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The Jordies 2024

Welcome to the Jordies! The annual award given to my favourite book, game, movie, and TV show that I read, played, and watched this year!

Absolution
Book

While nothing will ever compare to Annihilation and while it plays with a particular scifi theme I don’t particularly enjoy (no spoilies), Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer is an absolute banger that instills a sense of curiosity and dread that you won’t soon forget. If you enjoy cosmic horror, or scifi with an ecological theme, you should absolutely read this series (or anything by Jeff VanderMeer).

Astro Bot
Game

Astro Bot is pure joy. Everything about this game is fun and my only wish is that there was more of it to enjoy (and maybe a little bit more in the way of hidden collectibles and challenges). I also love that the game acts, like its predecessor Astro’s Playroom, as a visual and interactive library of PlayStation through the generations. Building the PS5, collecting IP Bots and peripherals could easily feel like corporate propaganda, but it doesn’t. It feels like a celebration of what makes video games so special.

Dune: Part Two
Movie

I love Dune. I love the books, I love the world. I think the films by Villeneuve are one of the best book adaptations ever made. The visual storytelling is incredible and I am so glad I got to experience it. It’s the only movie I’ve ever seen twice in the theatre and after I watched it I thought to myself: I’ll never make anything this good in my life.

Fallout
TV

As a casual Fallout series enjoyer, I didn’t have any expectations around this show, but they did a fantastic job. In turns serious and funny, the cast is amazing and the set and costume design is perfect. I love how the power armour of the Brotherhood of Steel is simultaneously a great power fantasy and an absolute joke (I especially loved how it was used in a particular at the end of Season 1, which seemed very real as a use-case to me). Ella Purnell is incredible as the lead. The show has made me much more interested in Fallout universe than ever before and I have high hopes for Season 2.

I love keycards

I’m not joking. I f*ckin’ love keycards.

I’m not sure what it is about the keycard, but I think it is the pinnacle of door unlocking technology in games. Perhaps it’s the nostalgia of hunting down keycards in Metal Gear Solid on the PS1. You know the ones I mean.

When I was a young lad, I thought opening a locked door via a keycard was peak scifi and I couldn’t wait to work at a place where I’d have a keycard strapped to my waist on one of those zippy-line-things or a lanyard around my neck. Now, of course, I don’t ever want to leave my house and I recognize that keycards aren’t quite the pinnacle of scifi tech I once thought they were, but I still love collecting them in games.

Most recently in Signalis (a game you should absolutely go play right this second, available on everything including Game Pass), a PS1-style retro-scifi survival horror in the vein of Silent Hill, I was reminded of my love of the keycard. The good folks at Rose Engine even gave me the opportunity to collect five of them for one door. They didn’t stop at collecting them, however, they even gave you the chance to write your own in a very cool retro punch-card computer.

Anyway, that’s all. I think the keycard is an underused item in the modern gaming landscape and I miss them. Make keycards great again.

The Jordies 2022

Welcome to the second annual Jordies! These are my awards for the top books, games, movies and TV in 2022!* Yes, this is incredibly late and I should have posted it in December 2021 2022, but nevermind all that.

Book: The Humans

The bad news is I only hit 74% of my reading goal last year (26/35), but the good news is that I did read some absolute bangers. While there wasn’t an obvious winner like last year’s Annihilation, picking a winner for the Jordies 2022 was a major challenge. However, as I look over my Goodreads list, a book does sneak its way to the top: The Humans by Matt Haig (of The Midnight Library fame). 

The Humans by Matt Haig is an extremely funny and extremely touching story of what it means to be human. This book was gifted to me (thanks Jess!) in early 2022 as I was emerging from a very deep depression and it hit all the right notes. You should absolutely read it.

Runners up that you should check out in no particular order: Slewfoot by Brom, The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht, Dawn by Olivia Butler, The Bone Mother (thanks Serenity) by David Demchuck, Wenjack by Joseph Boyden, The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer, and What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher. These were all really excellent books for different reasons and you should give them a read. 

Game: Signalis

Signalis hit just in time for my birthday and what a birthday gift it was. This was the best game I played all year and probably one of my favourite games of all time. A lovingly crafted ode to survival horror of olde (particularly Silent Hill) with fantastic pixel art and a beautiful story in a very unique sci-fi setting. Signalis is on everything and you owe it to yourself to try it. 

Shoutout my runner up for best game of the year: Vampire Survivors which is just an incredibly fun little game which you should absolutely play.

Movie: The Northman

I’ll be honest. I don’t actually watch a lot of movies in the course of a year. It’s a big investment and I’m usually too tired at the end of the day. 2022 was a busy year for me, so I watched even fewer movies than I normally would. However, I will always make time to go see a Robert Eggers movie, and the best movie I watched in 2022. Eggers does a great job of capturing the theme of whatever he makes, and The Northman captures the saga in the same way that The VVitch captured an Elizabethan folktale.

TV Show: Wednesday

If you’re like me, you find it difficult to start watching a show. I struggle to invest time into a TV series and most require an episode or two to really grab me. I started watching Wednesday as something light to watch with my wife at the end of our day, but after two or three episodes I was pretty hooked. I think Wednesday is a very fun show with well realized horror elements (well realized enough that you are willing to forgive the absolutely awful, and I mean awful CGI creature) that keeps you interested. If, like me, you did not enjoy the first episode very much, keep watching. Like many shows, the first episode leaned too heavily on the most extreme aspects of the characters and it came off as very goofy, but by the second or third episode it hit a good balance and ended up being my favourite show of 2022. 

*For the book category the book does not have to release in the year it is awarded, just the year I read it.

Character Creation Punk 2077

So, (almost) two years later, we’re finally being given the Cyberpunk 2077 we were promised. At least according to CDPR. 

In reality, Patch 1.5, while it has introduced many good changes, it isn’t the panacea we were promised (or deserve). I’m very happy that I never purchased Cyberpunk, it was a gift, and so that has softened my feelings and expectations around the title, but let’s be real: it’s a disaster, and the most recent update corrupted data and broke the game for many PS4 users.

I’m not going to go into detail about Patch 1.5, you can read about that everywhere, but with Patch 1.5 I have decided to give it another go. Originally, I played maybe four or five hours of the game as a Nomad. I made it to what I would consider the main part of the game, as you have your background prologue and then a series of tutorials disguised as gameplay that act as another prologue and lead you to the famous Johnny Silverhand. I think the game starts way too slowly and was extremely obnoxious and childish (see: dildo gate), but once you near the end of prologue.2, it starts to pick up and Johnny himself is an interesting character. With this in mind, I wanted to start from scratch and so I created a Corpo (incidentally, I think this is the best path re: your introduction to the world and the city), and herein lies my problem.

Character creation. When I was younger I enjoyed character creation a lot more. I didn’t mind spending hours creating my character and getting things just so. I don’t enjoy this kind of character creation as much anymore because I don’t have any free time, but Cyberpunk’s character creation is particularly flawed for one big reason: your character doesn’t stop moving.

Many games have done this. You are creating your character and they look around, shift from side to side, smile or frown or make funny faces, etc… in an effort to make the characters, I don’t know, feel more alive I guess. As a player I find this so incredibly obnoxious and I will never understand how this passes any internal UX tests. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to pick what lips, or nose, or whatever you want your character to have just for that character to look away from the screen and touch or play with the body part you are adjusting.

In Cyberpunk, as I try to choose the eyes with which I want to look upon the world, my character looks to the side and TOUCHES his eyebrows COVERING his eyes. As I try to pick the nose with which I want to smell the world, my character looks to the side and TOUCHES his nose COVERING it. As I try to pick the lips with which I want my character to eat digital noodles, my character looks to the side and TOUCHES his lips COVERING them.

To add insult to injury, it is done in the exact same way. Every. Single. Time.

This made character creation so frustrating and last much longer than it should have. It is so obnoxious and poorly done that I just can’t wrap my brain around the decision making process. Imagine going to a barber and every five seconds you twist your head to the side and touch your hair. You and your barber both would be furious with the result.