Easy (Netflix, Season 1)

A series of vignettes about “couples, life, sex and technology.” Less like a TV series and more like a short-story collection gleaned from attending a lot of cocktail parties.

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Overall: I suspect that the writer/director has a following large enough to get Netflix to hand him some money and say, “Do whatever you want.” And he did. While there were some things to appeal to me, I don’t think this was neatly as smart or as poignant as it thought it was.

2016 Year-In-Review: Video Games I Played

Though my definition of “completed” has varied to some extent (I included several games I didn’t finish but played significant amounts of; and left off games that I completed in less than 2 hours), I logged 62 games this year. 126 others were either tried and rejected and left off the list because they were too short. Also, I played through Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light and Suikoden independent of my backlog list (I’ve played them both before).

The first half of the year was dominated by 15 point-and-click/hidden-object puzzle games, and the second half by 15 KEMCO-published Android jrpgs. Other heavily represented genres were other kinds of puzzle games and platformer/metroidvania games.

Bravely Default was the game I spent the most time on, at 37 hours, but I also broke the 25-hour mark with Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows, Crash Drive, Shin Megami Tensai: Persona 3 Portable, and The Legend of Legacy.

(Okay, that’s not totally true: Cookie Jam, and to a lesser extent Juice Jam and Tap My Katamari probably ate the most hours, but I haven’t been logging them because they’re casual games playing in ten-minute bursts, often while I’m doing something else.)

Jethrien and I played some of Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 together, and have recently been on-and-off working our way through Child of Light, which I hope to finish and log in the next couple of weeks. ARR, on the other hand, was the driving force behind all those hours of Crash Drive and several other racing games, and has been introduced to a number of Atari and SNES classics. He’s not so great at them so far, it’s a work in progress.

I think I’ve found the shorter games more generally satisfying—getting an entire story in a couple of nights of play feels more worthwhile than having to spend several months on a 60-hour console rpg. That said, in 2017 I’m hoping to tackle a few of the longer games that have been on my backlog. I have a stack of new 3DS games I’m excited about, and plenty more point-and-click games and KEMCO jrpgs. I also have another 200 Steam titles (that I paid something like $50 total for in a dozen different bundles) to mine for worthwhile material.

By genre, the games that I would say, “This is genuinely good, you should try it if you like the genre,” are:
• JRPG: Undertale (PC), Bravely Default (3DS), Soul Historica (Android)
• Platformer/Metroidvania: Shantae and the Pirate's Curse (3DS), Another Metroid 2 Remake Project (AM2R) (PC)
• Tower Defense: GemCraft - Chasing Shadows (PC)
• Racing: Crash Drive 2 (PC)
• Shooter: Shooting Stars (Android/PC)
• Casual/Puzzle: You Must Build A Boat (Android), Hexcells Infinite (PC), Please Don't Touch Anything (Android/PC)
• Visual Novel/Story-Based: Her Story (PC), The Stanley Parable (PC), The Beginner's Guide (PC)
• Cross-Genre Action/RPG: Evoland 2 (PC)

2016 Retrospective, 2017 Goals

2016 Retrospective:

Not much has changed, really?

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2017 Goals:

The specifics are edited from last year, but the generalities are the same.

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