I should preface this story by explaining that my parents have always told me that I had a very vivid imagination as a child. They said I was always prone to flights of fancy and wild stories, even though I remember being a peculiarly practical child in my own way. Still, I’ve always figured they remembered things better than I did; so any time I had a memory that didn’t seem to make sense or to match up to the way the real world should work, I’ve just chalked it up to one of those “flights of fancy” and assumed it was my memories playing tricks on me. (You can imagine how vindicated I was when I finally saw the ‘Star Wars Holiday Special’…but I digress.)

continue reading "The Hole in the Wall: A Childhood Reminiscense"

Bruges. I usually hate Stefan Feld games because they are all recipes for getting victory points (he also put out Bora Bora this year, and that is a game where literally every single action, even passing, gives you points) and little else; they mostly seem like cynical exercises to stroke the addictions of Euro-gamers rather than actual attempts to craft a pleasing game. (If Stefan Feld made pizza, every pizza would have triple cheese and double pepperoni and ham and seven other toppings and it would be completely inedible.) But Bruges, despite being a Feld and therefore having a lot of ways to generate points, feels like a proper game to me – partially this is because of the crazy amount of card interactions within the game, partially it’s because actual effort was put into the design to make everything click just right. It’s true that there isn’t as much hand manipulation as I would like – basically you have to make the best of what you draw, most times, and a good engine in this game involves drawing as much as possible rather than hand-cycling – but that also makes the game simpler and quicker, and that’s not nothing.

Spyrium. William Attia’s long-awaited follow-up to Caylus hits many of the same buttons that that earlier game does for me; it’s a rock-solid worker-placement with a lot of ways to screw over other players, but they’re all still worker actions. Worker placement, at its best, is an elegant game mechanic that forces players to gamble, adapt on the fly and even bluff, and Spyrium gives you all of that while also forcing each player to carefully manage their inflows of money so they can buy further assets. It’s a remarkably tight design but its random board allocations also allow for a great deal of play variability and replayability. It’s just good, at absolutely everything.

Nothing Personal. It was advertised as a streamlining and modernization of Kremlin, the classic Avalon Hill area-control-as-negotiation game, and that is exactly what it delivers but it’s really such an improvement in so many ways. It’s chaotic but with enough control that it never feels random, thematic as all get out (this is a mobster game, and the mobsters CAN whack each other, but it’s much harder to whack Da Capo than it is to whack a low-level goomba – also the start player token is a pinky ring), and the negotiation of the game often comes down to who can offer the best bribe, which is exactly how a mobster game should play. (The box says “three to five,” but never play this with three since the bribing/negotiation portion of the game is essentially meaningless with three players.)

Eight-Minute Empire. Realistically this game takes fifteen minutes to play rather than eight – you can only finish a game in eight minutes if everybody really tears through their turns – but it’s still a fast and surprisingly deep little continent-controlling game that actually does feel a little bit like Risk, if Risk were good rather than tedious. So much game in such a little box!

Mascarade. Two smallbox bluffing games came out this year that were very good – this and Coup. The latter is fine, but I think it suffers a little from a deterministic end game – as you gradually eliminate character roles by eliminating players, Coup‘s endgame becomes a little of a fait accompli since it becomes much easier to figure out what your optimal play is. Mascarade doesn’t have this problem; it’s a bluffing game where it is entirely possible to not know your own power, let alone everybody else’s, and it requires a fair amount of mental dexterity to juggle your bluffs with other players’ knowledge. It’s a deftly designed little game with nice components (although I wish the art had been prettier; it’s very busy).

Next five: Planet Steam, Euphoria, The Duke, The Great Heartland Hauling Company, Guildhall.

Gravity. People complain that it loses a little oomph the second time through because the second time through all of Alfonso Cuaron’s brilliant direction isn’t a novelty any more, but whatever, it’s still brilliant. And I take issue with people who complain about Sandra Bullock in this movie; she’s the anchor of the film because her fear and panic are normal, human reactions to the insanity that is going on, and Sandra Bullock does “normal person overcoming fear” better than just about anybody else. She grounds the film and gives it the weight it needs; the most amazing shot in the movie is not any of the staggering Things Happening In Space shots, but the triumphant final shot of Bullock that closes it. So to sum up, Sandra Bullock is pretty good in this. So is George Clooney. (The dialogue is average at best, but so what.)

12 Years A Slave. It’s not an entertaining movie by any means – this is really a movie you have to endure rather than enjoy – but it’s simply a masterwork on so many levels (the acting, the direction, the dialogue, the cinematography – there is not one aspect of this movie that is not auteur-level work) that the endurance is worth undertaking. When the biggest complaint people have is that Brad Pitt’s character seems like a deus ex machina when those events are actually what exactly happened in Northrup’s actual life, then you know you have a fine movie on your hands – it deserves to win Best Picture in a walk, and even if it doesn’t we all know what the actual best picture of 2013 is.

Frozen. Tangled was the first sign that modern audiences actually still did want to see Disney Fairytale Musicals ™, the relative failure of The Princess and the Frog notwithstanding. (Did Frog make only a middling amount of money because of a black cast or because it was hand-drawn rather than CGI? Either way, it was a good movie, so this is further proof of my never-wrong theory that Audiences Are Often Stupid And Wrong.) But where Tangled is an solid B+ entry into the Disney musical canon, Frozen is an A; better songs (the weakest song in the movie, “Love Is An Open Door,” is silly and light until you realize, later on, it’s the villain song, not the love song), better characters, excellent and very active subversion of standard Disney “princess movie” tropes, numerous animation sequences that are absolutely breathtaking and all of the gags hit. Just staggeringly good and entirely deserving of the immense mountain of money it’s making.

American Hustle. There is so much about this movie that shouldn’t work: Christian Bale’s horrible combover and Noo Yawk accent would in any lesser movie scream out “I’M ACTING!” but in Hustle it fits because it’s a movie about liars. Multiple voiceover narrators should never work ever but in Hustle it makes sense because it’s a movie about liars. Gaudy filters to make the movie look “70s” should be mockworthy but in Hustle it works because it’s a movie about liars. Hustle‘s commitment to its own con mirrors its protagonists’ commitment to their cons and their desperate belief that their cons are morally acceptable; the entire movie is a justification. And it’s brilliant. Also it’s a really funny movie (“you don’t put metal in the science oven!”).

The World’s End. A lot of digital ink has been spilled recounting how meticulously Edgar Wright put this together; much more has been spilled trying to tie together the “Cornetto trilogy” as if that were a thing for real instead of Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost just bullshitting their audience endlessly that three basically unrelated films made by the same guys are in fact a thematic sequence of some kind. (SPOILER: they aren’t really.) But The World’s End is smart, and affecting, and definitely a movie made by guys in their early forties because as you approach that age the whole “what happened? Wasn’t I young?” thing gets more and more prominent and you start to understand why assholes buy sports cars even if you’d never buy one yourself. In this movie, the promise of being an immortal robot is the sports car, and so is the idea of a drinking marathon, and although those two things are in conflict they’re also not, and that’s the genius of it. And they behead a lot of robots and that’s good too.

Next five: Kon-Tiki, The Wolf of Wall Street, Before Midnight, The Croods, +1

Papers, Please. Everybody likes to talk about how big-budget AAA titles force us into difficult moral decisions, but realistically they almost never do. You do the bad thing to get to the next cutscene, that’s it, and your only real choice is to stop playing (I remember when people were saying that Spec Ops: The Line was so upsetting that it became unplayable past a certain point, like this was some sort of feature), and that’s not necessarily a problem with big-budget gaming per se but it’s definitely something that sort of game doesn’t do well. Papers, Please does this very well, because the choices you make are entirely your own and do not impact your advancement in the game: you can grow increasingly corrupt and keep your family alive, or stay human and watch them gradually starve/freeze/die of illness, or you can try to float between the two (I adopted “let my elderly uncle die off to keep my wife and child alive” as a strategy) but whatever you choose, you can continue to advance through the game stages and grasp at the faint straws of hope it provides. It’s remarkably elegant in simulating the demands of a tyranny upon you, the average Joe Citizen.

Monaco. The single-player version of this heist game is a fun puzzle-solver with myriad ways to solve each level (since all of the eight characters have their own special powers which let you waltz through some of the various challenges faster, but have to be normal at everything else), but it’s the multiplayer that really shines because it turns heist into farce so fast. At first I was trying to be all Thomas Crown on multiplayer levels, but watching everybody else just go hogwild and alerting the cops turned it into this weird slapstick farce of a thing which was ridiculously fun. I bought Payday 2 a while back when it was on sale. Haven’t played it once, because Monaco is just so good.

Rogue Legacy. This was my roguelike obsession of the year, a semi-rogue platform game with permanent leveling as you send descendant after descendant into the castle of death to kill the monsters. I am 4000 years into this family’s history and haven’t finished it yet, but I’m optimistic it should only take me another 1500 years’ worth or so of dead heirs. Great controls, great leveling design, great monsters, great everything. Until that Binding of Isaac sequel comes out this is my jam.

Sid Meier’s Civilization V: Brave New World. Okay technically this is just an expansion to a game from 2010 (good lord I have been playing Civ V for three years, what the hell) but BNW completes Civ V on so many levels so I am cheating a bit and listing it here: it makes diplomacy exceptionally more important (meaning all those wars you launch suddenly matter a lot more), changes the cultural victory condition to something much less twinkish but still achievable if you dedicate yourself to it (and the tourism mechanic’s benefits to trade are both thematic and an interesting motivator to pursue the victory condition), makes the trade mechanic both more powerful and more vulnerable simultaneously (sacking enemy trade routes and protecting your own becomes an actual thing), makes Great People much more useful, and revamps social policy for the better. It refines the “peaceful builder” aspect of Civ V while also making it more challenging, and nothing impresses me so much as when games, years after their initial release, continue to innovate and change. Sadly, this is probably the last expansion before Civ VI.

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger. A bargain-level FPS turns out to be my favorite shooter of the year? Well, it was. More critical types have applauded how the game’s use of an unreliable narrator makes it more fun and clever – which it does – but more importantly than that, it grounds the immense amount of action you undergo as you shoot the bejesus out of seemingly every last cowboy in the Wild West, whether they were good guys or bad guys. And the shooting is excellent, and the level design is rock solid. Really, Gunslinger serves as a reminder that designing a top-notch first person shooter is not really all that hard, which is why so many failures in this regard are so depressing.

Next five: Don’t Starve, Spelunky HD, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Ironclad Tactics, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. (That last would probably have made it on the list if I hadn’t started playing it only on December 30/had finished it already.)

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Also, if you missed it because of the holidays and wassailing and the like, last week I posted the second annual Not Quite The King William’s College Quiz and commenters thus far are not even half-finished and haven’t even identified all of the categories yet, which means I did my job properly and made it bastard hard. So go take a crack at it.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

‘Tomb of Dracula’ was, quite frankly, a nightmare brief. It was a horror comic published in the wake of a decision to loosen some of the strictures of the Comics Code, following a gang of intrepid vampire hunters led by the descendant of Van Helsing as they attempted to destroy the Lord of Vampires, Dracula. The problem should be obvious to everyone reading this, and it was obvious to the writers as well (which is why ‘Tomb of Dracula’ went through about three creative teams in its first five issues)…they’re going to fail, because Dracula’s name is right there in the title.

continue reading "Things I Love About Comics: Tomb of Dracula"

You can go over to Torontoist and read my three nominees for Heroes and Villains 2013: Tatiana Maslany, the Toronto Zoo’s elephant move, and The Raptor. (The Raptor piece was written before the Toronto Raptors went on a serious tear and actually look like a for-real basketball team for the first time in a loooooong time.)

None of them won Superhero of the Year or even came close in the voting, but unsurprisingly, Rob Ford took Supervillain in a walk.

The King William’s College Quiz has come and gone for another year, and of course its insistence that quiz-takers “know a lot of things” of course just makes the whole thing harder than it really needs to be. Therefore, once again we bring you the Not Quite The King William’s College Quiz, which we promise is not quite as hard as its namesake and panders to nerds shamelessly. Probably the latter is more important to nerds.

(P.S. Although still probably much easier than the real KWC Quiz, this should be much harder than last year.)

continue reading "The Not Quite The King William’s College Quiz, 2013 Edition"

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Click on thumb to see full

Everybody give Davinder a big ol’ welcome back round of internet applause!

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

The power is back on! It is a No Doubtmas MIRACLE, I tell you what.

Best of the season.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

(Al’Rashad is going to be delayed this week until my home has magical electricity again and is not a breeding ground for icicles, unfortunately. But remember, folks, up to one million people in Toronto without power in December isn’t an emergency because the Mayor says so.)