Let's piss on 2025's ashes and hope that 2026 is the year that the rich finally need those expensive bunkers they've been building.
Wow, I can't believe I've done two thousand and twenty five of these year-end articles already. I still remember writing the first one with my boy Jesus Christ before he left to do his own thing (drugs).
This year I've decided to take the good with the bad, meaning I'll write about the best and worst things of the year. This is because there is so much bad in the world that I wouldn't have much to write about otherwise.
Games
Best: Ghost of Yōtei
I started playing this while also playing Tears of the Kingdom. Despite being similar, I constantly remarked how much better Ghost of Yōtei is because it isn't filled with a constant stream of runny bullshit. For example, both games have a button to call your horse but in Ghost of Yōtei it actually does something. And while you can't climb any surface in Goats of Yokel like you can in Kingdom Tears, you can at least climb things when it's raining.
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| Hey look, it's a sword that won't break after swinging it ten times. I guess I'll put it with all the others. Oh how woeful it is to be spoiled for choice. |
Worst: Metroid Prime 4
I already said it all in my review. Fuck this game. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if Metroid Prime wasn't my favourite game of all time, but a Metroid Prime game that isn't for Metroid Prime fans is a shitty Metroid Prime game regardless.
Movies
Best: Fantastic 4/Thunderbolts
I'm not totally down on the post-Endgame MCU like a lot of people, mostly because I thought Endgame was already shit but also because I really liked Shang Chi and thought The Eternals was fine. But if you want something to point to a return to quality for Mickey Marvel, 2025 gave us two examples. Three if you count the new Captain America, which was a lot better than I was expecting. I like Anthony Mackie and think he's a great Cap'n, but I was worried they'd turn it into an allegory for what's going on in the US right now. However, despite being a raging red monster, Harrison Ford was still a better president than the raging orange monster that a third of real Americans were stupid enough to vote for and another third were too stupid to vote against.
Guillermo del Toro's "Hot Frankenstein" was also very good, but I surprised even myself by turning out to be more of a superhero nerd this year than a gothic horror nerd.
Worst: Tron: Ares
I don't watch a lot of movies and only seek out ones that I am pretty sure I'll enjoy, so a "worst" movie category is hard for me to fill out.
I didn't actually watch Tron: Ares and I probably never will, but I can surmise enough about it from all of the ancillary media to know that it's a bad movie. Not just because Jared Leto is a shitberg, but because they made a Tron movie that takes place mostly in the real world. The entire appeal of Tron is exploring the world inside a computer. If the movie didn't cost Disney over 320 million dollars to make and market I would have assumed they made that decision to cheap out on special effects costs. But, no, they made an expensive Tron movie set in the real world and cast Jared Leto as the star, because they clearly wanted to spend a tonne of money on killing the Tron franchise once and for all. Even the soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails isn't very good.
Television
Best: Devil May Cry
I probably watched more Tee Vee this year than I have in a while, but most of that was stuff from the '90s on Tubi or endless South Park on Pluto TV. Of the new stuff I actually watched, Devil May Cry is definitely the best.
I know a lot of fans didn't like Adi Shankar's take on the series but, as I have previously established, Devil May Cry fans are all annoying brats and anything they hate fills my heart with joy. Netflix Dante might be even better than young DMC Dante. If the Limp Bizkit theme song didn't push him over the edge, the highway scene with Papa Roach certainly did.
Worst: Alien Earth
I watched about ten minutes of the first episode, but it didn't even take me that long to decide it was going to be shit. I knew it would be from the very first line of text that appears on the screen, because it made it clear this would be yet another Alien story about androids instead of aliens. If they want to make more Blade Runner, just make more Blade Runner. I like Blade Runner, but I don't want Alien to be Blade Runner.
And so ends another shitty year of a shitty decade, as Donald "leaves a brown streak wherever he sits" Trump and his sycophants continue to ineptly yet effectively dismantle Western democracy and the rest of us can only watch in horror because we never predicted the social contract could be so fragile that the dumbest people alive could manage to tear up. But the one thing the ongoing march of American fascism hasn't damaged is my spirit. That has mostly been eroded by the constant drip of alcohol. I just mount the bottle upside-down on my wall and suckle at it like a hamster in a cage now.
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