I am not the kind of person who makes year-end best-of lists. For one thing, I’m not good with keeping track of the timelapse of a year - I often don’t remember whether an album or a film or a book was released this year, or last year, or even the year before. (I also don’t comment on other people’s year-end lists; this hilarious NPR article will give you an idea of why.)

But I do value the occasional recommendation, and perhaps you do too, so here’s a small handful of media picks all of which I know for a fact happened within the last year. All of these have been consumed by me and enjoyed greatly.

Books

Nonfiction division: The Table Comes First, Adam Gopnik. For anyone who is interested in food, recipes, restaurants, history of same, etc etc … basically, for all my foodie friends, but I have a whole lot of foodie friends. The writing in this book is so excellent and clever that I want to read large chunks of it aloud to anyone who’ll stand still long enough to listen.

Fiction division: Carte Blanche, Jeffery Deaver. The James Bond novel franchise has had its ups and downs since Ian Fleming. (Some would say it had its ups and downs even when Fleming was writing them.) Carte Blanche is essentially a reboot of the written franchise in the same ways that the recent Daniel Craig films have been a reboot of the visual one. It’s a surprisingly well-researched novel, more grounded in plausibility than you might expect. This is not High Literature, you understand, but it’s very enjoyable reading.

Music

Sky Full of Holes, Fountains of Wayne. Although not as many of these tracks will immediately reach out and grab you by the ears as did on Welcome Interstate Managers, keep listening. You will start by being caught by easy-to-love tracks like “Acela” or “The Summer Place,” but it’s the more thoughtful ones like “I Hate To See You Like This” or “Cold Comfort Flowers” that will keep dragging you back.

Only In Dreams, Dum Dum Girls. This could easily have been the same sort of listenable but one-gimmick album as Best Coast’s Crazy For You, but Kristen Gundred is better than that. The first thing you’ll notice is how much she sounds like early Chrissie Hynde. The second thing you’ll notice is that the album is full of interesting surprises that you don’t usually see in what is basically garage-girl-band material.

Movies

Hugo. Just go see it. In fact, make sure that you see it in 3D, and that’s not something I ever thought I would say about any film, ever. This is only a story about a boy who lives in the unseen channels of a train station and keeps the clocks wound at its uppermost levels. Below that, this is a story about Scorsese’s love of movies and his sense of wonder, neither of which seems to have diminished with age. In particular, if you are any kind of film buff and you haven’t already seen this film, you need to fix this immediately. And yes, you can take the kids. In fact, they may give this film their highest tribute: In the theatre where we saw it, the kids were so enthralled that they forgot for a while to be noisy and disruptive.

Games

Multiplayer Division: Star Wars: The Old Republic. I was briefly in the beta for this. It opens officially on 20 December. I don’t know how well it is going to play for people who don’t love the Star Wars universe. But if you do, and you like multiplayer online games, this is one you don’t want to miss.

Solo Division: Portal 2. Best game script in the last five years, perhaps in the last decade. This is the kind of game you want to play just to hear what the characters in it are going to say and do next. It is also a challenging puzzle game which is - despite the many environmental hazards which can kill you - almost completely nonviolent, so if you resist games where you spend your time shooting at everything that moves, this is the game for you. (The one caveat I will add is that you need to at least know a summary of what happened in the first Portal; ideally you will have played it. But it’s good too!)

Handheld Division: If you bought a 3DS, Super Mario 3D Land is the game that finally justifies your purchase price. Really. It’s that good. It’s the game they should have delayed the 3DS release for; it’s the first “killer app” for the system.

I feel old.

So, let’s say you’re young. Not even especially young. Let’s say you’re under forty. Or let’s say you’re just old enough that you came to this computer-gaming thing comparatively late in life - again, not especially old, pushing fifty will do it. This means you missed the sweet spot - you missed the time period when a handful of game shops were making the Golden Age of RPGs which had actual stories, decent writing, good organization, and took just enough actual strategy to play to keep you honest. Solo RPGs you could actually get invested in.

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It’s unfortunate that the guy who wrote this article is apparently a misogynist ass who probably shouldn’t be allowed to be anywhere near a female of any age. Because I found out what an ass he was, it predisposed me to disregard his article, and … well, that’s not fair. I mean, he’s still an ass, and I do not endorse him in any way, but if you dig in the article beyond the sensationalist stereotypes used as needless attention-getters, you find some modestly insightful stuff. Pity very few will bother digging that far now.

On the whole I approve of all efforts to resist, reject, and refute stereotypes, because I believe stereotypes are a straitjacket and everyone deserves a chance to work on a blank canvas. But in doing so, we should also not lose sight of the fact that stereotypes usually became stereotypes because they were at least partially true.

In other words, not all boys are violent, overly physical, short-attention-span, pecking-order-driven jerks - but enough of them are that the assumption became a bet which, to some people, was a worthwhile risk. (Write your own matching example about girls and sparkly-princess things.)

Here’s one part of the article which, in my experience both as a long-ago D&D player and as an MMORPG frequent flyer, is true more often than it is false, and which contains a useful insight or two:

My personal experience shows that girls are not less violent than boys, they are less wantonly violent. They don’t mind using force to achieve their goals or defend their honor, but they don’t relish in slaughter and destruction, and they certainly don’t like taking reckless risks solely for the sake of awesome.

I recollect a session in which a group came upon an infernal anaconda. A minotaur hero threw down his great axe, stripped to his breeches, and declared that he was going to wrestle the anaconda one-on-one and to strangle it to death with his bare hands. Why? Because that’s totally badass!

This is not something I imagine a female player doing. In fact, nearly all females playing for the first time, both young and old, created characters that specialized in ranged attacks, most often rangers and druids. Those who didn’t start the game as ranged strikers did so because of peer pressure from boys who really needed a leader in the group. Now, have you noticed how leaders in D&D never really lead, but only serve the group? A girl forced to play a so-called “leader” is much less likely to stay in the game than a girl given a character with which she can express herself and act as an individual, and not part of a well-oiled monster-killing, XP-making war-machine.

It’s a shame he didn’t bother to use the same nuance when spouting his best and worst case scenarios, like “Wait! You didn’t let me finish describing how my character is dressed this morning.” That’s just designed to make you grit your teeth, which is a pity, because after that comes something with actual value:

A 9-year old girl who came to see what D&D is all about once asked me if her character can be a vegetarian, to which I replied “of course” and rewarded her 200 XP because she was the only one who bothered with non-combat aspects of her character. As I reviewed the character sheets that evening I noticed that she wrote in her character class as “vegetarian ranger.” Practically every decision she made during this campaign was affected by her character’s vegetarianism and love for nature. This included not only her selection of friends and enemies, but also character appearance, choice of items, and making a point of petting an animal or planting a tree at least once per session.

Dramatic players care about how their characters look like and how they are perceived by seemingly inconsequential NPCs more than about “winning the game” or destroying stuff. In a way, they are much more immersed in the game than the sportsmen, who view it as, well … a game; or the hooligans, who view it as GTA: Nentir Vale. Crunch is of secondary importance to them; if you want to capture a dramatic player’s heart, it’s much more important to portray the witch as stooped and cackling, to describe the dragon’s magnificence with epic prose and grandiose tones, and to generally pay attention to body language and aesthetics. A dramatic player cares less about the powers and bonuses granted by the treasure and more about its luster and beauty.

Notice that in that second paragraph he says nothing at all about male and female but instead characterizes types of playing style. The types of playing style, I think, are accurate; it’s in linking such styles to a gender that we start running into problems.

Personally, while I don’t notice that all or even most female players are overly interested in the appearance, biography, et cetera of their character, I do think they are more interested in this, on average, than the average male player, for whom backstory is a bore. The girls want to have a character who is actually a character, fully-formed, including spending a long time in the character creator until they’re happy with what they have. The boys are like, “How fast can I get past this so can go kill things?”

Of course, I have always leaned heavily toward all of the “girl” values in the article - I prefer ranged players over meleers because up-close combat bores me; I like to play with character customization and visual appearance and I am always interested in what my character is wearing; I don’t mind violence but only when the situation requires it, and “how to avoid a fight” is just as challenging/interesting to me as “how to win one.” So I guess I disprove the stereotypes right there, but since I’m known to be gender-dysphoric anyway, I think I probably should not count.

We are living in a world where the smartest and best sources of information are often satirical sites; had you noticed?

David Wong, despite writing for cracked.com, here accurately describes the state of the computer gaming industry, and why those of us who love it may not be too happy with what happens to it over the next few years. Even if you think the rest of it is misguided, stick it out to point #1 at the end, because that point is very important (and discusses something I’ve been trying to tell people for about a decade now).

Assuming you can still find and read your receipt, GameStop has announced it will honor Duke Nukem Forever pre-orders made lo those many years ago.

That’s assuming the Chinese Democracy of video games actually does release on June 14. I, for one, will only believe it when I see it.

When I was an adolescent, I played games a fair bit. I had a regular group I’d play card and board games with on weekends. I recall even then that I liked the card games more than the board games.

Superfluous but possibly interesting thoughts on the current state of board games and their players after the cut.

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As Dan Lyke put it:

Doom, in JavaScript in your browser (or at least in Mozilla), compiled using LLVM.

I feel old.

I don’t watch much TV. I do play MMOs pretty much every night. This cartoon explains the connection. Mary’s comment in the last panel is one I have made many times.

OK, to begin with, the full name of this game is The Treasures of Mystery Island: The Ghost Ship, which is just too damned long.

Second, this has to be posted as a text post and not one that starts with a link, because Tumblr won’t let me put a “more” break in anything but a text post.

Third, the actual review, plus a rant, is all behind the break.

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A puzzle game with a very simple mechanic and excellent level design. Starts to actually cause heat buildup in brain cells sometime around level 10.

I am linking to the Jay Is Games page instead of direct to the actual game so that you can read the discussion/apologia there before playing it. This game is a pitch-perfect, fun, hilarious throwback to the arcade days (think Wizard of Wor); it is also apparently offensive to some people.

I personally cannot interpret its mild innuendo/fetish content on any level but that of broad satire (more so when one considers the personal history of its designer), but in case you feel differently, well, that’s why I linked the JIG page and not the game.

(Marked NSFW not because of sexual content - nothing is really shown but a little exposed 8-bit flesh* - but because it’s very obviously a game and it makes noise, and when the co-workers come over and see some of the splash screens, including the game’s title and that exposed 8-bit flesh … well, you get the idea.)

* Actually it’s more like 4-bit flesh.

Yesterday after a couple of short sessions I realized I had reached the point where I’d better just go ahead and dedicate a day to finishing Portal 2, get the restless night where I dream I’m running endlessly through levels of the game over with, and have done.

I have good news and bad news about Portal 2.

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For the record, I am in my forties and I own a DSi and a 3DS. And I use them. We also have a Wii at our house, and we use it. I won’t say, “In a related news story, a Sony exec is an arrogant jerk,” because that is hardly news.

Here you go, Jack Tretton. My compliments.

To get me to play one of the five million hidden object games that Big Fish throws at us every day, it has to have some sort of puzzle or adventure/story element that pushes the game past the “find objects in a pile of crap over and over” mechanic (which is always the most tedious part of the game for me).

[You might ask, why play HOGs at all? To which I answer: because that is apparently the only way I’m going to get adventure/story games these days with the frequency I want to play them. Pure examples are increasingly rare.]

The Fool is pretty good. The story is witty and well-paced. It has HOG sections but they play fair and are not overused, and backtracking to previous places where you already DID that pile but it has reset for a new object hunt (arrgh) is minimal and reasonably obvious. The one really frustrating non-HOG puzzle in the game is skippable without penalty.

The one real complaint with the game I have is that it IS fairly linear and fairly obvious. You will only have one or two moments where you have to think about how to proceed, if you are at all systematic about your exploration.

Length is okay if you’re paying $6.99. It will last you an afternoon, which is about all I expect from a casual game download these days.

[Edited to add: JayIsGames review.]