was on Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom. I'd actually enjoyed it enough that I felt like actually trying for the 100% completion, which meant maxing levels. Now, it is not a perfect game by any stetch of the imagination. But what it is is a GOOD game. It's solid, it's original and it's enjoyable. I'm sure I've talked about it before, but it strikes me as a criminally underrated game. I mean, I picked it up on whim simply because it was there, it was cheap and I liked the artwork. It's a crime that it never received any DLC and will probably never see a sequel. I mean, even the english dub was not all that bad. Seriously, how often does that happen?
I freely admit that one of the reasons I bought the Xbox was because I wanted to play Halo Anniversary edition. I'm not ashamed. The thing about Halo is that it's a good shooter game. And the beauty of the first one is that it's from a time before multiplayer was the main focus. I've played a few Halo games over the course of the year, and none of them are perfect. And whilst ODST trumps all the others in terms of storytelling, I think I've probably spent the most time playing Anniversary. If they can give Halo 2 a similar treatment I'll be a happy man indeed.
But in terms of outstanding game of the year there can only really be one choice. XCOM: Enemy Unknown is probably the game that makes me most glad I bought an Xbox. A brilliant distillation of the original game. Streamlined and concentrated rather than dumbed down it's every bit as fun as it's glorious forebearer. Tense, tactical, scary and dangerous combat combined with the tricky base management where every decision MEANS something. And on top of it all the control scheme for consoles is beautifully optimised and works smoothly. It's just a damn good game. Just gotta wait and see if they're gonna do Terror From The Deep.
In terms of actual physical gaming, well that's been fairly usual. Lot's Yu-Gi-Oh, a bit of Quarriors and Star Wars minis. But there was at least one new discovery.
Stupiduel. Ye gods but this is a fun game. I'd actually been after a copy for quite a while after finding it on boardgamegeek, but had no luck at all until I found a copy on ebay a few months back. Of course, after that I discovered that the game and it's expansions are actually easily available from the makers website, but such is life. In terms of gameplay you simply use the item and modifier cards to make up stories to kill each other, or defend against attacks. It's the closest thing I've ever seen to how they play Duel Monsters in series one Yu-Gi-Oh. As far as I can tell the only drawback is that the fantasy expansion doesn't have an Owlbear card.
So yeah, overall there have been some decent bits and bobs over the year. Not nearly as bad as I thought. Just need to see what the next twelve months bring us I suppose.
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