Your 2019 awards

Man, the mods on that website must be doing a great job because it keeps ranking as the best one every single year.

Favourites

Game - Nier Automata. Best game I've played this year, no doubt.

Movie - John Carpenter's Dark Star, it really did an impression for being his first movie, a collaboration with Dan O'Bannon (Alien's writer). The movie, even though it's a comedy, is very clearly the closest precursor to Alien.

Website - This awards keeps going to this pub. This pub rules. Varied discussions and very friendly people (even when Spirit Bomb goes full controversial, haha).

Best book - a Mexican one called Los de Abajo (in english, I think it's translated as The Underdogs). It's about the Mexican revolution: it's very violent, has a lot of deaths and it's awesome.

Best webshow - I vote on minimme for his humor and preference for B games (he has been reviewing a lot of licensed stuff and obscure GBA or even JAVA ports of more famous games). It reminds me of CGR circa 2010, which is cited as one of his influences. Really good channel, this guy deserves more views.


Music - I've heard a lot of Héroes del Silencio (Heroes of Silence) this year, a late 80s/early 90s spanish band. They're quite good (stratogustav is the one who suggested me a lot of their songs, I dig them).

Best inside joke on the pub - Movies starring Arnold. I've seen a lot of movies starring Arnold this year and enjoyed all of them. Thanks for constantly reminding me of how great Arnold is, cobretti .

Best animated series - Castlevania season 2. They fixed every gripe I had with the first season, I loved it.

Best tv show - Probably Dark (it's available on Netflix). I won't spoil anything, but it's just... Wow. What an amazing, well made show.


Now I'll go back to games:

Game that held up to its hype - Undertale. It has a terrible fanbase and too much hype around it, but it's a quite good RPG.

Best game in a genre that I haven't played much in the last ten years - Dead or Alive Ultimate (XBOX) for 1vs1 fighting games. It comes with two games: an improved, high-resolution port of DOA 1 and a remade DOA 2 with DOA 3's engine and many additions. It's a great value and goes cheap nowadays (I got mine for 4 bucks). It's also retrocompatible with the 360.

Best replayed classic that still holds up - Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Still perfect after all these years.

Best reevaluated game - Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within. When I played it around 14 years ago, I thought it was ok but not very good; now, I think it has one of the best fighting systems of that generation (it's not Ninja Gaiden, but it is good) that is still better than most current games, along with some very solid platforming. Only the edgy story fails to hold up, but I can excuse that.

Most boring/disappointing experience - Zelda: Spirit Tracks. It begins well and very enjoyable, but the later game turns into such a drag that I don't remember playing anything so bad and boring in years. Resident Evil 5 was also terrible, but not as boring, and it had some ridiculous and outlandish cutscenes and setpieces that make up in part for the flawed gameplay. So, really, Spirit Tracks was the worst.

Best game despite its huge, obvious flaws - I've been replaying Sonic Adventure this past week. Good grief, the game has a lot of awful things (cutscenes, most of the other characters' gameplay, awful camera, dodgy collision detection on the scenery) and yet I just can't stop playing it. I'm actually close to get every single emblem this time - just missing the last Sonic emblem and the Chao Race ones.

Best multiplayer - Saturn Bomberman. And keep in mind I only played the two-player modes (both coop and versus), I can only imagine how it is playing this game with nine other people.

Best revival: Sonic Mania Plus. It has proven that what the fans were asking for years was really the best thing for the franchise: just make another 2d pixel-art game with the same physics from the Mega Drive/Genesis ones.