(Rising from the grave to publish a few posts that have been sitting here for a year or so.  And maybe more. . . ) I decided to toss all my yearly Top 10 lists into one post, instead of spacing them out. So it you want to know what I liked best in 2020, here are my Top 10 TV shows, Top 10 Movies and Top 4 video games of the year.

TV

1. The Queen’s Gambit – I’m still thinking about it. It is really great. I wish I had more to say.
2. The Good Place S4 – It feels like ages ago that this aired, but it was early in 2020. This is the best show of the last half decade, and while I don’t think that this was the best season of the show, it maintained a steady and high level of quality throughout. I don’t have a lot new to say about The Good Place; it is a great show.
3. What We Do In The Shadows S2 – I remain incredibly impressed with this show; it uses the movie as a jumping off point and has managed a couple of very impressive seasons of comedy. I just love it.
4. Bob’s Burgers S10 – Old reliable keeps on chugging along, putting out 20 enjoyable episodes every year while showing few signs of stopping. This show is hitting the point where most long running shows start to run out of steam, but I’m not seeing that here. I don’t have more to say; it’s Bob’s Burgers and it is still great.
5. Schitt’s Creek S6 – This show has really grown on me over the last few seasons. The name put me off, and I wasn’t crazy about the first season. But as things went on, I really warmed to this show. This last season was pretty great, though it did get kind of stuck in setting things up for the ending. It was a season long farewell to the show, a well deserved victory lap that maybe could have been better outside of the meta angle.
6. The Mandalorian S2 – I am not sure this second season was better than the first, and I wasn’t as blown away by the first as many people were. But I have to admit, there is something to how this show is structured that just really works well. It is at its best when it is kind of a monster of the week space western. The end of this season dove headfirst into the lore of Star Wars, and that was fine, but the rest of it was what really grabbed me.
7. Giri/Haji – On the one hand, this is just a crime drama. A Japanese cop goes to London to track down his yakuza brother, either to kill him or to save him or to bring him to justice. There are many other threads that tangled in his mission. This is a show that is never afraid to take chances, and not all of them pay off, but I found it to be highly entertaining.
8. The Great Pretender – This anime is gorgeous and fun, makes great use of color and language, and manages to vary its tone from wacky to somber with few whiplash moments. It is just really good. It is about a group of con artists who steal from other thieves or villains. Since the protagonist is only about a half member of the crew, it is never clear how much of the con he is in on.
9. Hilda S2 – Endlessly charming and simply delightful all the way through. I can’t recommend this show enough. It’s about a little girl living in a sort of Scandinavian seeming land called Tolberg who has magical adventures.
10. Legends of Tomorrow & Stargirl – This is the point on the list where I hit a run of superhero shows. Shows I like, but for whatever reason had some quibbles with. This last spot could have easily gone to The Boys S2 (in fact, that is what I had slotted in here originally) or Doom Patrol, if it had an ending, but upon reflection, I went for a tie between the two shows that gave me the most simple pleasure to watch. I have long enjoyed Legends of Tomorrow, and Stargirl was better than expected. It was only a few short years ago that any sort of superhero tv show would have been of interest just for its subject matter; now they are pretty close to oversaturated. But I still get plenty of enjoyment out of the good ones.

Movies

1. Emma. – One of if not the first movie I saw this year stayed on top the list all along. Just a great adaptation.
2. Da 5 Bloods – Spike Lee’s latest was exciting and thoughtful. Just a really good film.
3. Palm Springs – This Groundhog Day-esque rom com worked for me. It is bleak, yet funny and does a great job of contrasting how its two protagonists react to their predicament.
4. Bill & Ted Face the Music – Maybe my love for this movie will fade when watching it in other times, but it felt like the perfect movie for the moment when it came out. It is funny and heartfelt.
5. Birds of Prey – Just a complete delight. I feel like I might be championing this movie for years to come. It is one of the few superhero movies with actually well choreographed fight scenes instead of just cgi nonsense. It is so much fun.
6. Lost Girls – Amy Ryan tries to solve the mystery of her daughter’s disappearance/murder despite the apathy of the police. It is just great.
7. The Vast of Night – A low budget sci-fi about alien sightings in a small western town. The protagonists try to figure out what is up with these UFOs while the rest of the town is at the high school basketball game. It is all period detail and atmosphere. It is great.
8. Soul – This is the first time I’ve agreed with the complaint about a Pixar movie not being for kids, but it was great nonetheless.
9. Wonder Woman 1984 – I am choosing not to even look into the furor over this movie. I liked it a whole lot.
10. Mank – There is a lot interesting going on here. Its subject matter is of limited interest, I would think, outside of film circles, but a lot of what it is trying to say transcends that. Oldman is great.

Video Games

I didn’t play ten new games in 2020. I played a lot of games, but most of them were older. However, the few I did play, I greatly enjoyed. So, here they are:

1. Yakuza: Like A Dragon – I have only cleared the opening few chapters of this game; it feels like I am about one third of the way through it. However, that is enough for me to put it on top. Yakuza is already one of my favorite series, and turning it into a full on jrpg was just about the only way it could be more perfectly designed for my enjoyment.
2. Final Fantasy VII Remake – Final Fantasy VII has never been one of my favorites in the series. I came to it too late, by the time I played it I found it old and ugly and nowhere near as good as the SNES games I had been playing instead. When I came back to it years later, I saw more clearly how good it actually was, though it was too late for me to have any real nostalgia for it. Which is why I was surprised at how strongly the Remake triggered my nostalgia. This game kind of plays nothing like the jrpgs of old, but in other ways it is exactly how imagined games playing in the future when FFVII came out originally. I can’t wait to get more of this.
3. Super Mario 3D All-Stars – I wish I had more time to play these games. I played about a third of Super Mario Sunshine, then loaned the game to my brother. I love Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario 64, but had never played Super Mario Sunshine all the way through. This is a solid collection. I can’t wait to go through Super Mario Galaxy again.
4. Shantae and the Seven Sirens – Hey, WayForward put out a Shantae metroidvania early this year. It was a delight.

Finished

Mega Man X7 – I did not beat Mega Man X7. I beat a few levels of Mega Man X7 and realized that continuing with it would only lead to frustration. I don’t see any real reason to tear into this game here. It’s not good. It was an attempt to do the classic 2D Mega Man in 3D, at least partly. Mega Man Legends took the series into 3D, but it turned it into a Zelda-esque adventure game. MMX7 tried to do 3D while maintaining the style and feel of the older games. Honestly, that part is not particularly unsuccessful. It is the other stuff the game did, like the execrable driving stage and a generally uncooperative camera. It also does little stuff, like defaulting to no when the game asks questions, meaning if you are trying to hurry through repeated dialogue the game will frequently repeat it or send you back to the start. I just don’t need this in my life.

Super Mario Picross – This is on the Switch Nintendo online service. It is a Japanese only picross game. I blasted through it. It’s some good picross.

Ongoing

Atelier Ryza – Marginal progress. This game is just not quite clicking yet; I think it will at some point.

Tactics Ogre Knight of Lodis – Maybe it’s my recent replays of the Final Fantasy Tactics Advance games, but something made me want to replay this other GBA tactics game. I played through the first couple of battles. It is really setting something up. The Ogre Battle/Tactics Ogre games were always smarter than they get credit for. This one is setting up an interesting story about colonialism and religious hegemony that, if I remember correctly, actually goes somewhere. I hope the game remains as fun to play as I remember.

Pokemon Sword – I really needed something familiar and comfortable right now, and a Pokemon game really fit the bill. I have been almost completely disconnected from the mainstream gaming conversation for a while, but I get the feeling Sword/Shield didn’t go over all that well. There are some problems with the game I have had so far. It is a strange map, with a lot crammed into the one Wild Area, and the rest of it feeling a little empty. I like the general feel of it being a sporting event. That is an interesting way of framing things. I think the big problem people had was cutting down the available Pokemon, which I understand why that was an unpopular choice, but it doesn’t make a practical problem going through the main game. And since I never bother with any of the multiplayer, it doesn’t change much for me. I’ve had a lot of fun blasting through the first half of it.

Upcoming

Yakuza: Like A Dragon – I’m really looking forward to this, but didn’t manage to get it started in November. I hope that changes before the end of the year.

This is the 1000th post I’ve written on this blog. Well, 1000th post; I did do a month of strictly image posts about 8 years ago. With this milestone approaching, I’ve been looking back on what I’ve written and thinking about what I want to do in the future. My first thought was to just close up shop, disappear as unnoticed now as when I started. If I had some other outlet, I might have done that. But I’ve got a half dozen posts ready to go in the hopper, so at least for now I intend to keep plugging away. So here are 1000 words reflecting on 1000 posts.

What I’ve written over the last 8 or so years is different from what I imagined. What I imagined was me doing what all the popular sites I was reading were doing all by myself. At first I wanted to do TV reviews in the style of the AV Club, but I was getting in on the end of that train; the AV Club even cut back on their TV reviews not long after. Early on I outlined an ambitious plan to do recaps of my favorite shows, a list that is remarkably similar to what that list would look like today, and I got through a season of Futurama. The problem is that they were all comedies, shows without meaningful serialization or plot to examine. Writing about comedy shows is harder than I imagined; explaining jokes is not interesting and it only serves to make the jokes less funny. Without a lot of plot or character development, there wasn’t much to analyze. I always had an idea to start that back up again, likely focusing on different shows, like the CW DC shows, but I really don’t think I will.

I will continue to write about TV, though. I am intending to do more in depth writing about TV seasons as they end. Too often I write a short blurb in monthly post about how much I enjoyed a TV show and add a bit about writing more about it later, knowing that that will never happen. I want to try to make it happen. Also, I want to get some words down about my favorite shows, even if they aren’t episode reviews. I’ve already done that for a few (like Parks and Rec and The Office) but I will get to more. My movie reviews aren’t exactly what I intended when I started, but I am reasonably happy with them. I don’t see how I do them changing, though again I do intend to write more about older stuff.

My Video Game Archeology series was me biting real hard into Retronauts shtick, but even when I started people were moving to YouTube for video game stuff. That is one that might see a return. I’ve got a list of 8 and 16-bit (as well as a few N64/PS1) games that I’ve always wanted to try; it is entirely possible I might go back and give that a go. Otherwise, I will stay the course with my dwindling video game playing and writing time. This blog ended up being a lot more contemporary than I intended. I wanted to write about the things I loved, and at the time I was more inclined to spend time with old favorites than seek out new ones. For nearly a decade I replayed some of my favorite games at least once a year; the trio of Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI and Suikoden 2. I’ve mentioned the list of posts I intended to write that I made up before starting this blog before. (I’ll share that list below.) Keeping in mind that I made that list circa 2010, there is a lot on there that I have no idea what I intended to write about and a lot on there that I no longer have any intention of writing about. However, there is very little on that list that was new at the time, especially in the video games department.

I wrote about sports for a time, but my time as an intense sports fan is kind of past. Shake-ups to the college sports landscape, revelations about head trauma in the NFL and the like have kind of put me at a bit of a distance from sports that I didn’t feel in my early 20s. I still watch plenty of basketball, football and baseball, but I can’t honestly say that I care like I used to. Some of my favorite sports memories have happened while I was writing this blog, even if I didn’t write about them. I started a thing about baseball and the Royals after the 2014 season ended in a World Series defeat, and I had another one after the 2015 World Series victory. But I couldn’t really get my thoughts into words. I’m not saying I’ll never write about sports on this blog again, but look how long it’s been since I did.

I don’t have a lot to say about books and comics, I will keep writing about them as I read them and that’s about it. Maybe some more in depth features, maybe not.

I also don’t know that I’m proud of my work on this blog. In preparing for this post, I thought I would go back and find my favorite things that I’ve written, forgetting that I hate everything I’ve ever written. I can pick out some favorite experiences, if not posts. Book: Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde. Movie: Mad Max Fury Road. Game: Breath of the Wild. I don’t know that any of those are my best writing, but those are the best things I’ve written about.

Having the blog was a way to make my time working at jobs that didn’t matter seem less pointless. But my work isn’t so pointless anymore and I don’t know that my writing has actually improved. So who knows what the future holds.

Continue reading →

When I was first contemplating beginning this blog, I set myself what I soon realized was a fanciful goal: I was going to write 100 posts to have in the bag before I ever started posting anything. That way, I could make a schedule and keep to it. I could write and post things as I finished them and when I got to a post day – the plan then was the same as it is now with post going up M/W/F – with nothing ready to go I could just dig into my backlog of 100 posts and have something right there. I soon realized that doing so was an unrealistic goal. Right now I barely but up 100 blog posts in a year, so it would have essentially meant holding off from starting the blog for a full year, which would have essentially meant never starting it. So then I used it as a bit of a guide, picking something off the list to write about when other inspiration failed me. At some point, I filed away the list in a folder and forgot about it. Now I’ve stumbled across it, half a decade a later and it is a bit like finding a time capsule. This list contains the things that I thought I wanted to write about in 2010. Some I have written about, some I still want to and some I wonder why I ever had them on the list.

Mixed in with childhood movie favorites, like Willow, and some of my favorite games, like Skies of Arcadia and Chrono Cross, are some truly baffling decisions. I apparently felt I had a lot to say about Tim Story’s Fantastic Four movies, which I think I like more than most but they don’t really inspire any strong feelings or thoughts in me. I thought I had an angle to write something about Chuck, a show I stopped watching midway through its second season which had been a couple of years before I made this list. Maybe I was going to write about why I gave up on the show; if that was it I can’t write it now, since I don’ remember anything about that show. I also had quite a few sports things to write on the list, but I don’t really care about sports, especially college sports which made up the bulk of the items, much anymore. I do need to check and see if I ever poster any of the blog posts I wrote about being a Royals fan, from one right after the wild card game to one after they lost the World Series to finally one after they won it the next year.

A big one is A Song of Ice and Fire. When I made the list I was still among those eagerly awaiting A Dance With Dragons and the show had yet to premiere. The combination of a reread of the series and many tiresome conversations with fans of the show, as well as quite a few fans of the books, soured me on the whole series. What I would have written A Song of Ice and Fire then is very different than what I would write about it now. Is writing about it even still worth pursuing? I have endeavored to make my blog a generally positive place. I’ve never gotten much satisfaction from tearing something down. If I don’t like something, I’ll say that, but I am much more likely to just not write about things I don’t like rather than go out of my way to get mad at it. Still, sometimes putting a contrasting viewpoint out there is cathartic. I don’t have much nice to say about ASoIaF. I am happy that it has its fans and don’t begrudge them their enjoyment of it, but that is not the kind of fantasy I like.

That is another thing this list has brought to mind. I wanted to write about the pop culture that I loved as a child, the interests and experiences that shaped my youth and my tastes to this day. Somehow, though, I’ve managed to turn this blog into largely something more current. I spend a lot more time writing about new games and new movies that I watched recently instead of more formative experiences. The items on my list that fit the criteria of being a childhood favorite are the ones I am more likely to write about.

Right now, I am thinking of making a concerted effort to write those 100 blog posts I originally planned. I probably won’t change much else about how I do things, but now and then I will throw in an item or two from that rather diverse list. Once I’ve written about all 100, I think that would be a good time to close up shop here. Who knows? I like writing; despite the utter indifference that my meanderings here seem to inspire in people, I get enough out of them to continue doing them. But I am feeling a whole lot less eager to keep this up at the moment. So next week maybe you’ll see me finally put into words my indifference to the charms of Game of Thrones or maybe I will finally finish that long gestating exploration of morality in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Or maybe I will wax nostalgic about watching Willow on repeat. I don’t know.

I’ve been doing this blog a long time now and I’m getting a little tired of how I have things set up.  So I am going to be making some changes.  A new look, a new name.  I doubt my output will change much, but I kind of hope to have a little more structure to how I do things. (spoiler – that won’t happen) My biggest hope is that the new look and name will spark a change in me. As much as I enjoy writing here, I don’t feel like I’ve grown much as a writer since I started this.  It may be wrong to say this, but I’m not really worried about how many readers I have.  Don’t get me wrong, I hope people read what I write and enjoy it, but this is largely an exercise for me order my thoughts.

The new name is a long time coming.  We are Finally Cowboys has always been stolen from a song title in the game No More Heroes.  I liked that song, and I like the slightly nonsensical whimsy of it.  However, as long as I am using this title, it doesn’t really feel like this is mine.  Also, the sub-head of “A man’s desperate refusal to put away childish things” was cheeky and fun when I started this, but what is amusing to a 24 year old is sometimes a little sad for someone pushing 30.  So that will change as well.  What will it change to? I’m not sure as of yet, but I’ve got it narrowed down to a couple of options.

At the end of last year I tried to get a lot of my ongoing projects finished, not just here but elsewhere.  I finally finished up my let’s play of Fire Emblem: the Sacred Stones over on talking time.  That only took me four years.  I almost finished my much delayed replay of the Legend of Zelda series (my take on Skyward Sword should be up shortly) and I meant to get back and finally finish my reread of Wheel of Time reread, but again I came up short.  I will finish both of those this year.  It will take me a while, but I will also finish my JSA reread, though right now that project feels like it is casting around without a purpose.  There is a good chance that I will start some other project that I lack the time and patience to finish.

Once I complete the unfinished business, I hope to do things a little differently.  I will likely post less frequently, but I hope to make up the difference in the length and quality of my posts. Fewer, more in depth posts is the goal. I guess time will tell.  I will be adding a third regular monthly post, one for movies and TV to go along my with monthly video game and book journals. There are a lot of things I watch or play that I don’t really have 1000 words to say about them, but still want to get some thoughts down.  Also, I plan to add an index, but that project might take me a little longer to get up.

Just about the easiest list to do. But since I was planning to do a lot of lists, I figured I’d get the easy ones out first. When I made these Top 5 Friday lists I had planned to get a full year’s worth of them before I started posting, but that project died pretty quickly.

These are my 5 favorite movies, with the one stipulation that I am not putting more than one movie of the same series on this list. That rule exists so that the list wasn’t all Indiana Jones and Edgar Wright movies.

5: Flash Gordon – I saw this movie sitting in a hotel room in South Dakota on a vacation to see Mt Rushmore. This movie is still the most memorable thing from that trip. It is nuts, pure campy, drug-induced, fever dream insanity.

4: Hot Fuzz – Any of the three movies in this loose trilogy (Shaun of the Dead and The Worlds End being the other two) could have filled this slot, but Hot Fuzz is the one I like best. It simultaneously a hilarious send up of buddy cop movies while also being a great buddy cop movie. There are so many layers that I was still finding jokes after a handful of viewings.

3: Porco Rosso – I don’t know that I would say that Porco Rosso is the best Miyazaki movie, but it is certainly my favorite. There is just so much beautiful scenery on display as Porco flies around the Adriatic and so many great characters.

2: The Princess Bride – This film has it all, action, adventure, romance, humor. Somehow it lets viewers know that it is all a story and still gets them to care about the characters. It is constantly destroying suspension of disbelief, but that only somehow strengthens it.

1: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – I know that many will question the choice of this over Raiders, it was a close call, but I get just slightly more enjoyment of each viewing of Crusade than Raiders. It is the perfect action comedy.