Robot Unicorn Attack.

(It’s a really good game!)

Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro’s remarkable ability to use excess packaging on their primary gaming product – Magic: The Gathering – has gotten truly ridiculous in the last couple of years, and every new product just seems to get worse. My favorite until recently was this “premium deck” of foiled Slivers – take a look at it and then realize that, given the contents within that clamshell, one could fit in four copies of all contents in the volume taken up by that plastic case. Maybe five.

But apparently the Sliver deck wasn’t wasteful enough, because now there’s this:

This is the “premium all-foil” special edition Shards of Alara booster pack. Looks innocuous, but this is the thing: it contains one booster pack of cards. For those unfamiliar with the concept, here is a picture of a nerd (or possibly a hipster being ironic) holding up a booster pack next to his head.

And where is the actual booster pack (which, needless to say, comes wrapped in its own booster pack wrap within the larger amount of packaging)? Why, here it is!

Imagine how much less space just shipping a boxful of the booster packs would take. And in turn, less energy and cost.

However, I understand that Wizards has its smartest people over in the creative department, where they come up with amazing new worlds that all happen to have goblins and merfolk and elves.¹ So, really, can you blame them for putting all this extraneous crap on one lousy booster pack? Of course you can’t.

1. Their latest one is “world with goblins and merfolk and elves where there are giant floating rocks, and the giant floating rocks are magical.“ [↩]

…this fellow over at Boardgamegeek has a son who was born premature, and who has to undergo a fifth (!) surgery, and his insurance isn’t covering everything and he’s out of work. He’s already sold games, but a bunch of other people on BGG – including me – have listed games with proceeds going to him. So if you’ve got a BGG account – or are willing to set one up and like boardgames (and there’s also a pretty complete Nintendo Wii setup there as well which is currently going for relative peanuts) – you might want to consider bidding.

As an added bonus, if any of my readers wins one of my auctions, I’ll throw in a little something extra into the box.

EDIT TO ADD: As of right now, nobody has yet bid on this autographed/certified Eric Clapton vinyl album.

Okay, so I enjoy RPGs from time to time, but “sandbox” style play has limited appeal for me: I hated Oblivion, for example, because I kept getting lost and could never figure out where the story goals were. (Fallout 3 was much better in this regard.) For the same reason, I didn’t really enjoy Mass Effect that much; it was a lot more widespread than most of BioWare’s RPG games (which I usually like) and my gaming time is limited so I don’t want to spend it running my character all over the damn place.

I’m asking because I want to know how big the sandbox factor is for Dragon Age. Will I grow old and die before I advance my character halfway through the frigging game? These are important questions if I am gonna play the game. Otherwise I’ll just go buy Left 4 Dead 2 and shoot zombies. Actually, why don’t I just go buy Left 4 Dead 2 and shoot zombies?

LIKED

- Glee continues to impress, but here is the weird thing: in the United States it is doing slightly sub-average numbers, but in Canada it is a runaway hit getting a boffo huge audience. Someone has to explain how that works, beyond the simple and obvious truth that we clearly have better taste in teevee than you Yankees do.

- I don’t generally say much about them because they’re consistently good without being particularly showy about it, but anyway: Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy and War of Kings and all the other Marvel “cosmic” comics books are excellent. It’s just worth saying, because these books don’t get the praise that Iron Fist or Hercules (rightly) get, but Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning are writing the best outer-space superhero books since – well, their run on Legion of Super-Heroes. (Meanwhile, over at DC, they’ve given the “cosmic” franchise mostly to Jim Starlin, and that is… Not Working Out.)

DID NOT LIKE

- I finally played Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage and do not understand the mega-high BGG rating it has. First off, given that it’s a total redesign, it would have been nice if they had bothered to come up with a better way to handle armies than the old-school “let’s stack counters in a precarious, easy-to-topple stack” design. (Also, although I can appreciate the spirit and artistry of a die with Carthaginian numbers on it, in practice it is completely stupid.) More importantly, though, the game hinges around the battles, and the battle system is entirely too random for my tastes: even drawing mass numbers of battle cards, too many battles were lost after one or two piddling exchanges. Put this in the “a bunch of 50-year-olds were feeling nostalgic for a mediocre game” category.

LIKED

- Extract isn’t quite on the level of Mike Judge’s other brilliant comedies, but it’s still damn funny; Jason Bateman, JK Simmons, Kirsten Wiig, and Clifton Collins Jr. are all fantastic (and Beth Grant deserves a shout-out for creating the most hilariously annoying character ever; seriously, you will wish she would get run over by a truck), but you have to give props to Ben Affleck for being just goddamned awesome. I honestly think Ben Affleck doesn’t get enough props in this world.

- Strange Tales #1 is exactly as good as you thought it would be. Not sure why Marvel made us wait so long for it, but it’s fantastic. I thought the much-hyped Peter Bagge “Incorrigible Hulk” story was actually one of the least impressive; it’s still good, but I was a bigger fan of John Leavitt and Molly Crabapple’s She-Hulk story, Jason’s story of Spider-Man wanting to get into a barfight, and of course Dash Shaw’s Dr. Strange.

MEH

- Yes, I get that Spelunky is brilliant programming and revolutionary in its application of roguelike principles to platform gaming and blah blah blah but here’s the thing: a lot of little things that would have made this a truly great game as opposed to a truly great exercise in programming aren’t quite right. Most glaring is that there isn’t enough lifegain to quite counter the numerous ways to lose life in the game; the only way to gain life is to rescue the girl, an exercise that can frequently end up losing you life in the process (since carrying things is such a pain, given the loss of the whip and ability to run). There are other things: the dart-shooters do two points of damage rather than one, and given that it’s really easy to run towards one that’s offscreen and not see it before you’re getting shot with a dart, that feels unbalanced. The skulls sometimes becoming skeletons injects additional required caution that makes the game tedious. And the ghost showing up randomly is just goddamn annoying and makes the game less fun. It’s frustrating because the game is nearly great. But it’s not.

DIDN’T LIKE

- “All right, Supergirl, here you are. And you saved my life – much appreciated, by the way. But I still have to ask – are you here now as a hero… or as a villain?”
(Supergirl sheds single tear)
- “I’m Kryptonian, sure, but I’m not bad. I’m good.”
-”My father’s dead. I want justice. Together we can be justice!”

Somebody actually paid James Robinson to write Cry For Justice #3. Now, in fairness, the bits with Congo Bill and Mikaal Tomas teaming up actually flow quite well and I wish I was just reading Congo Bill and Alien Starman Fight Baddies, and there’s a nice bit with the Shade and Bobo that, one awkward line aside, feels like classic Starman. But everything with the actual star-billed superheroes in this book is total crap, and that’s before you get into the implications of them torturing a baddie who turns out to be a different baddie.

LIKED

- The Web is the first of JMS’ “Red Circle” comics that I’ve actually really enjoyed. This is not to say that Hangman and Inferno were bad comics; they were competently made bland ones, featuring Yet Another Spectre and a kinda boring guy-who-transforms-into-another-guy-who’s-on-fire. The Web actually has a pretty good hook, though, in that its hero is a guy who knows he’s kind of a shithead and has decided he doesn’t want to be a shithead (and has billions of dollars so he can be a superhero), and then his first time trying to not be a shithead manages to be a shithead anyway, but just a superheroic one. And then he learns a lesson. It’s kind of a twisted take on the Spider-Man origin and it works pretty well.

- I’m really enjoying Overlord II, more for its sense of humour than its occasionally annoying gameplay. Having command over an army of annoying hyperactive murderous runts is, it appears, endlessly entertaining. Listening to the heroic elves champion “all creatures, so long as they are fluffy and cute” is hilarious too. Really, it’s just a funny game with occasionally annoying controls.

- District 9 is good. (Insert dialogue about potential racist aspects of movie here.)

MEH

- How inessential a comic is Power Girl? Lemme put it this way: while hunting for a torrent of old Golden Age crime comics, I saw one for the new issue of Power Girl. It would have taken me one click to read it. I did not click. That is how inessential Power Girl is. And that comes from somebody who likes Power Girl and Amanda Conner’s art.

DIDN’T LIKE

- Wendy’s is doing this new line of “boneless wings,” which might be better called “nuggets in sauce.” They taste like you would expect nuggets in sauce to taste. The Asian Chicken ones are my least favorite, as they are nuggets basically dipped in a mix of honey and cheap, not particularly spicy sriracha. The Buffalo ones are worse. Given that Wendy’s has what is easily my favorite fast-food chicken item of all time (the Spicy Chicken sandwich), this comes as a disappointment.

Globetrotter XL.

LIKED

- Ghost Rider: Heaven’s Fire seems a bit gratuitous in some ways (was there a reason this couldn’t just be in the regular Ghost Rider comic instead of pumping the price to four bucks because you included a measly 70s reprint in the back, Marvel?), but who cares if it’s a bit of a money grab because at least it’s a justified one: Jason Aaron is really pumping this comic full of pure nitrous and putting pedal to the metal in the best possible way. He just keeps upping the ante more and more with every issue of Ghost Rider and it never disappoints.

- Everybody else has already given Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of the first Parker novel, The Hunter, big ups so I might as well jump on board: holy shit what a great read this is.

- Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is the second Call of Juarez game, and aside from the boring gunfighter duel mechanic, this is a goddamned great first-person shooter game just like the first one was. Maybe I could have stood to see more types of gun or more instances where Thomas’ ability to use an Indian bow would have been important, but even with those issues it’s still a fine game where you shoot many bad people with bullets, and there is never anything wrong with that.

DIDN’T LIKE

- Face The Ace is as bad as you think it is: take all the excitement of watching regular TV poker (hint: there wasn’t that much to begin with) and knock it down a few notches by having one person in the match be a giddy housewife or clueless frat boy type who barely knows how to play the game. And the host – one of the second-tier guys from The Sopranos who now has no career – is ridiculously annoying. Just a dreadful show.

LIKED

- Someone in the requests post asked for a general investigation into what I like and don’t like in music, and that’s coming later this week, but for the meantime? I really got into listening to Orishas this week. I really like hip-hop combined with traditional musical forms and Orishas do it very well, mixing Spanish rhyming (which admittedly I can’t follow, but their flow and performance is excellent even without understanding the words) with Cuban rumba- and salsa-style beats. “El Kilo” is probably my favorite single of theirs so far, but “Bruja” isn’t far behind.

- I’m really enjoying Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris. It’s funny and clever and hard to put down, and that’s what I want out of a light novel.

- I’ve always had an inherent fondness for poker-dice type games, and Lock N’ Roll is one of the best I’ve seen in quite some time. Current high score is 7622, for those interested in beating me.

MEH

- I got Britannia this week at a discount, which is great, and of course the new Fantasy Flight edition of the game is gorgeous in most respects. My complaint, however, is that this is a game with eleventy billion tokens, and the plastic insert which is supposed to store the pieces is entirely random and doesn’t actually have anything to do with the various types of pieces, so you end up kind of mixing things together in untidy clumps. This isn’t a small deal, because Britannia is a looooong-ass game, and anything that can reduce its playtime – like, say, simplifying the storage of it – is welcome.

- I finally got around to reading all of Jack Staff this week and… it’s not bad, I suppose, but I don’t see why this comic gets so many raves. It’s a perfectly average, okayish superhero comic. If it was a Marvel or DC book it would be completely unmemorable. Paul Grist’s art gives it an additional sort of original character, sure, but I was expecting an A-plus book and got maybe a B-minus. Is this like Walt Simonson’s Thor – is it one of those comics everybody else jerks over and I just read it and think, “eh, whatever?” (Other than Beta Ray Bill, of course.)

DIDN’T LIKE

- Whenever I see one of the old Big Books that Paradox Press used to print (The Big Book of Death, The Big Book of Hoaxes, The Big Book of the Weird Wild West, et cetera) in a used bookstore, I make a point to pick it up because they’re out of print and they’re always awesome: clever stories about real, obscure things, people and happenings. However, The Big Book of Urban Legends is just terrible, because it is full of boring stories about fake things that never happened that you have already heard half a dozen times. It’s like reading a book of knock-knock jokes when you’re older than eight; you know them all already, so it’s not fun or cool. It’s just bad.

LIKED

- Harry Potter and the Sixth Movie is decent. It’s not in the league of Star Trek or Up for summer quality, but it’s entertaining and well-made on all levels, which has been a fucking rarity in the land of the summer blockbuster this year. You have to really admire how the movies manage to take everything of quality out of the increasingly mediocre progression of books and ignore all the extra flotsam. (For example, Dobby has not shown up once since the second movie, which just goes to show you that the producers understand that Dobby is horrible in all ways.) This time around, Emma Watson really steps up her acting a notch, and Tom Felton makes Draco compelling and sad, which the book never really managed to do.

- Also finally got around to seeing Adventureland and was terribly impressed by it. It turns out Kristen Stewart can actually act when she is not in a shitty movie about sparkle vampires, and Ryan Reynolds’ turn as the park handyman/fading rocker is magnetic in the sort of way that Brad Pitt was in Thelma and Louise. And Jesse Eisenberg is like Michael Cera if Michael Cera wasn’t sometimes horribly annoying in a sort of “I need to punch you in the face” way.

- After a couple of marathon sessions I can safely say that Small World is definitely my frontrunner for “best board game of the year.” It’s quick (about an hour per session when people know the rules), strategic without being boring, has that random element that makes games interesting without being overly luck-based, and best of all it’s the sort of game that’s inherently funny. “A-ha! The Bivouacking Sorcerers strike with great vengeance upon your Dragon Master Halflings!”

DIDN’T LIKE

- Yeah, Blackest Night sure sucked.

LIKED

- Tales From Monkey Island Chapter One: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal is the first Telltale games adventure “episode” ever that I felt really lived up to the promise of the point-and-click-and-grab-things genre. Most of their previous offerings have been marked by puzzles that fell somewhere in between “unintuitive” and “nonsensical.” But Tales‘ puzzles make sense; they’re not easy, but they’re not so obtuse as to ruin the fun of the story. (Which is fun, incidentally; the story is so far on par with the best Monkey Island games.)

- Wipeout Couples was actually even more enjoyable than regular Wipeout, which is one of the great “sit back and have a beer” teevee shows. Seeing people root for their spouses on the obstacle course (and cheer, and complain) makes it even more fun. Whodathunk?

- The Magic: The Gathering 2010 base set is just shitloads of fun. People complaining about the rules changes need to get slapped for a number of reasons. The base set has knights and dragons and genies and goblins and everything that should be in a Magic base set: the traditional archetypes and things that are awesome about Generic Fantasy Literature ™. And the new spells and cards are flavourful and well-designed.

MEH

- I know I’m going to get pilloried for this, but: Wednesday Comics. The strip quality was good to excellent overall (exceptions: the incoherent Teen Titans and the very been-there-done-that Metal Men and Demon/Catwoman strips), but a lot of the comics didn’t give me the feel of the old weekly serials they were trying to echo: they felt like first pages of short comic stories and nothing more. Which is fine and I enjoyed them, but I’m not gonna go jerking off over the thing because the first page of eleven or twelve stories is awesome; it’s just too small and early a sample for me to call it “good.”

I’d also call into question the value. People have been exclaiming how this is the same price as a normal comic, but normal comics are overpriced. The giant-size of the layout is nice, definitely, and there’s something to be said for the experience of reading a comic newspaper-style – but it doesn’t give me more story. In fact it gives me less. Yes, yes, I’ve seen multiple people talking about the “square foot of comics” measure as if that was somehow relevant (next up: “Wednesday Comics gives you 24% more wood pulp for your dollar!”). And if they were trying to echo the old serials, why wasn’t this thing printed on cheap newsprint and sold for a buck? That would have been a marketing revolution. As it is, it’s just another (admittedly novel) exercise in marketing to the hardcores, and I can’t get that excited over marketing to the hardcores, because that is what is killing superhero comics.

DIDN’T LIKE

- Lesbian Vampire Killers desperately wants to be the next Shaun of the Dead. Here is all you need to know: it is nowhere near being the next Shaun of the Dead. Avoid. Like the plague.

LIKED

- Pixar films, at this point, are either an A+ (Wall-E), an A (Ratatouille) or an A- (Cars). On this scale, Up is a solid A – not quite reaching the peaks of Pixar but definitely not one of their “lesser” efforts (where “lesser” is something just about any other filmmakers would kill for). Ed Asner’s voicework fits his character perfectly (and if you don’t at least sniffle in that first ten minutes, what are you made of?) and the little kid character steals just about every scene without feeling forced. The second great summer film of a thus-mostly-starved 2009.

- Panic Breakout is really only fun the first one or two times, but what a one or two times!

- Finally got around to reading Jennifer 8. Lee’s The Fortune Cookie Chronicles and really enjoyed how a treatise on the history of modern Chinese food could serve as commentary on globalism, cultural mutation, immigration, racial attitudes, appropriation and reconcilation. Fascinating, and also brings with it a number of “oh, must try that” food ideas.

DIDN’T LIKE

- Mental is a terrible case of medical-procedural-by-the-numbers, pretending to be daring because it’s dealing with mental illness, but come on – using special effects to make schizophrenia more exciting is both overdone and tasteless. Chris Vance, in the lead, is particularly ill-equipped to handle his role; of course, even if he were a great actor, he’d still have a boring “look I’m kooky and nontraditional for no explicable reason” character to deal with, but he’s not a great actor; half of his work feels like a weak Hugh-Laurie-as-House impersonation minus the balls that makes House so interesting.

- “The Princess and the Dragon” expansion for Carcassonne? Oh my god, is it bad. Mutates one of the best board games of all time into an unrecognizable, not very-fun mess. Avoid. Do not get this expansion.

- Man, what a terrible set of audition episodes for So You Think You Can Dance this year. I went back and speed-rewatched the most recent set of Australian audition episodes for a comparison, and then last year’s Canadian and American auditions, and it’s not just me; this year’s American auditions focused more on jokey bad auditions that were supposedly funny much, much more than average, and the American show is the only one that still even bothers to show many bad auditions at all; in the Aussie and Canuck versions you can literally count the number of joke auditions on one hand, which ironically makes them funnier because they stand out in sharp relief to all the really great dancing. I’m honestly a bit nervous about this season now because I can’t help but wonder: did they not have enough good dancing to showcase?

This Flash version of the 1988 “Aliens” official boardgame is near-perfect.

I used to play that game all the time when I was in university. There was always time for another bug hunt.

Over at Pajiba, Dustin Rowles calls out Gore Verbinski for booting out of the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean flick to instead direct the film adaptation of Bioshock.

Leaving aside the question of whether it is a good idea for Verbinski to jump ship, so to speak – and I would say “hell yes,” given that the third Pirates was lacklustre throughout and gasping at the overly-long finish – there then follows extended dialogue about whether or not there is even a point to directing a film version of Bioshock, since the game itself is essentially an interactive movie with a rich plot, gorgeous visual ethos and numerous action sequences beyond the usual “shoot things and walk through corridors” experience of first-person gaming.

I think there is, for the same reason I think there’s a movie (or movies) to be made out of the Half-Life series of games: the protagonist is a blank slate. Your character in Bioshock says literally nothing during the course of the game. Things happen to him and are revealed to him (or her, who knows), but his actions within the game do not serve to illuminate anything about the personality of the protagonist.

That alone offers up a whole new avenue of storytelling opportunity for anyone looking to make a filmic version of the game, and serves to differ a film from the game. And that’s why I think Verbinski’s choice is the right one.

koichi_hirose, in comments here (and if you haven’t nominated me as a G20 Voice blogger yet, then by all means do so!) requests the following post:

My request: what you think about the current state of Magic The Gathering, about the recent blocks, or what decks you prefer yourself.

In general, I’m extremely impressed with Wizards/Hasbro as a support system for Magic and always have been; they’ve got a core understanding of the concept of not just keeping the brand stable but growing it whenever possible, and of designing the game not only for the hardcores but for the casual player as well.

Personally, I barely play Standard (IE “the last few expansions” for nonplayers) right now. I have one Standard deck built – a green/white Elves deck, the cheapest possible deck I could make that was still reasonably competitive (six rare cards) – and I play it every once in a while when I’m in the mood for a constructed tournament. (I will almost always prefer to draft or play sealed deck rather than play constructed.)

Of course, right now Magic’s Standard environment is kind of warped because some of the tribal archetypes introduced in the Lorwyn block (decks built around a single type of creature, such as Elves, Faeries or Treefolk) are so powerful and synergistic compared to anything else that the environment becomes a rock-paper-scissors game of Faeries/Kithkin/Red Deck, and the Alara expansions will be largely window dressing until those tribal decks disappear in October when Lorwyn rotates out of Standard.

(Which is another reason draft is more fun: when I drop a Woolly Thoctar it doesn’t die thirty seconds later, but instead has the impact that a massive fatty creature should have.)

I more frequently play casual vintage multiplayer (using a lot of proxy cards) with my roommates and friends, and that’s good fun, and the Alara cards have been far more effective in that environment. Magic’s a far better casual game than most CCGs and always has been, which is why it’s had so much staying power where most CCGs haven’t.

ME: So the federal budget got announced -
FLAPJACKS: Oh, god, are we going to have the boring budget conversation? Stimulus infrastructure spending jobs jobs jobs. There. I said everything we could ever say about the budget. Can we talk about Left 4 Dead now?
ME: What is there to talk about? It’s a good game.
FLAPJACKS: I have moral issues with it.
ME: About a game where you shoot zombies.
FLAPJACKS: Yes.
ME: I somehow know I’m going to regret asking why you have moral issues with it.
FLAPJACKS: Well, technically they are not “zombies.” They are “infected.” Which is why they can run fast like in 28 Days Later, see. So that means that these are simply poor diseased people.
ME: But in the game society has completely broken down as a result of there being so many zombies, and as a result of their proclivity to murder anything living.
FLAPJACKS: But isn’t that breakdown our failure? Why are we punishing the poor, sick people who, were they in their right non-zombified minds, would be horrified by their actions, and also not very likely to chase after a pipebomb like they were cats pouncing on yarn?
ME: The pipebomb thing is weird, isn’t it?
FLAPJACKS: The game seems to say that zombies will chase after anything that beeps. So that begs the question: why don’t you get more things that beep? Screw the guns, I’m gonna go find me some battery-operated clock-radios. They’ll keep me alive longer. You don’t go to the gun shop; you find yourself a Radio Shack and you’re ready for any undead zombie swarm.
ME: But the superior zombies, the ones with powers – they ignore the beeping. So you need guns to take care of the big bad undead.
FLAPJACKS: Clearly second-stage undeath gives one eardrums of steel.
ME: I don’t think that’s right.
FLAPJACKS: And another thing. How come you can only carry one grenade in this game? Is that even remotely realistic?
ME: Sure it is.
FLAPJACKS: How is that realistic? Grenades are small.
ME: Think about it. Say you are wearing pants with pockets, a shirt, and shoes -
FLAPJACKS: And socks.
ME: All right, and socks.
FLAPJACKS: I don’t want my shoes to smell like feet in the zombie apocalypse.
ME: Yes. Okay. Socks. Anyway, my point is this: you wear the medpack like it is a backpack. You have your pistols in holsters. You have your primary gun slung over your shoulder when you don’t use it. This leaves you two pockets: one can hold your pain-pills, and the other holds a grenade. You don’t have room to carry a second grenade. Especially when you consider that your options are either a Molotov cocktail or a pipebomb, neither of which is exactly compact.
FLAPJACKS: Firstly, where are all the real grenades? I mean, you find dead Army guys all over the place in this game, and frequently you find huge piles of ammunition and assault rifles and combat shotguns just, like, lying around. They didn’t bring any grenades?
ME: What good would real grenades be, though? They don’t beep and they don’t set zombies on fire. Maybe the soldiers used all the real grenades and found out the hard way that grenades aren’t that useful against a zombie swarm.
FLAPJACKS: Actually, that makes sense.
ME: Of course it does.
FLAPJACKS: All right, I withdraw my complaint about the lack of proper grenades. But that doesn’t address my other issue, which is “why don’t I get, like, a fanny pack or something in which I could store extra Molotovs or pipebombs.”
ME: Well, you’d need the fanny-pack to be front-slung, right? For easy grenade access.
FLAPJACKS: Yes.
ME: So do you really want that much gunpowder and/or kerosene right up against your crotch?
FLAPJACKS: …point.
ME: There we go.
FLAPJACKS: Still, I would like to press the development team to include some of my ideas for the next patch.
ME: Oh, Christ, not the elephant stampede again.
FLAPJACKS: Come on. It would be the ultimate powerup. There is no problem an elephant stampede cannot potentially solve.
ME: Putting aside the question of why there would be enough elephants to stampede the zombies in the first place, and the question of how one could realistically summon a herd of elephants in this post-apocalyptic scenario, wouldn’t summoning the elephants be problematic?
FLAPJACKS: Why?
ME: Ever think that maybe the elephant stampede might be counterproductive?
FLAPJACKS: No.
ME: Well, what if you got caught in the elephant stampede? Or a teammate?
FLAPJACKS: Or Nelson Mandela?
ME: …what is Nelson Mandela doing in the zombie apocalypse?
FLAPJACKS: He survived brutal imprisonment for thirty years. He’d be able to handle some lousy zombies.
ME: Anyway, that’s my point. The elephant stampede – quite apart from being ridiculous – would be counterproductive.
FLAPJACKS: But that is exactly why it has to be included. It demands a greater degree of playskill to use effectively. It is not a bludgeon, but a scalpel.
ME: A scalpel that is made of maddened elephants.
FLAPJACKS: Exactly so.

Jayisgames is doing a vote-off for the best web-games of 2008, and I include the link because my entire purpose in life is to make other people waste precious time so they don’t create precious works of art, properly parent children or bring about world peace.

“Pork and Beans” by Weezer and “So What” by Pink. 2008 was a really great year for “fuck you” songs, as the general frustration of the world with stupid bullshit finally hit its boiling point, and these were two of the best. Weezer’s song was “Fuck you, I’m a nerd” and Pink’s was “Fuck you, my marriage didn’t work out and who are you to comment.” They both had fantastic hooks (Pink’s “na-na-na-na” in particular will burn itself into your brain) and great musicality, and while Weezer’s video might have been a love letter to internet geeks, Pink’s video had Pink dancing naked and chainsawing down a tree, so at best the “best video” contest between these two is a wash.

The Incredible Hercules. Let’s face facts: 2008 was a remarkably shitty year for Big Two superhero comics. Other than the tail end of All-Star Superman’s glorious twelve-issue run, what was there? “Event” comics repeatedly failed to impress (something which, at this point, should surprise absolutely nobody) and most superhero comics held up as this year’s exemplars of the form (Jason Aaron’s Ghost Rider, say, or Geoff Johns’ work on Green Lantern, or Abnett and Lanning’s writing on Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy) are barely more than what should be expected out of the form – competent, entertaining storytelling that isn’t particularly revolutionary. The one bright light in all of this was Incredible Hercules, a comic which takes the mythological scope of Walt Simonson’s Thor and marries it to a humourous style not unlike that of Giffen and DeMatteis’ Justice League International (with the same core of pathos that that latter title had). Constantly wonderful and only getting better with time.

WALL-E. The single best film Pixar Studios have ever made – and considering this is the studio with Toy Story 2, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc. and The Incredibles under its belt, that says something. Confident enough to wed most of its storytelling to physical comedy – and physical comedy created by a junky little robot no less – the scope and ambition of WALL-E is only more breathtaking. Yes, Andrew Stanton and company walked it back in public, claiming that it wasn’t “about” consumerism and the ecological destruction of the planet. The rest of us knew ass-covering bullshit when we heard it.

Nation by Terry Pratchett. Nobody knows how many swings at the plate Pratchett has left in him at this point, so that makes this home run of a book all the more glorious; a book which manages to be horrifying without being gory, romantic without being crass, sad without being melodramatic, spiritual without being moralistic, and praiseworthy of science without being annoyingly self-satisfied. As it is a Pratchett book, it is of course also very, very funny and clever throughout, and its message – of the possible comingling and even necessary interdependence of science and religion – is timely and welcome.

Leverage. God, how did John Rogers pitch this and ever have any trouble? “It’s Ocean’s Eleven versus evil corporations who screw over the little guy.” Why did it take so long for someone in Hollywood to throw money at him to get it made? But finally it happened, and this show is a glorious triumph – funny, exciting and most of all you never, ever have to watch it in Idiot Mode because the characters are doing stupid things for stupid reasons. Leverage is a show where the characters, at their worst, do smart things for stupid reasons. Or stupid things for smart reasons. And that makes all the difference.

Furr by Blitzen Trapper. I like music with energetic beats and operatic ambition, so the fact that I’m putting simple, folky, gentle Blitzen Trapper on my “best” list should serve as notice to how brilliant this record was. The title track is a love song about a werewolf, for crissake – just saying that should prepare you for some of the shittiest filk imaginable, but instead Blitzen Trapper makes it work, avoiding cute jokes and writing pure, eloquent poetry, and sounding all the while like a young version of Bob Dylan backed up by The Band. Just fantastic.

Berlin: City of Smoke. Jason Lutes’ epic continues to be absolutely fucking staggering. You should read this comic. Enough said.

In Bruges. Tanked at the box office, as people expected from the shitty advertising campaign that it would be another Lock, Stock-lite English gangster caper film, but instead this was by turns a funny and solemn story about two gangsters (in Bruges) taking cover after a crime gone horribly wrong, a crime that left scars. The comedy comes from razor-sharp dialogue; the pathos from absolutely brilliant work by Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes, and a story that inverts the usual heh-heh-we’re-gangsters tropes and unabashedly, without moralizing, points out that the criminal life really, really sucks at your soul. The best directorial debut of the year, by a country mile.

Northlanders. Brutal, vicious, and utterly fantastic Viking stories that only served to once again remind comics fans of why Vertigo still matters if you’re not interested in medium-dark fantasy (along with the equally fantastic Scalped). Totally hard-ass and uncompromising about both the virtues and flaws of the Viking world, and the lack of an overarching supernarrative means that Brian Wood can do what he does best – stories more connected by theme than by plot. (With Vikings in them.)

Fallout 3. Everybody else has already said everything that could be said about this game, so I’ll just throw in a backhanded compliment: the game is so crazily chock-full of content that I maxed out at level 20 when I was less than a third of the way through the main plot. Dear Bethesda: please to patch game to give more levels please.

Bob on Survivor. You have to love it when a 57-year-old physics teacher (and clearly still a very fit one) dominates the competition challenges over people half his age and invents multiple realistic-looking fake immunity idols to keep himself in play. Bob was the runaway fan-favorite of Survivor: Gabon and easily one of the most dominant players in years, his only failing being an early willingness to trust the wrong people (which merely made him all the more sympathetic).

The Boys. The next time somebody tells me that Garth Ennis just likes to take the piss out of superhero comics and that’s the only reason he’s writing The Boys, I will make them read #15, wherein Annie, undergoing a severe crisis of faith, demands that God give her a sign He exists, and leaves the church disappointed and on the brink of collapse when nothing happens – and then promptly runs into Hughie, who of course is exactly the sign she asked for. Then I will beat them to death with a lead pipe because I am sick to fucking death of people whining about shit that isn’t true. Be forewarned.

The Battlestar Galactica board game. An ingeniously designed board game, featuring the standard cooperative-survival mechanics one would expect given the setting, but with a brilliant twist: some of the players are actually Cylons and they are secretly trying to destroy humanity. The game’s system is designed to make hiding and striking against humanity a thing of subtlety and play-skill; if you’re really good you can even set up other players to take the fall for you, framing them as Cylons using nothing more than your own ability to lie. Similarly, it takes true observational skill to ferret out a really good Cylon player, as well as time your incarceration of them properly. Yes, it’s kind of a shame that Boomer sucks compared to most of the other characters, but other than that this game is seriously just about perfect in its execution.

Chuck. With a promising mini-season start last year, Chuck was already a solidly entertaining little show, but now? Far and away the most improved show on television; the plots are more clever, the dialogue snappier, the action higher quality and the unrealized romance between Chuck and Sarah satisfyingly boiling away behind a thousand actually-good reasons for them to not be together. Also good: the elevation of the Buy-More supporting cast to credits-level importance. Last season I was worried Chuck might waste them in favour of the annoying guy who plays Morgan. This season – well, less Morgan! That’s a start.

Metropolis by Janelle Monáe.

I trust that was self-explanatory, but if it wasn’t – that blend of nu-funk, futuristic soul and utter batshit craziness (it’s a concept album! Set in 2719!) is like what I think Legion of Super-Heroes should be if it were transposed into musical form. And she’s an obvious music nerd. Any other P.Diddy “discovery” diva-lite would want to be all pretty and sexified in their debut video. She wants to be Robot James Brown. How awesome is that?