No doubt, Yimou Zhang is a big fan of Shakespeare. He seems intent on steering his films down a path where everyone has no choice but to die. At least it’s a stunningly beautiful path, and when they do meet their mortal end, it’s in a battle of epic poportion.

A wacky little game, clearly aiming to expand on the genre created by Warioware, and ultimately succeeding on its own merits. The break time cut scenes will live in my memory for years to come.

The life if a 1950s Japanese bureaucrat is at times painful to watch and the cultural gap makes it really difficult to identify with the main character, but in spite of these sizable obstacles, Kurosawa manages to reach across time and space to open our heart up a bit and allow us to look inside. I also really liked the scenes of free-wheeling debauchery.

A campy, colorful film which, on reflection, bears some resemblance to a wacky film about gay Thai volleyball players that I saw dubbed into Japanese. At times it strays a bit into the tedious, but overall it delivers.

What a depressing book. I suppose I can’t fault the author for wanting to share her tale of growing up in a vicious loveless family and it’s a small miracle that she managed to find any love within herself at all after suckling from the dry, thorny teat up to and beyond her parents’ death. However, this is not my preferred brand of schadefreude. Pass the happiness and triumph please.

The games I enjoyed playing most this year (in some vague order of enjoyment quotient):

• Pikmin 2 – GC
• Paper Mario – GC
• 塊魂 [Katamari Damacy] – PS2
• Sly 2 – PS2
• Hot Shots Golf: Fore! – PS2

I also played a few wacky indy games that I really enjoyed:

• Samorost – Flash
• Zep’s Dreamland – Vinders
• N – Flash

As I generally don’t review games that I don’t finish, it may be hard to gauge what I played based on my somewhat sporadic review output. For balance, here are some games I played that I didn’t much like:

• La Pucelle Tactics – I prefer strategy games where a small number of units and actual strategy take precedent over a zillion different item and unit combinations.

• Half-Life 2 – I don’t like shooting things and books are a better medium for stories.
• Metal Gear Solid 3 – See above, but replace books with movies and stories with overacted action plots.
• Metroid Prime 2 – I got tired of waiting for the “Scanning…” display and of falling off platforms due to the first person perspective, and I don’t really like shooting things.
• GTA3 – The driving interface was fiddly and standing in front of a wall and pressing a button to spray graffiti wasn’t a lot of fun. I have enough time worrying about eating cheese burgers and exercise in real life, if I have to do it in a game too, it damned well better add fun gameplay. Moreover, I’m sure if I got further into it, I would have been reminded that I don’t like shooting things.
• Pitfall: The Lost Expedition – The worst execution I’ve seen in a long time; I’m not even sure the game was finished before they shipped it.
• Transformers – Driving wasn’t that fun and did I mention that I don’t like shooting things.
• Perimiter – An inscrutable RTS.
• Evil Genius – Had some promise style-wise, but in the end the simulation gameplay failed to be compelling or fluid.
• Leisure Suit Larry Magna Cum Laude – Gag me with a spoon, is this a game?
• Burnout 3 – Oh God, the load times, my eyes, they burn. Maybe if I had a fun GBA game to play while I was waiting for the level to reload, I could have enjoyed it.

And a number of games were alright, but not worth writing home about, as they say. The best part about 2004 was that thanks to Gamefly, I didn’t have to waste hundreds of dollars on tens of games that I didn’t enjoy. Yay for the consumer. Here’s hoping 2005 will provide more reasons to actually cough up the full price.

This book was a goodness. Heinlein’s philosophies managed to penetrate the layer of predjudices and discarded ideologies that seem to hang so thick over most decades-old science fiction. One can taste a bit of the sixties in his noble efforts to continue the millenia-old tradition of suggesting that perhaps we could all just love one another and get along.

Another gorgeous Miyazaki film. I saw this one in its native Japanese, so though I understood half of the dialogue, it was the unimportant half. None the less, the story was not hard to follow and the view was spectacular. Miyazaki dreams up extraordinary worlds populated with extraordinary characters, to say nothing of their houses.