Yeah, this has nothing to do with a week summary. In fact, this happened in like…May, but I saw it and I love arepas and it looked so good. Mmmm…arepas…

Welcome to the last WIBD of the year! I’ve been a little bad about keeping up with this list throughout the year, but I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing what I’ve been up to and I hope to continue to talk about what I’m doing next year too.

Movies

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – Not the first time I’ve seen it, but the first time Katie’s ever seen it all the way through. Is the movie a little cheesy/corny when viewed in the 2010s? Yeah, a little, but it’s also kind of supposed to be that way. Solid fun.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire – My dad randomly got way into The Hunger Games when he saw it with my brother and he wanted to watch Catching Fire, so we went to the movies early on Christmas and had us a jolly time. Definitely an exciting movie, but it’s not gonna win any awards or anything.

TV

Key & Peele – Katie and Kara were randomly watching a few episodes. Hell of a show. Super hilarious.

How I Met Your Mother – The mother episodes continue being real stand-out affairs. Loved seeing Andrew Rannells again. He’s a funny dude.

Parenthood – Yeah, the mayor campaign subplot was a little silly. I also wasn’t expecting them to cancel the wedding.

Trophy Wife – I’d heard good things about the show and I do love Malin Åkerman, so this show seemed like it would be pretty good. On the whole, it’s a little predictable, but it’s got a solid cast and makes for some good laughs. Not gonna blow anyone away with groundbreaking comedy, but I will say that I laughed pretty hard a few times.

The Amazing Race – Moving on through season 21. I’m loving watching it again. I don’t know why people disliked this season, it was super fun.

Music

I’m sure I’ve put The Weeknd’s “Wicked Games” up here before, but it’s so tight. Damn…

Books

Well Played 1.0: Video Games, value, and Meaning – Right now I’m on a good section about Shadow of the Colossus and something the author is calling “futile interactivity”, which really is an interesting mechanic that is not used often enough in games.

Video Games

Civilization V – The long break has slowed Eric and David’s ability (mostly David’s) to play turns. It’s been an agonizing wait…

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies – Still on that final case. Just found out that there’s a nefarious third party influencing things, but I have no idea where we’re supposed to proceed in this case. Getting interesting.

Super Mario 3D Land – The good times I experienced in Super Mario 3D World made me want to go back and view the source material. It makes a lot of the things I saw in 3D world make a little more sense as an extension of things introduced in 3D Land, but 3D Land uses depth in ways that are way neater, but also impossible on a non-3D system.

XCOM: Enemy Within – Another game bites the dust. Moved on to a new game and turned off the Second Wave stuff. It makes the game more interesting and tougher, but I’m having too hard a time actually winning for me to leave them on. I’ll start to remix on further playthroughs.

NES Remix – Nintendo stealth released this during their most recent Nintendo Direct. It’s a little like WarioWare, but without the zaniness. The idea is that you’re supposed to complete mini challenges with old NES classics within a time limit. Works pretty well, but some of those old games are tough. Also it’s weird that they don’t allow custom button mappings. I don’t want to use A and B, I want to use Y and B.

Pokemon Y – Barely beat that ice gym thanks to Sturdy. I mean, I almost lost, for sure. All my original team is gone/dead, so I’m down to a new set that I’m grinding up to level 50 before I try to tackle Victory Road. The Elite Four is gonna be a struggle, I know it.

Super Mario 3D World – I played this a whole bunch with my siblings over the break and…holy cow, still so good. That final world?! That FINAL BOSS?! Just an incredible moment that I totally dug. I need to talk about it more, but I’ll probably talk about it in my year end video game thing.

Project X Zone – Ok, picture this: What if Namco, Capcom, and Sega made a crossover tactical RPG game with all their famous characters? That’s what this is. I played the demo before picking it up and Ryu and Ken were battling monsters with Valkyria Chronicles dudes. Namco guys were there too (no idea who they were). It’s neat, but I don’t think I have the hang of the battle system yet. Looking forward to putting more time in next year.

Risk of Rain – Played this with Lee and Min. It starts off feeling a little thin because you’ve only got one guy unlocked, but with two we seemed to be getting the hang of it a lot more. Really fun as a multiplayer game. Can’t wait to get more time in with the guys.

The Walking Dead 400 Days – It’s short, but it’s more of that Walking Dead flavor that everyone needs. It’s full of short vignettes about companionship and survival and I really loved all the connections between the characters.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds – Unlocked the first item to rent (bow), but I haven’t entered the Eastern Temple yet. Loving the game so far.

The Walking Dead Season 2 – Just…brutal. There’s this thing that happens where Clementine’s trust is betrayed…SO GOOD.

I’m WAY behind on writing legitimate content on this site, but I hope you’re enjoying all the videos. I wanted to mention a few things:

The opening pitch at Nationals Park will be tossed out by Barack Obama this year! I’ve managed to secure a ticket for the game. Our Nation’s team was 3-2 when Bush attended ballgames, but I’m afraid that they’ll probably start out Obama’s record with a loss against the National League Champion Phillies. Should still be fun to see him make that toss in person.

In totally unrelated news, I beat Yakuza and have moved on to Yakuza 2. I absolutely agree with anyone who chafes at the comparison of the series to GTA, because it’s nothing like it. The game is more like a brawler combined with a JRPG. Kazuma Kiryu levels up his fighting abilities as he gains experience from fighting, there’s tons of text and dialogue both in and out of cutscenes, and Kiryu even has equipment that affects his fighting. Action RPG is a much better descriptor.

The second iteration also corrects a lot of the faults from the first. Fighting still isn’t perfect, but it’s much improved and I find myself getting knocked around more because I’m playing poorly, not because the camera is terrible. The story is also much better partially because it seems a little less clichéd than the last game, even if it’s still a bit on the anime side. I’m intrigued by the whole East vs West thing they’ve got going on (it’s not what you think, we’re talking East Japan (Kanto) vs West Japan (Kansai)) and now they’ve thrown a foreign mafia (Korean) in the mix. I worry about what a Japanese video game is going to have to say about a Korean mafia, but we’ll see if they manage to keep the racism somewhat in check.

The other great thing about Yakuza 2 is that they didn’t bother with an English dub. I’m so thankful for this it’s insane. I’d much rather hear the Japanese voices, even if I can tell that some of the translation is off due to strange localization changes made in the first game (place names, people names, etc.). Some of the jokes just don’t make sense otherwise. For example, there’s this American dude who fights you in the coliseum in both games. Kiryu makes a comment on how bad his Japanese is in the first game, but everyone was speaking English, so it made no sense. When he appeared in the second game and I could hear his Japanese it was clearly being mangled and mispronounced, which did elicit a laugh from me. I might be fooling myself, but I even feel like I can hear the slight difference in the East vs. West Japanese accents too, which would be impossible with a dub. Good work not ruining this iteration of the series, Sega.

In news that you never thought you’d ever hear again, a new Sonic sidescroller for the home consoles is set to hit this summer!

After countless missteps by Sega, it seems like they’ve finally listened to the fans and decided to release a sidescrolling Sonic game. Insane. Will it be any good? God help Sega if it isn’t. It will finally prove that the franchise should stay dead, but if the revival is successful, we could have a lot of fun headed our way soon.

Civ IV Game Progress

Progress has been somewhat hampered by busy schedules, weather, and partying, but we’ve started to move along in our respective Civ games and things should start to get busy soon. In the first game we started, Eric named me Zara Yaqob, a default name, and I was randomly selected to be the Ethiopians. I don’t have a lot of experience with these guys, but their Unique Unit (UU) and Building (UB) both come in the early game, so I’d better hope I find some opponents quick so that I can start attacking as soon as possible. I intelligently built a worker in this game first, so I’ll be able to start chopping down forests to speed up the production of my settler and start claiming some resources.

I may have the lowest score now...

The little bit of exploration I’ve done shows that this is a very strange map type. It’s a flat world with no wraparound, so the leftmost border is it. Since I’m so close to it, this might be hell on my logistics if I try to wage a battle of any kind, but if I have plenty of opponents between me and the other edge of the world, I might just do ok.

My second game has me as the Khmer empire. If you observe closely, you can see the black outline of a city from the Holy Roman Empire (which was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire) crowding my borders.

That bastard Justinian is gonna have to die...

Unfortunately for me, the Khmer’s UU doesn’t come until closer to the Middle Ages where it replaces War Elephants. That’s not to say that I won’t immediately try to conquer Justinian if I get the chance. Taking an extra city is just the boost I need to get a strong head start on Eric.

The third game has me playing as the Portuguese, Eric’s nemesis in his last major single player game. A civ definitely geared toward the middle to late game with its naval UU and Custom House UB, I’d actually be more than happy not to encounter too many AI before I have a chance to build up. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t see things my way.

Lisbon!

I’ve met both the Persians and the Mongolians…great. At least I’m dealing with Kublai instead of Genghis, but that means that I’ve got two Civs with strong early-game UUs nearby. I’ve located the Mongolians, but I’m going to have to act fast to claim territory and conquer at least one of these guys if I want to stand a chance.

I see you Mongolia!

Also note that my score is way less in this game thanks to me taking an extra turn to optimize the location for Lisbon. We shall see what that extra turn of production will cost me. Should I get that settler out quickly enough, I can start to optimize my economy for war and make short work of at least one of these enemies. If I don’t, there’s no guarantee that Eric won’t come steamrolling in and conquer the three of us.