Favorite Media of 2013

That is what I digged the most this year. Can you dig it?

For the past few years (see 2010, 2011, and 2012) I’ve been ending the year with a big ol’ post where I go through my favorite media of the year in a few key categories. For me, it acts as an exercise in looking back at what it is that tickled me the most during the year that was, and hey, it might give you some ideas on things you should check out. This year, remembering many of these things was much easier since I now keep a media consumption diary online — that would be my Debaser Tumblr blog.

So this is the best of the year?

Nope, not at all. This is a highly subjective compilation of my favorite things. Also, there’s a lot I haven’t had the chance to take in yet (I’m looking at you, Super Mario 3D World), and although in past years I’ve sometimes cheated a bit — basically, stuff that I didn’t get around to from the previous year — this year I made a point of sticking to things that really came out in 2013.

So here it, starting with a top 5 in alphabetical order, and then a listing of honorable mentions for each.

Favorite Games
Again, the thing to remember here is that these are my favorite games that I’ve played. I can’t play everything — or more importantly, I can’t afford to play everything — and there are also a few games that I just haven’t got around to yet, that I think I’ll really like (like Beyond: Two Souls and BioShock Infinite, which I only picked up recently). Also, I’m not much of a PC (well, Mac) gamer, so there are plenty of great indies that I do want to play, and I’m very happy that many of them are going to be coming out on Vita or PS4 (or both). The platform mentioned is the one I played it on (many of these are multi-platform titles).

• Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (PS3)
• Grand Theft Auto V (PS3)
• Super Mario 3D World (Wii U)
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (3DS)
• Zen Pinball 2: Star Wars Pinball (PS4/PS3/Vita)

Honorable Mentions: Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (PS4), Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale(3DS), Call of Juarez: Gunslinger (PS3), Final Fantasy XIV (PS3), Fire Emblem: Awakening (3DS), Guacamelee(Vita), Resogun (PS4), Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft Beta (Mac), Need for Speed Rivals (PS4), Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (PS3), Rayman Legends (Vita), Spelunky (Vita), Tomb Raider (PS3), The Last of Us (PS3)

Favorite iOS Games
Last year I put The Walking Dead in the regular games category, but since I play all Telltale games on iPad, and it’s really the only way I want to play these games, I felt like it was time to put it in this category (along with the truly excellent The Wolf Among Us). People always say that iOS gaming is all about simple cheap games, but looking at my top 5, it’s really PC/console-like games that work great with touch that I tend to gravitate towards. I’m certainly ready and willing to pay $20 for a season (5 episodes) of The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us on iOS (and in 2014 I’ll do the same for The Game of Thrones and Tales from the Borderlands), and I’m glad that République has gone this route as well. Also, even though I had a lot of fun playing the free-to-play Plants vs. Zombies 2, I would have much preferred paying a standard $5 or $10 for it — and would have played much more — so it doesn’t get included.

• République
• Ridiculous Fishing
• Shadowrun Returns
• The Walking Dead: Season 2 and 400 Days DLC
• The Wolf Among Us

Honorable Mentions: Battle of the Bulge, Colossatron, Joe Danger Touch, Magic 2014, Nimble Quest, Steve Jackson’s Sorcery!

Favorite TV
I always find it very difficult to come up with the top 5, but what I have here are truly the shows that I enjoyed watching the most, although my binging of Arrow and Fringe comes closely behind, and it was difficult to not put Mad Men in the top 5, a show I still adore. And speaking of binging, I’ve started watching more seasons of shows this way, foregoing watching on a weekly basis — I find it more satisfying and easier to follow — and so shows that I normally would include, like Boardwalk Empire and Treme, are not there because I just haven’t gotten around to watching them yet.

• Breaking Bad
• Eastbound and Down
• Game of Thrones
• House of Cards
• Orange Is the New Black

Honorable Mentions: Arrow, Fringe, Girls, Inside Amy Schumer, Luther, Mad Men, Shameless, Spartacus: War of the Damned, Top Gear, Tron: Uprising

Favorite Movies
This always feels like it’s the most incomplete of categories, since so many great films come out at the end of the year, which means I’ll only see them in the coming months — so many of my favorite movies that I watched this year actually came out last year. But still, I think these are the 2013 releases that I enjoyed the most. And yes, Pain & Gain was just too fun not to include.

• Before Midnight
• Elysium
• Frances Ha
• Pacific Rim
• Spring Breakers

Honorable Mentions: Don Jon, Oblivion, Pain & Gain, Rush, Side Effects, Star Trek Into Darkness, This Is the End, Upstream Color, Wreck-It Ralph

Favorite Comics
This year I really found myself getting back into French comics, and not necessarily with new releases, although the weekly Le journal de Spirou is one of my favorite reads. I also find myself missing out on lots of great English releases — especially with graphic novels — and so the end of the year is always an excuse to go through the “best of” lists from various sites to find out what I missed. I think Comics Alliance has a really great one. Of everything here, Hawkeye and Sex Criminals are truly my favorite series of the year, followed by East of West.

• East of West
• Hawkeye
• Sex Criminals
• The Massive
• The Walking Dead

Honorable Mentions: Fury: My War Gone By, Lazarus, Sweet Tooth, The Wake, Trillium, Velvet

Favorite Albums
Well, a big change this year in how I cover my favorite music. I usually always have a “favorite tracks” category, along with the “favorite albums” one, and for the tracks, I do a round-up of tracks that are not from my favorite albums. But this year, I found that I really couldn’t separate them. Sure, I’ve always been an album guy more than a singles guy, but I do have a lot of tracks I love — that I play on the Codex — and this year they pretty much all came from albums that I really loved too. And hey, there were A LOT of albums I really loved this year, hence the ridiculously long “honorable mentions” list, but these are really all of my favorite albums of the year. As I do each year, I’ll soon do a special episode of the Codex that covers all of this amazing music. Also, if I were to choose one album to rule them all for 2013, it would have to be M.I.A.’s Matangi.

• Cold Spring Fault Less Youth (Mount Kimbie)
• Matangi (M.I.A.)
• Pure Heroine (Lorde)
• Random Access Memories (Daft Punk)
• The Blow (The Blow)

Honorable Mentions: Anything on Return (Toro Y Moi), Bitter Rivals (Sleigh Bells), Fade Away (Best Coast), False Idols (Tricky), La Musique Numérique (AM & Shawn Lee), Mala (Devendra Banhart), Miracle Mile (STRFKR), Modern Vampires in the City (Vampire Weekend), More Is Than Isn’t (RJD2), Night Time, My Time (Sky Ferrera), Paracosm (Washed Out), Performance (Outfit), Reflektor (Arcade Fire), Run Fast (The Julie Ruin), The Bones of What You Believe (CHVRCHES), Overgrown (James Blake), Wakin on a Pretty Daze (Kurt Vile), Wed 21 (Juana Molina)