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Stuff I liked in 2015

As always, this list is purely personal, not just in terms of reflecting my tastes, but also because it's about what I found in 2015, regardless of when it was made.

Films

Mad Max: Fury Road
A masterclass in minimalist world-building. Fury Road paints a weird, vibrant, thrilling world that it trusts you to pick up as you go along, never slowing the action to spell out what you can infer or imagine.

Captain Philips
Naturalistic filmmaking that puts the audience on board as the captain of a container ship negotiates with the pirates that are trying to hijack it. An edge-of-your-seat story with a large dollop of veracity.

John Wick 
I feel like I’m losing my taste for slick, stylised violence, especially the kind that glorifies dudes taking out their grievances on strangers. Nevertheless, John Wick is a film that violences real good.

Books

Leviathan Wakes - James S.A. Corey
The first in a series of science fiction page-turners that manages to keep the space adventuring grounded and believable, even as a crew of misfits and a hard-drinking detective uncover a conspiracy that reaches far beyond the politically divided solar system.

Annihilation - Jeff Vandemeer
“Eerie and unsettling”, the blurb on the back of the book says. And then some. An utterly riveting journey into a bizarre wilderness.

A Darker Shade of Magic - V.E. Schwab
Alternate Londons, dangerous magic and sadistic tyrants make for a charming fantasy.

Comics

Ms. Marvel - G. Willow Wilson, et al.
If you read one superhero comic, read this.

Rocket Raccoon - Skottie Young, et al.
Colourful adventures in space with everyone’s new favourite interstellar rodent.

Fuse - Antony Johnston, Justin Greenwood, et al.
A police odd couple solve crimes on a space station. Given the restrained tone, I found it a bit disappointingly soft in the sci-fi stakes, but the characters are great and the whodunnits genuinely engrossing.

TV

Person of Interest
We’re only up to season 3 of this show in the UK, but it’s still some of the best science fiction TV out there (masquerading as, ick, a crime procedural). Three-dimensional characters deal intelligently with thought provoking and important themes - without forgetting to get mixed up in plenty of gripping drama while they’re at it.

The Flash
So at this point the Arrowverse is shaping up to be TV’s Marvel Cinematic Universe (only with lesser-known DC characters), and this is it at its fun, imaginative, colourful best.

Parks and Recreation
Imagine The West Wing, but with really low stakes. Then fill it with great characters that the show clearly has lots of affection for. Pierce lid. Microwave for five minutes. Excellent television.

Video Games

Soma
I loved everything about this game. It certainly has its flaws, but I didn't mind any of them. An unflinchingly honest exploration of some of the more uncomfortable ideas in science fiction, in a gruesomely beautiful underwater setting, with cool non-human characters, scary monsters, and tonnes of widgets to fiddle with. Loved it, loved it, loved it.

Alien Isolation
A remarkable love letter to Ridley Scott’s original 1979 horror film. The game may never be quite sure what to do with itself, but exploring a note-perfect extension of the world of Alien, while being stalked by cinema’s most memorable monster, was always going to be something that would win me over.

Invisible Inc.
I do like me some stealth games. I play them methodically, slowly, carefully - exploring everything. Invisible Inc. is a turn-based stealth game that aims to change everything calcified and clichéd in the genre, turning my play style on its head and encouraging nail-biting, carefully planned risk taking. I imagine people will be talking about the design of this game for many, many years to come.

OH HI

I've been working on a thing since April that's been taking forever and is now in the get-other-people-to-poke-it stage.

You can also take a peek at a thing that I didn't get to work on here.

Blast Off

In case you missed it, version 1.0 of Kerbal Space Program is out, with new kerbals, new parts and new mechanics.

I've started over in career mode and it also seem to be much less of a grind than before...

2014: Stuff I Thought was Cool

Better late than never: the definitive list of stuff I found and liked in 2014. A lot of superhero stuff this time.

Films

Guardians of the Galaxy
Captain America: Winter Soldier
These two films, both critical and commercial successes, are radically different approaches to making a Marvel movie. One builds heavily on the shared universe, the other strikes out into strange new territory. Both barely seem like superhero stories.

Man of Tai Chi
So Keanu Reeves' directorial debut is a great kung fu film and also a solid bit of filmmaking. How 'bout that.

Honourable Mention: Sanjuro

Books

Railsea - China Mieville
It's Moby Dick on a train, only deeper and stranger than that.

The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
Engrossing, imaginative and magical.

Ancillary Justice - Ann Leckie
A nuanced and carefully constructed space opera with a fantastic main character.

Honourable Mention: Embassytown - China Mieville

Comics

Ms Marvel - G. Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona, et al.
A nice balance of fun superheroics and down-to-earth character drama. A lot of bollocks has been written about Kamala Khan, but the simple fact is that she's a great everyman protagonist.

Hawkeye - Matt Fraction, David Aja et al.
A low key, character-led comic in which your least-favourite Avenger turns out to be a loveable loser trying to do best by those around him.

Saga - Brian Vaughn, Fiona Staples et al.
The new 20th Century Boys in terms of these end-of-year lists of mine.

Honourable Mention: Black Widow - Nathan Edmondson, Phil Noto et al.

TV

Person of Interest
I avoided this show reflexively at first, assuming it was yet another post-9/11 show about questioning rights and freedoms as though they were ambiguous or even undesirable. But no, it's actually a stealth science fiction show with a much better treatment of privacy and exceptional power than you might expect.

Arrow
That dark, gritty, camp, out-of-this-world action show about Robin Hood.

Smallville
The New Adventures of Superguy and Robin Hood, guest starring Martian Detective.

Honourable Mention: Sleepy Hollow

Video Games

Valkyria Chronicles
The World War 2 era fantasy land is beautifully realised, the melodrama can be surprisingly affecting and the real-time-meets-turn-based gameplay is addictive.

Shadowrun Returns
A solid and fun cyberpunk roleplaying game.

The Stanley Parable
Big, funny and clever.

Honourable Mention: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

Shorter for Science

I've been using pretty much the same rocket design for trips to Kerbin's moons for a while now, but, especially with the extra science components for career mode, I finally got exasperated with its gangly instability.

This new rocket uses the same layout for most of its stages, but has a much shorter and broader lander. I wasn't convinced that the extra engines and reduced fuel capacity weren't a compromise too far, but Jebediah successfully took it to the Mun's Farside Crater and back.

Strangers in Orbit

I threw together a slightly monstrous rocket to do a rescue contract.

Actually synchronising with the poor lost kerbonaut ate most of its fuel, but then it was just a short trip back down to the surface...

Sacrificial Kerbot

Oh, hello.

I've been playing Kerbal Space Program's career mode since the version 0.24 update. My best achievement so far has been crash-landing a probe onto one of Duna's ice caps, where it sent back temperature and pressure readings for juicy science points.

I Made Another Thing

This thing is about a bunch of weirdoes who talk at you.

Here it is.

Further Adventures in What's Happening

Once again, I volunteered to write examinations of the nominations for the XYZZY Awards' best character award, which you can find here, if you're into that kind of thing.

What's Happening

So yesterday I attended the XYZZY Awards Ceremony on ye olde ifMud.

Castle of the Red Prince was a nominee for Best Use of Innovation.

Change of plan...

Actually, there's something unseemly about dumping a load of images on a Blogger blog, so I'm going to post my failures at isuckatmetalslug.tumblr.com

Tumblr also lets me easily queue my failures up to post over the oncoming days and it doesn't compress the crap out of the screenshots (which are admittedly from a port that distorts the game's graphics anyway...)

I'll probably add a little post here if I manage to make any significant progress. Like it would be nice to make it to the mission 2 boss one day. :-/

Credit where credit's due.

The third instalment in SNK's classic run 'n' gun series Metal Slug is now available on Steam. It's perhaps best described as a "passable" port - it works for most people, stutters very occasionally (for me, more frequently for others) and displays some of the best pixel art of all time at an almost-but-not-quite-right resolution.

If you can forgive those faults, it's still a delightfully exaggerated bunch of explosive madness. And when I'm not working on my current project (which has hopefully passed the point where I'd be prepared to give up before finishing it), I'm currently seeing how far I can get into the game on a single credit (medium difficulty). The answer is probably not far, but I'm going to post my progress here until I give up.

2013: Stuff I Found and Liked

Film

A Cat in Paris
A short and delightful film about a cat's friendships with a grieving little girl and a professional thief.

No
Charting the party political broadcasts that aired against Pinochet during the referendum that ended his dictatorship, this film alternates between moments of levity and vulnerability, all filmed in a gloriously ugly-beautiful video cassette style.

Thor: The Dark World
It made me laugh, it used its London locations well and by now the Marvel Cinematic Universe has me hook, line and sinker.

Books

Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
Relentless retro nostalgia can't hide the fact that this book cares for its characters, even as it puts them through virtual reality hell.

King of Air Fighters - Ira Jones
This hagiography of Edward "Mick" Mannock is as interesting for its undisguised bias as its charting of the life of one of the most important airmen of the First World War.

Blue Remembered Earth - Alastair Reynolds
A solid work of science fiction by one of my favourite authors in the genre.

Comics

Gunnerkrigg Court - Thomas Siddell
I caught up on the hard-copy editions of this webcomic a few months ago, and it's as imaginative and winsome as ever.

21st Century Boys - Naoki Urasawa
This two volume conclusion to Urasawa's 20th Century Boys wraps up what is probably one of my all-time favourite stories - a genre-spanning epic which always has more surprises up its sleeve.

Knights of Sidonia - Tsutomu Nihei
To some this is the comic where Nihei sold out, but in applying his strange blend of M.C. Escher and H.R. Giger to the space opera genre he's created something I find appealingly strange.

Television

Community
Is this a sitcom, or one long, carefully choreographed battle against genre, tropes and expectations? Inventive, imaginative and - beneath its cynical and sarcastic exterior - heartfelt and compassionate.

Fringe
The fifth and final season was by far the weakest, but it's hard to hold a grudge against such a genuine effort to bid fond farewell to this likeable cast of oddballs.

Adventure Time
Genuine characters experience mind-blowingly unreal situations across a bizarre fantasy land. What's not to like?

Video Games

Minecraft
I may be a bit late to the party, but this really is the game that has everything. Build a home, explore strange and dangerous countryside, fight monsters. Imagination is both encouraged and rewarded.

Kerbal Space Program
No shit, if you've visited here over the past year. Fun, challenging and open-ended.

A Dark Room
This game starts out simply enough that I dismissed it out of hand when I first encountered it. The next time, I lingered a little longer and quickly found a game that consistently ramps up the scale each time you think you've got a handle on it. Also a superlative example of minimalist world-building.

Rendezvous at 140,000m

Docking two spacecraft is notoriously hard, in real life as well as in Kerbal Space Program. Making use of this nifty guide I was able to get close, and after quick saving/loading through a few bad misses, managed to dock the final part of Clowder Station.

I also took the opportunity to swap out Jebediah for Rayvis Kerman. Jeb's a little too precious to risk losing in a random space junk strike.

And then the launch vehicle carefully deorbited, taking its main fuel tank with it, leaving Rayvis in charge of a slightly skew-whiff space station.

Getting kind of busy up there...

The scary part about putting a space station in orbit around Kerbin is viewing all the junk you've left up there and trying to pick an orbit that doesn't intersect with any of it. And the rocket that puts it at that altitude has to be extra careful about any junk it leaves behind, what with it spending time on an identical orbit.

So, after undocking the first part of Clowder Station, commanded by a lonely Jebediah Kerman, Bob Kerman was careful to deorbit his big fuel tank before separating the final lander stage and leaving Jeb in orbit.

The final touch was switching the vessel type to "station" so it shows up with a nice icon in the tracking station. Next step: docking the other half of the thing. A.k.a the hard part.

Teething Problems

As the next step in conquering space, I decided to put a space station in Kerbin orbit. Of course, just sticking something in orbit is trivial, so I would be trying to dock two different space station parts together - docking being one of the hardest things to do in Kerbal Space Program, or indeed actual space.

Did I say putting things in orbit was the easy bit? The launcher I threw together seems to have a strange flaw where if it's throttled up towards the end of one of its stages, it suddenly spins out of control and explodes (the crew module is mercifully left intact and able to parachute back down to Kerbin).

Spoiler: I will actually complete the space station before realising that the issue is with some incorrectly connected fuel lines causing some of the engines to run out of fuel before others, throwing the rocket fatally off-balance.

By the way, I am 30 now

:[

No Kerbal Left Behind*

While the Auto-Kitten 1 arced along its slow orbit to Eve, poor Bob Kerman was still trundling around on the Mun.

Unfortunately, the Auto Kitten 1 was such a pleasure to drive because of the many lessons I learned the hard way with Bob's rover, and realising that I was never going to get him to any interesting locations, I decided he should turn around and make the arduous return trip to Kerbin.

*Except Hudbles Kerman.