Okay, wow, 2012 is done -- did everybody have fun? Not just in that last night where we saw Ryan Seacrest ceremoniously becoming the welcome host-husk to Dick Clark's frozen brain so that he may live for another century. No, I'm sure everybody's New Year's Eve was enjoyable. Mine was. I saw our bar's drunk owner make a three minute speech about the Fiscal Cliff to some light laughter and some good natured heckling. Then some wide-lipped woman started shouting about being a well-informed Republican, and she had to leave with her weird prehensile tail between her legs a few minutes before the ball dropped.
I'm talking like the entire year as a whole. Given that we talk about conversable, popular materials here, for we are those who are literate in culture, this year, we combined the best things in entertainment into one list. Last year, there was enough juice to talk about the best games and the best TV characters in their own lists, but this year, no such luck. But we must compare. Partly because it's fun to compare pineapples to bananas. Partly because 2012 was a light year in massive, cultural moments.
Sure, we had elections, and the Olympics, and The Avengers made two killion dollars, and rightly so, but this was a year of people, and their entertainment existing inside of spheres with lessened overlap with others. Without further adieu:
++ SPOILERS ++ Journey takes about 2 hours to complete, which is a little longer than it takes to watch Happy Gilmore but a lot shorter than it takes to read Paradise Lost. Like the Samuel L. Jackson film Snakes on a Plane, it is a game about its title. You land in a desert, brought there by a comet. You walk up a hill. You see a mountain in the distance. The mountain looks special. The word "Journey" displays on your screen. What follows is a march through inexplicable beauty, floating, and a monomaniacal devotion to reaching the mountain you saw in the beginning. You'll eventually die. Maybe a few times. Not as a function of this being a video game, but as a function of what occurs on the journey.
Journey's closing flight sequence and accompanying music is the single best moment in games for 2012. Yes, I damn near cried at sheer bewilderment. Play it with headphones.
This is Final Fantasy: The Movie: The Videogame. Follow the logic? If Final Fantasy 1 had been made, and then none of the others had, and time had proceeded, and then in 2010, the same guy had decided to make Final Fantasy 2, this would be that game. It's the adventure you imagined in your mind when you were playing 8-bit Nintendo games that didn't have enough pixels to show much more than a slashing sword and four-letter names for characters. It's a boy's childish imagination given form with all the beguiling panache we all want in a save-the-princess / save-the-world adventure, which we detailed at exhaustive length in our earlier review.
In Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds, it was obvious how much Tarantino just wanted to make an 'effing western. All the slow-boil intensity. The vignette-style scenes. The magnificent, spontaneous, violence that he's known for. The slamming zoom-ins. The inhumanly-evil villains (although in Django's case, historically-accurate). In his other movies, it was goofy, and quaint, and effective. In Django, it's exactly how it should be. He would be hard-pressed to top this. It all suited Tarantino so well, my hope is that he has one or two more good movies in him, and then he'll just step aside, which has confessed he's interested in doing.
XCOM has more candelabra-toting, step-by-step, "ohfuckohfuck" moments than a haunted house made of newspapers. The Lord taketh away in the turn-based, you versus aliens turn-based strategy game where you can name your characters after funny things, as I've inferred. There is no reloading in Ironman mode. Nobody can save your characters from death after they die. Only you can save them from death before they die.
Which brings us to the big winner!
At least not worth arguing about or listing on this here Internet. Too much happened, specifically to you, and specifically to me, to put something arbitrary at the top of the list. I've laughed too hard at too many things that few too people would find relevant or funny. You're probably the same way. So the single greatest thing in entertainment this year was the thing that made you laugh the most.
-- @Alex Crumb (originally published 1/2/13)