Word Sandwich.

Kept me up till goddamned 3 AM.

One of two in a series.

Many things in 2007 were good. These are some of the most good bits.

Ratatouille

As has been said elsewhere, it’s really nice that once a year, Pixar puts out a movie, and the best case scenario is that it’s a timeless classic and the worst case scenario is that it’s just a really good, fun little movie. Ratatouille is firmly in the middle ground of Pixar releases – better than Cars or A Bug’s Life, but not as fully realized as The Incredibles or Toy Story 2. (Which makes it only about ten times as good as most movies at a bare minimum.) Brad Bird – a likely candidate for the best animation director alive, and yes, I’m counting Hayao Miyazaki when I say that – brings a relatively simple story of a rat-turned-chef to life with a minimum of fuss, a wonderful turn from Peter O’Toole and a sweet, widely applicable moral.

Civilization IV: Beyond The Sword

The deepest computer strategy game there is – period – gets its second extension, and god, what more can they pack in if they decide to create a third expansion pack as rumoured? A ton of clever new mods, new units, the addition of corporations and advanced espionage rules, a crapload of new civilizations (including the Dutch, Sumerians, Byzantines and the Holy Roman Empire – but, sadly, no Canada), and of course the chance to play as Abraham fucking Lincoln. The game just keeps getting deeper and more complex with every expansion, and the best bit is that the learning curve can be as slight or as tough as you want. And it’s so deeply moddable a game – if I were inclined to mod games, this would be it. Civ IV as applied to the Wheel of Time world? As applied to Tolkien? Heck, even Eddings. (Eddings wouldn’t be hard, you’d just take the appropriate equivalent existing civilizations and change the names.)

The Immortal Iron Fist

Unlike, for example, Chris Sims, I have no particular fetish for the curious remnants of 1970s Marvel comics, and I had no expectations of an Iron Fist series. The man wore slippers for god’s sake, little yellow kung-fu booties. He kicked people, which in and of itself is not really that amazing or impressive. (I mean, Karate Kid kicks people, and just look at Countdown.) In short: a third-tier superhero with a small, dwindling fanbase is, generally speaking, not something about which I really look forward to reading. But then Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker decided they wanted to write a complete kung fu epic, only really tangentially related to the Marvel Universe, and they got superb art from David Aja and a host of others, and thankfully they got rid of the booties. The result is quite simply the best superhero comic available at present: a non-angst-ridden story-driven work, stuffed to the buns with top-quality action, a wealth of backstory applied smartly, and whip-smart dialogue. And again: it’s Iron Fist. Who woulda thunk?

Don’t Mess With The Dragon by Ozomatli

Their best album so far, and when you’re dealing with a band with a discography like Ozomatli’s that is no small thing to say. Some music critics dismissed the album as “admirable, but unfocused.” This is Music Critic for “not all of the songs sound the same so I have trouble writing up the album in one paragraph. Please make all of your songs sound kind of alike.” Ozomatli cannot do this, though, partially because they are a nine-piece band, but mostly because they are simply too damned awesome, with their melange of funk, hip-hop, salsa, rock and jazz fusing together into an improbable, wondrous whole. And as a bonus, this is far and away their most danceable album yet.

“30 Rock”

Quite possibly the funniest television show of the new millennium – all the sharp, venomous wit of Arrested Development combined with the quotability of the best seasons of The Simpsons and a surprising amount of heart to boot, and topped off with performances that any other show would kill simply to have one of. In most shows, Judah Friedlander’s fat nerd writer would be the go-to joke character; in 30 Rock, he’s not even in the top three, not when you have Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin and – I can’t believe I’m typing this – Tracy Morgan, who prior to this was my second-least-favourite SNLer of all time (beaten out only by the truly talentless Horatio Sanz). But especially Alec Baldwin, who finally gets to display the savage comic ability that was only hinted at by his numerous guest appearances on SNL, and who should be on this show for the rest of his natural life if they can manage it.

Air Guitar Nation

Everybody making best-of movie lists this year gives the nerd-doc props to The King Of Kong (and understandably), but by god do not overlook Air Guitar Nation, which like that other doc works the “competition” storyline by having one rock-steady hero (the incomparable C-Diddy) and one egomaniacal ass (the deeply strangleworthy Bjorn Turoque), who are both extremely good at what they do. The fact that what they do is cavort around on stage rocking an imaginary guitar is at first hilarious, but then eventually becomes life-affirming and wonderful (and hilarious), and when the film progresses to the World Championships of Air Guitar, somewhere in rural Finland (no, really), and the crowds cheer for the devoted air guitarists – well, it is entirely possible that a small portion of Heaven is like this. A fairly weird portion. But a portion.

Team Fortress 2

When it comes to the Orange Box, Portal understandably gets all the hype, because it’s clever and original and funny. But Portal only lasts a few hours. The real meat of the Orange Box comes with the involving, easy-to-learn-but-hard-to-master online gameplay of Team Fortress 2, a game with animation and visual design reminiscent of The Incredibles and a sense of humour from, well, pretty much the same place (the Heavy Weapons Guy’s pseudo-Slavic commentary alone is worth the price of admission, but don’t discount the Scout’s Bronx taunts, the high-pitched German screaming of the Medic, or the muffled yells of the Pyro – because the Pyro wears a mask, you see). The gameplay is simple and elegant, and always extremely easy to follow: “snapshots” freeze-framing the guy who killed you not only help you identify who killed you but help newcomes get an idea of how. Plus, they helpfully label the pieces of your dead body when you get gibbed.

“Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Geniuses Who Make Up America’s Top High School Chess Team” by Michael Weinreb

Recommended particularly for nerds, and I estimate my readers are, oh, ninety-eight percent or so nerds. (Wave your freak flag high.) Even if you aren’t a chess fiend particularly (and I, personally, am at best an average player – although if we’re talking speed doubles chess, that’s different strokes right there), this book will resonate, because – come on – it’s about nerds surviving high school by doing their own thing. It’s just that in this case, “their own thing” wins them big-ass trophies.

Killer of Sheep

I first saw Killer of Sheep when I was 20, taking an American Cinema course. The prof had a bootleg copy, which is how I got the rare chance to see a movie that, though made in 1977, only got released this year due to conflicts over the music rights. Killer of Sheep is amazing – a lot of people liken it to Italian neorealist cinema like The Bicycle Thief, but I always thought of it as having a more Cassavetes sort of a feel, despite the film’s essential lack of continuous narrative – it’s bleak and honest but doesn’t lack heart, and indeed I would argue it almost has more because of that bleakness. It’s on DVD along with Burnett’s second feature and a number of his shorts, which are likewise brilliant. Rent or buy, either way.

The video for “1234” by Feist

The song alone would qualify for this list, but the video is the sort of thing that births superstars – delightful low-fi wonderment, relying on showmanship and pure filmmaking skill to pull off (trust me when I say that I can tell the focus pulling for the shoot was nightmarishly difficult just by looking at it), and effortlessly communicating sheer joy in a way that isn’t entirely common, to say the least. A thousand thousand high school girls just got their first girl-on-girl musician crush this year because of this video. (Tori Amos would be proud.)

The Spirit

Step 1: Get Darwyn Cooke to write and draw something.
Step 2: Fuck yeah.

Bioshock

A perfectly excellent first-person shooter, notable for both the character improvement system imported from the old (and fantastic) System Shock games, and the gorgeous, completely immersive 1940s Art Deco-ish visual design, brought to life with graphics both gorgeous and surprisingly interactive. (The opening, where your plane crashes in the middle of the ocean, and you get to swim around as you watch it sink – amazing.) Oh, and of course there’s the fact that the main plot boils down to “Atlas Shrugged, except it all goes wrong and people become zombies.” I am honest enough to admit that the game’s hearty “fuck you, Ayn Rand” ethos tickles me greatly.

Yau Man on Survivor: Fiji

Yau Man was easily the coolest player to come along in quite a while on Survivor – a canny late-fifties math teacher with a knack for practical survival and for playing the game to a brilliant inch. Plus, he was funny. Unfortunately, Yau Man made the critical mistake of thinking that somebody named “Dreamz” was intelligent enough to realize when he had precisely zero shot at winning the game outright, or that giving “Dreamz” a car would be incentive enough for the jackass to walk away happy rather than compromise his much-vaunted integrity in the hopes of winning a million dollars he would never actually win. On the bright side, the next season of Survivor, starting in February, is a “hardcore fans versus top Survivors” show, and you have to bet that Yau Man qualifies as a top Survivor – if he wants to go for a second round, that is. Yau Man might not, because he’s just that cool.

Upcoming: The stuff that did suck.

Beach has its origins in two very popular areas of first-person shooter gaming: the original Omaha Beach map in Day of Defeat, and Team Fortress 2‘s progressive-attack maps like Gravel Pit where one team is on “attack and take control” and the other team is on “defend until time runs out.” And this is an understandable combination of two great flavours.

After all, the Omaha Beach map (“Charlie”) in Day of Defeat might not have been the most balanced or playable map for that game – that honor likely goes to the Caen map, still a masterpiece of team-FPS design – but it was a rush. That initial run into the onslaught of German snipers (and the map encouraged tons of snipers) simulated the actual Omaha Beach experience as well as a video game could at that time. You can draw a line from that map right through Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault and to the classic Call of Duty Stalingrad rush sequence.

So, with Team Fortress 2 the new gold standard for team first-person shooter play (yeah, screw you, Quake Wars), it seems only natural that somebody would recreate the Omaha Beach experience for TF2. And at first glance, the designers have done it expertly – the map offers great play for Pyro players especially (which, given the deadliness of flamethrowers in narrow trenches, is terribly appropriate), and defending Snipers will have a blast to say the least. (At one point, I heard a defending player wonder why their team had anything other than Engineers, Pyros and Snipers on it. I can’t disagree.) The third-stage tunnels are twisty and intricate and a lot of fun. Yes, at first glance, this is a great map.

The problem is the second glance, when you start to realize the myriad problems with the map. Firstly, this is the first TF2 custom map I’ve ever seen that allowed spawn camping (IE, being able to snipe players exactly as they respawn on the map). Spawn camping sucks. It is the opposite of fun – you die, you wait to respawn, and then before you even get to play you die again. In a highly participatory game like TF2, it’s simply the death knell of good play.

Worse is the fact that the defenders have infinite and extremely easy access to resupply: most of the healing powerups and ammo powerups are concentrated on the defender’s side of the board, making the first and especially the second control points almost impossible to capture. Worse, their resupply rooms – where the attackers can’t enter – have rapid access to the frontlines. I lost count of the number of times while, attacking the second control point, I dropped an opponent to about ten percent health and he’d just run into the resupply room, instantly regenerate to full health, and come back out for the kill (since I was down health after our fight).

And what’s really problematic is that Beach’s designers have been spotted playing on the map, and when asked about the imbalances, they say that this was on purpose, since “D-Day was hard.” Really, they said that. Completely missing the point that:

A) TF2 is meant to be a lighthearted, fun game rather than a military simulation,
B) in every other Omaha Beach map for any other game, the design has more or less equalled out both sides,
and C) the Allies won, not the Axis, remember?

As it stands, Beach is just about unplayable – once the novelty of the setting wears off, the tedious gameplay will drive you away. The sad thing is that this is easily fixed with some simple redesigns – orient the landing boats (the spawn points for the attackers) so that players can at least make a run up the beach before being killed, and remove the rapid-access healing for the defenders, and you’d have the makings of a very playable map. But right now, it’s very, very bad.

This makes me want to play World of Warcraft slightly more than I did previously. We are now up to “probably never” from “definitely never.” This is the type of power Mr. T possesses.

Also: Shatner.

So, you’ve plunked down some of your hard-earned money for The Orange Box and you’ve already finished Portal and have bugged the shit out of all your remaining friends with jokes about cake. Now what? Perhaps you want to jump into some enjoyable online competition with Team Fortress 2, the premier shooting-at-other-people game. Maybe it’s because of the awesome, vaguely-like-The Incredibles graphics. Maybe it’s because of the attention to detail both in gameplay and presentation. Maybe you just want to shoot at people and yell “TAKE THAT YOU QUEER” over your headset. Whichever of these is your personal barometer of importance, you can be sure that Team Fortress 2 will satisfy it.

However, with nine distinct classes in Team Fortress 2, the barrier to play may seem slightly daunting. Do not fret! Valve has thoughtfully designed a game where even a rank newbie can jump in and immediately begin playing like a veteran! Just be sure to follow these simple tips and you will soon be indistinguishable from the vast majority of Team Fortress 2 players so long as you shout homophobic slurs two or three times an hour.

The Heavy. Beginning players often gravitate to the Heavy, possibly because he is a big fat guy and many players will look rather like the Heavy (minus the obvious muscle, of course), but also because his gameplay is quite simple. Remember, anybody playing a Medic is your slave, and everybody loves hearing you shout for the Medic twenty times in a row. After all, nobody deserves healing ahead of you, because you are the big strong Heavy and everybody else is just a tiny ant that you will squish. You never have to duck or hide because you have 300 hit points, more than anybody else, and 300 is practically infinite. Oh, and make sure you always spin your barrel so you can fire at a moment’s notice. Who cares if it makes you an easier target? 300 hit points, baby!

The Soldier. Hey, remember how back when you played Quake 2 everybody always wanted the rocket launcher? The Soldier is the only class who gets the rocket launcher! That means the Soldier is the best class of them all! Your slow-moving rockets are especially fantastic for long-range combat with Snipers. In addition to getting the rocket launcher, you also get to rocket-jump. Rocket-jumping is awesome, and you will always have enough hit points to survive the landing, and you definitely won’t lift up in a slow, graceful arc that makes it easy to be shot to death in midair.

The Demoman. The Demoman comes with two grenade launchers. The first grenade launcher shoots grenades that explode on impact with enemies, and which clatter around if they miss. If you are a Demoman, ninety-nine percent of your grenades are intended to miss. You don’t even have to come close. Just keep shooting grenades wherever you like. If anybody complains, explain to them about “suppression fire” and why you’re actually winning the game by filling that alleyway with grenades. Now the enemy team has to attack through one of the other two entries – you’re helping pin them down! The other Demoman grenade launcher fires stickybombs which can kill your teammates if you trigger them at the wrong time. The wrong time is never “when there is at least one enemy in range of my stickybomb explosion,” even if four of your teammates are there. (You may also want to explain “attrition” to them as well.)

The Scout. You can outrun anything. You saw it in the trailer – the sentry guns and the Heavy can’t shoot the Scout, because you’re just so fast. Would the trailer be inaccurate? And the Scout counts double for capturing control points, which means you should always break into a dead run for the control point. Going anywhere else is a waste of time. Maybe you can double-jump every so often for variety, but Scouts have one job to do, so do it. Heck, suicide charges worked for the Soviets at Stalingrad and for Iran in the Iran-Iraq war, so they should work for you too!

The Pyro. Never, ever, ever switch from your flamethrower. So what if it’s useless at long range? What happens if an enemy suddenly pops out right in front of you? You’ll be glad you had the flamethrower then! Heck, why even take your hand off the trigger? Just rush the enemy with your flamethrower going full blast. You’re bound to set some of them on fire before you die, and if you’re playing a Pyro, the only thing that counts is how many enemies you set on fire, as opposed to how many you actually kill. Also, it says in the rulebook that you should ambush people with your flamethrower, so go ahead and do that. Nobody else has read the rulebook and thus will not be expecting you to hide in all those obvious hiding-place that jut off long corridors.

The Engineer. The Engineer is the last line of defense for any team. That means you build all your structures at the control point closest to your base. Even the teleporter exit. The other players can handle all those other control points – you’re going to guarantee that your opponents never take the last one. And if you stalemate your opponent, that’s very nearly as good as winning! Also, remember to build the sentry gun first because the dispenser just gives you more metal to build other structures, while the sentry gun can shoot people (if they ever get close). And never forget that every ammunition box is, by definition, yours. Other players understand this and never need ammunition. They’re too busy dying trying to get those control points the other team controls anyway; they’ll never need all their ammo…

The Sniper. Some people will tell you that the Sniper is the toughest class to play in the entire game. Those people are stupid. Sniping is easy: you pick a point a long way away and shoot at anybody who goes through that area. Don’t hide your laser sight, because the other team isn’t paying attention to it anyway, and you want to be at exactly the right spot so you can get more headshots. Also, remember that the best time to play a Sniper is when you’re attacking and trying to gain ground, because the class excels on offense. Does your attacking team have less than four Snipers? Then why not play one? You can always use more Snipers! It’s a support class – doesn’t everybody like to be supported?

The Medic. Your Ubercharge is quite possibly the most dangerous ability in the entire game, so be sure to use it on a class that can really make best use of it. A Sniper, say, or maybe a Scout. And remember, if you have to Uber up a Heavy, don’t bother staying close to him or anything like that. And be sure to try and kill people with your needle gun from time to time. That way, they respect you.

The Spy. Disguise yourself as a class the other team doesn’t have. They’ll be even more confused that way. When attacking an engineer station, stab the Engineer then try to take out the sentry gun. Don’t worry about being detected while cloaked – it never happens, and if you uncloak while the enemy can see you, they’ll probably be too busy to notice anyway. The Spy: the easiest class to play!

Well, this game would probably be very addictive to me if I didn’t have Team Fortress 2.

Ah, sweet, sweet Team Fortress 2. I do so love shooting people.