Games I Liked in 2011, Part Two - “Human After All?”

A continuing look at games that I really liked, but not quite as much as WWE All Stars, in the year of our Lord 2011.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution 

“He’s more machine now than man” – Benjamin Kenobi

The Deus Ex series is about two things: the meeting of man and machine, raising the question of whether developing and getting stronger means losing your humanity, and, famously, freedom. You’re handed a level, one small chunk at a time, and asked how you’d like to approach it.

To use the immortal Terminator 2: Judgment Day as an example – will you be the T-1oo0, infiltrating into your enemies’ homes and then running them through with razor-sharp arm blades? Or maybe an Arnie-style terminator, toting a mini-gun and launching maniacally as you bat away incoming rockets? Or the pacifistic PoNY-3000 (which only features in the version of the film that exists inside my head) preferring to just be friends, avoid the violence altogether… and putting the odd person to sleep if you really, really must?

Like our last game, playing Human Revolution, you can feel the gravity of the seminal original, but in this case it's a much looser adaption. Deus Ex was, after all, made by entirely different people over a decade ago. Born into our modern world of third-person cover and DRM, where everything has to be a shooter, it was only natural that this would be a very different game.

Still, as much as Human Revolution throws out from the original – it rewinds the plot to the immediate future, ditching the whole cast in the process, trades in the grey and blue colour scheme for black and gold – it holds onto more. The cyberpunk setting, the customisable Six Million Dollar Man-style augmentations, the philosophical leanings. Most of all, it holds onto that idea of choice. Each level has a startpoint and an endpoint, but how you get from one to the other is up to you. There are connecting doors which skip out sections of corridor; ladders which take you to the roof, far above the action; ventilation shafts to crawl in.

So that, then, is the core essence of Deus Ex. An overarching plot about control and loss of humanity, propping up a game that invites you to do what thou wilt. It’s not necessarily the most natural combination. But, for me at least, the way that freedom works is a perfect expression of the theme.

It turns out, given all that choice, something flips deep inside me. I can’t choose – won’t, shan’t – and so end up searching for the most obscure route, the one they’ve hidden behind a series of crates and down a pit you can only access with the augmentation that negates fall damage. Then I’ll backtrack, and find another way I could have done it.

I want to see the puzzle the developers have crafted for me from every possible angle. I have to see everything, I have to interact with everything, hack everything, (for a first-person action game, Deus Ex gives you a lot more possible verbs than just ‘shoot’, ‘jump’ and ‘stand out in the open until you die’), find every hidden vent, pick up every item.

I’m not even a robot. I’m a hoover.

It could be more open, of course. For all those extra verbs I mentioned, Human Revolution still manages to be slightly more limiting than the original Deus Ex, now over a decade old. It turns its attention instead to being slicker. The amount of thought that has gone into making the world futuristically plausible and beautiful, the nicely honed controls, the fact it actually has a story and some characters… there’s a lot of stuff to love here, even for hardened Deus Ex purists.

A good example of this trade-off can be seen in the item glow – any object that can be interacted with has its edges picked out with a fuzzy gold light. It highlights how much scenery is decorative, tied down, and the relatively limited interactivity. No strength rating here. I believe it was mildly controversial, and can be turned off in the options menu, but I see no need. It fits nicely into the game’s aesthetic, makes diegetic sense, and makes it easier to spot hidden items and routes, which is exactly what my lizard brain wants. And it couldn’t possibly break the hypnotic effect a play session has over me.

Human Revolution is one of those games that makes you constantly late. The type you struggle to tear yourself away from, a mysterious substance keeping your hands glued to the controller (…Oh, not like that. Ew. Grow up.) And the team at Eidos Montreal use the compelling systems of the game to immerse you in a sci-fi world stronger, even, than Portal 2's playful series of ideas - one which extrapolates headlines, technology, architecture and even fashion into something plausible and enticing.

And, even after I’ve managed to power down the Xbox, a dip into that world leaves me seeing our own a little differently. Like the long sessions of Guitar Hero that translated all my dreams into five-colour blocks, like the week I longed for my own Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device. Like… a post-Christmas weekend back home, most of it spent with my nose pressed to the 38” flatscreen, controller in hand. It’s a nice day outside, and I almost feel bad about not leaving the house. Almost. I look out into the back garden, just as the sun clips the top of the fence. Its glow catches the edges of a shirt, hanging on the line, outlines it with a sharp halo of --gold. Ooh, I think. It must be interactive.

Games I Liked in 2011, Part One - "Harder, Better, Faster, Longer"

So, in the pub the other week, conversation swung to the best pop culture of last year, naturally. When asked about my ‘game of the year’, I refused to pick a single game. Further pushed, I picked WWE All Stars. It was a choice born partially of the thrilling novelty of such a pop/obscure pick, partially of intoxication, but mostly of total honesty.
It is a choice behind which I will of course stand. It’s also a choice which got me thinking about how hard it was (and almost always is) for me to pick a single Best Game, and how I've completely failed to write anything about any of my favourites from last year.
Consider this, then, a loose tour through all the games I really enjoyed last year, accompanied with some hand-drawn doodles, and why exactly WWE All Stars was the absolute Best Game of 2011. But we’ll get to that. For now, let’s jump back to April, and take a look at…

Portal 2

As the name suggests, Portal 2 was a sequel, with all the baggage that entails. Worse, it was a sequel to a truly brilliant game. The original Portal took a wonderful central concept - a gun that could shoot teleporting holes into walls - and expressed it perfectly, compressed into two and a half hours. On top of that, it added a classic antagonist in GLaDOS, some of the best jokes in gaming, and a song. It was a revolution, practically inventing the first-person puzzling genre, that seemed to come out of nowhere.

Portal 2 wasn't much of a surprise at all. Like all good sequels, it didn't move away from the core principles of the original, but built on them. It kept the same setting - a series of test chambers in the Aperture Science laboratory. The same cast – silent Chell, ever-taunting GLaDOS. The same mechanics – solving spatial puzzles using your portal gun. It took all those, and then built on them.

So, a journey beneath Aperture's floors revealed the ruins of cavernous testing grounds from its past. The bumbling AI Wheatley (played by Stephen Merchant) and self-confident ghost of Cave Johnson (J.K. Simmons) filled out the dramatis personæ. And the portal puzzles were expanded with physics-altering gels which could be guided through test chambers to make surfaces slippy, or bouncy.

Most of it all, it adapted Portal's attitude and structure: a highly polished series of puzzles, bookended by chunks of narratives, with jokes. Portal 2 avoided the obvious pitfalls - pandering to the memes the original bred and sent out onto the internet; trying to turn the plot into something of world-shaking import; trying to repeat the surprise of that song - but, ultimately, it was more or less the same thing, stretched out and with some fancy bits added on.

Which sounds really negative, but clearly that's not the case. This is one of my favourite games of last year. Familiarity makes its structure – a series of chambers, bookended with a joke or bit of story – stick out a little too awkwardly, but it's a better game than the original Portal in almost every way.

It takes its extended length as virtue, providing more of an actual, story-shaped story, and a wider variety of settings and puzzles. Most impressively, Portal 2 manages to keep its difficulty curve every bit as smooth over those extra hours, with every new discovery telegraphed neatly and then built upon, and rarely repeats itself.

I’d even argue Portal 2 is actually a funnier game. The jokes in the original mostly worked because they took the player by surprise. Abandoned laboratories are not a setting you expect to find jokes in, sci-fi puzzle games aren’t a genre renowned for their hilarity. It was a sort of comedy ambush. Portal 2 knows you know this, going in, and cuts loose with the jokes from the first comedy setpiece, which sticks you in a motel room and indulges in a spot of fourth-wall breaking ‘press A to speak’ action, all curated by Wheatley – the noisy robo-comic to your silent straight man, and every bit the equal of GLaDOS.

It’s definitely the best written and acted game I played last year, and is in the running for best written and acted piece of 2011 culture full stop. It’s certainly the funniest.

As a package, Portal 2 is so sharp that you hardly even notice its elegance until afterwards. When you do, it becomes clear how much silliness we have to put up with, how often people accept that the voice acting wasn’t too uneven this time as if that was something worth celebrating, how merely quite good plots have champions of the medium wetting themselves with excitement.

Portal 2 is a darn good puzzle game. It’s not half bad as science-fiction. But mostly importantly, it is simply the funniest comedy game I have ever played. If it hadn't been for that pesky original, Portal 2 could've had a shot at being the best game of all time.

BEST ALBUM OF 2011

People, especially people writing in certain types of magazines, occasionally talk about soundscapes, about how the way in which an album or song is laid out can feel like a sort of immersive environment. Well, says Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd, that game is for wimps. In the space of one released-for-free mixtape, The Weeknd established a whole world.

A world where – as pretty much everyone who’s written about, or listened to, the music will tell you – it is constantly the early hours of the morning, where it’s cold and smoky outside, where the party is always just ending. A world with the colours turned down slightly, viewed through a lens smeared with vaseline … or are your eyes just bleary?

With its sort of Noir R’n’B (as in the black-&-white motifs, sure, but also the femme fatales and troubled masculinity of the lyrics, the quivering motel neons in the music) House of Balloons manages to transport all this to the space between your eyes and ears. It’s a weird kind of Tolkeinesque world-building by way of R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet.


This was effortlessly sustained by the other two parts of the mixtape trilogy The Weeknd released in 2011, Thursday and Echoes of Silence, which served more or less as expansion packs. The former just adds a slightly different colour palette, the Vice City to House of Balloon’s GTAIII. Accordingly, I was hoping December’s Echoes of Silence might be his San Andreas, in terms of expanding every bit of ambition in the original to obscene proportions.


It’s not, but it does sharpens the aesthetic to a lethal point, then turn it back on pop, to shows how it’s not all that far from, for example, the work of Michael Jackson – it opens with a cover of MJ’s Dirty Diana, which doesn’t sound too dissimilar to the original, just filtered through that unmistakable Weeknd worldview.

The three albums have distinct personalities, but there’s the intertextuality runs deep, and each can be played back to back, flowing almost imperceptibly into one another, to create a two-hour mood piece. It’s testament to Tesfate’s masterful control over the aesthetic parameters of this world– so much so that it’s jarring to hear Superhero and Party, tracks from around 2008, released recently, when he was doing something completely different, closer to trad R’n’B, and frankly much less interesting.

The Weeknd snuck into an incredible number of corners during 2011 – the music I talked about when I was drunk, slipping it into playlists so everyone else could hear it, owning the week I lived in a hostel in Bath and playing at being a games journalist, being the only album on the my mobile’s SD card, so soundtracking a lot of morning tube journeys and late night walks home.

(This piece is a palimpsest, etched over the remains of something I wrote back in June, about the joys of playing House of Balloons back to back, on constant repeat. I ended up back-to-backing the album, with barely an exhale between end and beginning, for pretty much the entire next six months. I still have absolutely no idea of most of the lyrics.)

There’s a sense that perhaps I’m enjoying something beyond the music, something that exists in the images it sets off in my head, in the meeting point between the videos and photographs and what other people said.
That tends to be at least inherent in the criticisms of The Weeknd (of which there have a been a lot, often from writers whose opinions I respect) - that somehow these aren’t songs that Tesfaye is selling. And, okay, compared to, say, Childish Gambino - to pick another artist whose work I enjoyed immensely in 2011 - the pleasure is less immediate, the songs are less likely to grab me by the lapels while I’m listening to them.

Admittedly, a lot of the time, I let The Weeknd slip into the background, using it as a sort of musical wallpaper, while something else goes in the foreground. But if it’s ambient, it’s aggressively ambient. It’s the kind of wallpaper that, suddenly feeling overly sensitive to everything, you rub your fingers over, and appreciate every inch of texture.

It’s music that feels physical, in every possible way - not just how it occasionally taps into your muscles and makes them jump and twitch in the nearest approximation of dancing you can manage on the morning commute, but like its ideas form something three-dimensional, so dense you could almost reach out and touch it. And it is dense - all this information is condensed down into these small aural packages, like Grant Morrison hyperstorytelling or something.

But, yes, perhaps I don’t enjoy House of Balloons in the way I do other music. The lyrics don’t mean a lot to me; to be honest, I can’t participate in the discussion about whether the songs are misogynist or misguided, because the words are just extra sounds to me. Which is fine, because the sounds are the whole point of the thing.

Tesfaye has a delicate voice, which generally sits on top of the song, skimming along the surface, while in depths there are these bassy, creaky thumpings. In the space in between, all sorts of stuff can happen: The Beach House sample Loft Music squashes out of shape, so it feels like an uncovered artefact of ancient pop rather than something from 2008. The bit where a woman’s voice joins in on The Party & The After Party, throbbing just under the song. The statement-of-intent looping squeal that introduces House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls – and from there, the song slides into a fluid underlying push/pull, with just the slightest buzzy echo, before introducing all sorts of other sounds and layering them on top, or underneath.

Every single moment on House of Balloons sounds absolutely gorgeous - whether through headphones, my old beaten-up laptop speakers, or my relatively good sound system. There are entire clubs’ worth of speakers going wasted on not playing The Weeknd constantly. I say we take the Gatecrashers of this world (rubbish club, fantastic sound systems) by force, and turn them into cathedrals of sound.

And then, the next morning, walking the wet streets, trying to scratch the tinnitus echo of the songs from our inner ear with a little finger, we can live in that fantasy world that House of Balloons taught us about. Of course, that would mean we’d just have to start enjoying the songs on their own merits.

Oh well.

2011 – twelve months, twelve songs

The pre-New Years blogfest didn’t quite go as planned, thanks to the intrusion of pesky real life, and my own stupidity in underestimating the effort required to read and summarise an entire years’ worth of film reviews. I move into a flat in London tomorrow – an event aligned so neatly with the start of the new year I’m finding it difficult not to self-mythologise, but also meaning I won’t have broadband for a little while, but I’ve got a few end-of-year articles I’m hoping to polish and put up here. Watch this space, but for now enjoy this month-by-month account of the year in music (and double your fun with this YouTube playlist, featuring all 12 songs).

JANUARY
Kanye West – All of the Lights
Or, how I discovered that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy had been my favourite album of 2010 all along, I’d just never listened to it. Running some beautiful strings and piano into big, punch-to-the-face beats, punctuated with those horns, there is always at least one thing going on. All of the Lights also features some of Rihanna’s finest work (and, in the video, the most I’ve ever understood why the entire universe fancies her) alongside a great segment owned by Kid Cudi, and appearances by Fergie, Charlie Wilson, John Legend, Tony Williams, Alicia Keys, La Roux, The-Dream, Ryan Leslie, Alvin Fields and Ken Lewis. It should be a mess but Yeezy, in full 21st-Century-Brian-Wilson mode, stitches it all together perfectly to make an instant classic that would soundtrack the climax of every house party for the rest of the year.
FEBRUARY
Kimya Dawson – Walk Like Thunder
From music that sounds best at 2am coming through a stack of speakers, via a wall of human flesh that’s screaming a rough approximation of the lyrics, to headphone music for those 2ams spent alone. Walk Like Thunder is a 10 minute epic that fully earns its length. The listener is trapped in a confessional booth with Kimya’s voice and sparse atmospheric music, only blooming out at the very end into an Aesop Rock cameo. It’s pretty blunt, lyrically, but I’d venture that’s the point – people do everything they can to avoid talking about death, and maybe that should change.
MARCH
Rebecca Black – Friday
Am I being contrary? Well, maybe a little. (I briefly considered including Swagger Jagger instead, playing the same role). But I’ve genuinely got a lot of joy out of this song over this year – some of those lyrics are genius in their banality, if your mind is pitched just right, and it’s sweet-natured enough, and I think it’s unfairly become a byword for rubbish pop. Rubbish pop is mediocre, and the mind-blowing literality and creepy older rent-a-rapper of Friday is not that, by any yardstick. This goes out to all those 344,303 dislikes on YouTube – grow up, it’s at least pretty good.
APRIL
Childish Gambino – Break
January, redux. All of the Lights was so good it stretched into two of my favourite songs of the year – this is a remix, kind of, but it’s so much more than that. It’s in a relationship with the original, definitely, referring back and twisting its lines, but picks something new out of it – a sort of melancholy sweetness – like a friend telling you the answer to one of those Magic Eye puzzles. And then Mr Glover does his thing, dropping some nicely dense lines thick with reference, wordplay and an almost unhealthy interest in Asian women in a way that reminds you that in his other life, Donald is a well-loved comedian and writer. The meeting of those two simple ideas – cartoony rap and confessional emoting – would spark a love affair that lasted all year.
MAY
The Weeknd – House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls
The most important thing I heard all year. 2011 was the year I really got into hip-hop and R’n’B, and Kanye and The Weeknd (and Miles “Strong Opinions” Bradley’s Tumblr) are probably equally responsible. It’s already pretty obvious that the three mixtapes The Weeknd released this year will be leaving grubby pawprints all over pop for some time to come. (Plus, last night Christopher “Mancrush” Sparrow pointed out to me that it should be pronounced The Weakn’d. That kind of hidden-in-plain-sight wordplay would pretty much guarantees The Weeknd a place on this list.)
I’m not specifically thinking about this track here, mind – anything off of House of Balloons is good with me. Less than than individual songs, it’s the aesthetic choices, and the trail of thick gloomy atmosphere it leaves, that have stuck with me.
JUNE
Emmy the Great – A Woman, A Woman, A Century of Sleep
And Emmy returns from the wilderness semi-unrecognisable, having shed some of the folkiness and acerbic one liners in favour of grander sounds and more obscure lyrics. It’s all a bit rather more grown-up, and you sense that, in another life, this is the year Emma Lee Moss would have moved from short stories to writing novels. That’s rarely something I mean in a good way, but the razor-sharp confidence of Emmy Mk 2 makes for something fully the equal, and opposite, of all the old material.
JULY
Drake – Marvin’s Room
By this point, the year’s ruling aesthetic was official set – moody late-nite R’n’B/hip-hop full of loneliness and isolation and unpleasantly irresponsible drinking. Marvin’s Room is simply a fine example of that. It employs beats that sound the way H.R. Giger’s industrial/organic artwork looks, mixing straightforward rap verses with sung choruses which stretch out Drake’s voice into something quivering and completely separable from the rest of the sounds. Meanwhile, snippets of phone conversation flit in and out, repurposing the skit tradition into something that fits the post-Weeknd aesthetic.
There’s something about its deployment of the n-word that I’m not fully comfortable with, and the slow-motion repeat of the bridge is only just on the right side of being silly, but Marvin’s Room provides a stylish bridge between House of Balloons and the Chris Rock guest appearance on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
AUGUST
Kanye West & Jay-Z – Otis
Another slice of solid, straightforward hip-hop that references an R’n’B legend in its title, it’s hard not to consider Otis the mirror image of Marvin’s Room. It sounds absolutely gorgeous but like the accompanying Spike Jonze video, it’s surprisingly no-frills: just Yeezy and Hova hanging out and shooting the breeze. The entire song just rests on these two big personalities, and they’re more than big enough to carry it. Otis doesn’t bother with any kind of subtle rise-and-fall, it just uses a series of joyous screams to tell you this is the climax. Perfect – they were possibly my single favourite sound in music all year.
SEPTEMBER
Florence & The Machine – Shake It Out [Weeknd Remix]
In which The Weeknd house style gets turned onto a piece of otherwise basic but decent indie pop. It inspired probably the best bit of music writing I did all year, so I’ll just steal and remix that. It’s no one-trick pony, but the outstanding bit is how the remix splits Florence’s vocals into two tracks, one high-register pinging and one slowing so its sounds like the vinyl its pressed onto has melted; even the lyrics get warped into two separate interpretations. The remix manages to take the voice of Florence Welch, reasonably talented human being, and run it through a prism, multiplying into something more transcendental and pluralistic and interesting.
OCTOBER
Kavinsky – Nightcall
The Drive soundtrack is absolutely phenomenal, and has earned the film a strong foothold in my lasting affections. This was the highlight, perfectly pitched for drives along empty roads wearing sunglasses and a brooding expression. There’s that contrast again, between the sweet, earnest Lovefoxx vocals and the terrifying digitised whisper of Kavinsky, which sounds like a serial-killer broadcasting onto the dead space between channels on your car radio. With the loud clarity of  cinema speakers behind it, it absolutely knocked me out, and then I went home and listened to it another thirty times. On repeat, living at home with no job or real hope of one, with only the company of my laptop screen, it kept me up past a sensible bedtime for a good chunk of October. It’s time I couldn’t have hoped to waste more beautifully.
NOVEMBER
Los Campesinos! – Baby I Got The Death Rattle
The best of the LC! tracks we got this year, mixing together pretty much everything I love about the band into something that doesn’t sound quite like anything else they’ve released. It opens with a spoken section worthy of its own t-shirt, Gareth doing his brilliant microscopic poetry thing, and picks out a path through a few superimposed versions of the same song, jumping from one slightly different version to another throughout. Single, well-observed lines cut diagonally against choruses. There’s a point where the song declares “and this is the end”, pauses , and immediately starts to build up again with one of those LC! intros where it sounds like they’re playing toy instruments, straight into the final third of the song.
Baby I Got The Death Rattle is a song that fully earns the morbid melodrama of its title – the full-on emo band I wanted LC! to become peeking through once more - but it still has a swing in its hips, and a sense of humour. I love that LC! don’t exclude sex from their song, and as the song takes a turn towards the smutty, an obvious rhyme gets undermined with a dismissive “oh, you get the message”, with the timing of the greatest punchlines, before jumping right back into the final chorus. It takes itself exactly serious enough to know when to crack a smile.
DECEMBER
Azaelia Banks – 212
A lot of the music I’ve mentioned here has been night-time music, tunes for the early hours. There’s something about 212 that feels like it was made for daylight, with Miss Banks a beacon of pure attitude. I just talked about LC! being smutty, but they've got nothing on this. The song delivers a range of filthiness and aggression beyond what the hip-hop boys can manage, delivered with the light touch of the finest pop music. The song is perfectly crafted, curvy in all the right places and just fidgety enough to suggest an entire career for the newcomer – the new Nicki Minaj, Missy Elliot and Santigold, depending on who you listen to – into a three minute single. Most importantly, though, it’s just having enormous fun while it’s at it.

That’s far from everything I’ve loved this year. Rihanna’s S&M held my heart for a good few weeks before she officially ‘lost it’, in my estimation; Heems’ WOMYN is the year’s best bit of feminism-pop; The National provided the only song of theirs I’ve ever truly loved for the Portal 2 soundtrack in Exile/Vilify. And missing off The-Dream/Terius Nash’s Wedding Crasher is an absolute travesty, frankly, and I can only apologise. But it’s everything I could fit in this admittedly rather narrow format.

Self-Reflection on Saturdays: a Spot of FFoF Post-Game Analysis

I embarked on this yearlong endeavour hoping to learn something about myself. Rereading all the entries this week, I'm not sure I've had any mindblowing ephiphanies but, presented with a chunk of writing (or indeed picks) this substantial, it'd be hard not to spot a few patterns.

First of all, that I'm not a very good self-proofreader. I've alluded a few times to the number of entries written in a panic, in those final hours before my self-imposed deadline of 23:59 on Friday - a deadline I only missed once, by about 15 minutes - and that meant I didn't get to double-check everything as thoroughly as I might have liked. I can see at least one thing I'd change in every single post - an odd bit of phrasing mostly, a factual error, a couple of typos (or an occasional vestigial "???", my personal notation for write more here).

I won't go back and change them all, though, not even my claim that Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 2003. I'd claim that this about retaining the purity of the thing, but honestly it's just that this list has already driven me mad once, and I don't fancy getting lost in it again.

Perhaps more interesting are the words, phrases, and structures I've repeatedly leant on. Talk of “quotables”, “charisma”, and “cool” need to exorcised from future writing, and recently, a lot of “of course”s and “after all”s have crept in too. (An attempt at keeping a conversational tone, I reckon.)

Thematically and structurally, I reckon I've overused the gap between what I'd remembered and what I found on a rewatch as a springboard. Similarly, a tendency to focus on one element throughout the piece, and then conclude by saying but, wait, there's more to this film! has been too common - a result, probably, of trying to find a variety of ways to gush about a film...

Consider this me burning all my writerly bridges – none of these tricks are ones I'll be able to use again. Good.

The most peculiar bit is how how fond I've been of using permutations of “boy meets girl...” for showing how something sticks to/departs from a standard structure and cinematic traditions, but it's something I think I've only ever used in FFoF posts, so as long as it stays there, that's okay.

Throughout, I've struggled to organically work in a synopsis of the plot – partially because it feels like it ruins the fun of watching it for yourself - but it's something, in all the different permutations I've tried out, I have been working hard to fix. As I've pointed out in some of the posts, I'm less concerned by narrative than other elements of cinema. I'm fascinated by pacing – whether something comes over an hour in, or 20 minutes from the end - and non-traditional (i.e. non-fantasy) world-building. Also, use of music, pure emotional resonance, big Ideas, how a film fits into a director or writer's body of work... all thoughts I've addressed at some point.

Most of all, though, it's been a year of trying to work out how to describe cinema, in terms of what exactly is happening on screen, and whether it's extraneous. Most of the joy of writing about, say, music is just finding words for what's happening; in games journalism, I'm interested in telling stories other people won't necessarily have had. It's much harder in film, treading a line between spoiling a key scene or boring you with something you've already seen. The Apocalypse Now piece's look at the Do Lung Bridge scene is possibly the best example of this – it's a fine piece of visual poetry which I tried to get down in suitably wide-eyed prose. I'm still not sure it's possible.

A chart showing the breakdown of my fifty favourite films, by decade

As someone on the internet once told me, I need to watch some films that were made more than 10 years ago. The years 2000-2009 make up an overwhelming half of the list, with my single favourite year for films, apparently, being 2004. It's the year Shaun of the Dead, Anchorman, The Incredibles, and my #1 favourite film ever, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, came out. It's also the year I was 15 years old.

I observed it a few times throughout, but I really have a obsession with the links between being a teenager  and cinema. Cinema burnt brightest for me when I was in my teens - almost every year between 1999 and 2009 produced three films on this list, and most of the other ones I saw in that impressionable time too. A lot of the films were included for the warping effect they had on my young brain, and what was on my mind at the time - male friendship, the relationship between individual and state, the loss of youth and innocence, etc.

It also turns out that, statistically speaking, Quentin Tarantino is my favourite director, having directed four of the films on this top 50, with Brad Bird trailing just behind with three. Tarantino is even more prolific as a screenwriter, having written five films on the list. That said, if we're being purely statistical, he would also be my favourite actor, having had substantial appearances in three films, and that is certainly not the truth.

Looking back, there are films that should be higher, or lower – Airplane!, for example, was clearly cheated, while I'm not wholly sure T2 deserves its place around the halfway mark  –  and there are a couple of films I'd like to include – Social Network being the first one that comes to mind – though I have absolutely no idea which films I'd kick off the list to make room.

After all, lists like these are completely arbitrary. That's the truth we can admit now it's all over – they're a bit silly, really, and it's something you can see shining through every time I jokily declare a statement to be fact!.

Nevertheless, as a body of work, it's something I'm very proud of. There's enough there - somewhere in the region of 30,000 words, by my estimation - to fill a small book, and most of it is reasonably good. It's certainly quite wide-reaching, in terms of genre, topic, and years of release... well, okay, no, not years of release, given that the entire '60s and '70s are represented by a single film each.

But I managed to cover all sorts: posts contained thoughts on whole genres, or single shots. I reflected on the nature of Top x lists, my relationship with my sister, how films from children differ from films for adults. My big theory about how detective stories are the purest distilled form of narrative dipped its toe in the FFoF waters more than once. And there is, of course, some fantastically hubristic formalism in there - remember that time I wrote entire the Memento post backwards and then carefully reshuffled it so no one would ever notice?

There's a hell of a lot of intertextuality going on, especially in entries that lie next to each other, intentional - the pairing of The Thing and Zodiac, for example - and stuff that just slipped in  - the mention of Spencer-inherited personality traits in the Spirited Away and Iron Giant pieces, later transmuting into the comparison of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and 24 Hour Party People as distant cousins with a single family trait in common.

In fact, there's lots of talk about family trees, and relationships between films. There's a big dusty hall of fame taking up a corner of my brain, with each film and article give its own place, with lines and arrows running between each. The project quickly turned into an attempt to document a sort of personal history, and writing it has created a history of its own. I remember where I was when I wrote most of them – the staff room at school, on lunch from work experience and, most often, on a variety of trains.

What was meant to be a way of getting me to write more regularly turned into an autobiography, really. It's something I tried to chase out - the boring writer peering over your shoulder constantly - but, as I pointed out in the Pulp Fiction entry, it's often hard for me to separate the media I love from the conditions I experienced it in.