1. Action: Fury Road. It's a goddamn masterpiece, bless Margaret Sixel for editing it into the incredible hard-driving piece that it is. Without her it'd never have worked.
2. Superhero Stuff: Black Panther tied with Captain America: The First Avenger. Black Panther is so goddamn good. Like, deserves to be its own cinematic universe. Screw the rest of the canon, just give me more Wakanda.
and yes, I like the first Cap movie best. The other two are great, but I have a huge soft spot for the first one, probably in part because it's less complicated. Steve knows precisely who's bad and goes and punches them, none of the good guys betrays anyone else.
Also Hugo Weaving is always a blast playing villains, and in my weird, weird brain the Red Skull is physically attractive. No one here is surprised to find this out.
3. Horror: The Collector. Low-hollywood budget but doesn't look it (~$10-12M), all the characters act logically according to what knowledge they have, and the faceless antagonist has great physicality courtesy of Juan Fernández de Alarcon. Also he saves a spider at one point during the movie. Again, it surprises no one that I like this one.
4. The Stur Wurs: Empire, honestly. While I think TLJ is the better movie, Empire both has the force of nostalgia behind it, and I think it did a better job with communicating scale than TLJ. And since I love villains, it's the obvious choice.
5. Wildcard: I don't really have a fifth one. Look, if a movie has a faceless or inhuman entity with a nice design, I will love that part of the movie.
I love Sonny from I, Robot. I love Christopher Johnson from District 9. I love the alien from Annihilation. I love Rinzler from Daft Punk: The Musical Tron Legacy. Just don't give it a human face, and I'll love it.
And I think more media should do that, especially with sympatheic characters. People are not encouraged enough by their media to sympathize with things that don't have a visible human face. I think it stunts people's ability to empathize with things they don't have an immediate connection to.
Usually games without storylines can't hold me (I cannot stand MOBAs or arena games, for example), but modded Minecraft is so goddamn satisfying. I can wander around in a modpack for 40 hours or more, and when I get bored there's always a new pack someone's put together.
It's been defunct for years, but it was and still is my favorite MMO. An original superhero world shared with its progenitor City of Heroes, CoV had both a fun storyline and intensely satisfying gameplay. I got in during the beta and played it until it shut down.
Wonder why my screen name is Spider? It's because of this game. It made me love spiders. Its lead villain NPC (spider-themed, obviously) was my very first RP account on LiveJournal.
Equippment wasn't a factor, so your character's look was near-100% customizable from day one. The character creator was more expansive than pretty much any I've ever seen, with hundreds of wardrobe options. You could make your own superhero or villain and stick with the look, or totally redesign their physical looks or wardrobe whenever you wanted.
And the way the game handled powers was near-ideal, to me. You'd unlock new powers as you levelled up, but more importantly, levelling unlocked more enhancement slots for each one. You could customize the function of your powers to fine-tune your build. Only Warframe since then has matched that kind of experience. Speaking of...
The game I've spent the most time on out of my current library, officially a thousand hours as of yesterday. Aesthetically, it's my favorite game on this list. Again, surprises nobody, but a game with barely any human faces is where I feel the most comfortable.
For ages it didn't really have a story beyond occasional limited events and little ficlets hidden in the codex, but I latched onto the hints that they gave. And thus far, the story updates have not disappointed.
And I am deep into the true endgame of this thing: fashionframe. More limited than CoV, but the aesthetics! God. It's so pretty, and everyone moves too fast to really show it off most of the time.
And there's a heckton of Warframes now, all of them you can switch between at will once you unlock them. There's gender parity between the frames, and you're not locked to one gender. Heck, one of them defaults to female, but is both male and female depending on what form you select for them.
And everyone can find their playstyle. Do you want to stomp so hard you break physics? Physically hurt people with electronic music? Kill people with disco balls? Make giant snowglobes? Command a war cat and make razorwire buckyballs? Flagellate yourself? Wear a tophat and open dimensional rifts?
I love it so much. I started the series with Morrowind, but this is my baby. Skyrim might have fixed a lot of issues, but this is the game I feel homesick for the most.
It also hugely benefits from mods in a similar way to Minecraft. If you're tired of the basic experience, add some mods! It's nowhere near as smooth to set up as with Minecraft, but it can completely change the feel of the game.
And fun fact: I have never finished a Bethesda game. I play them for hundreds of hours but I just live my own life, basically. The main quest isn't the important part for me.
This is by far and away the best in the series to me. The writing is fantastic. The setting is well-developed and distinct. The characters are complex and so are their motivations and interactions. Yes, even Vaan.
Vaan's a sticking point for a lot of people, because he looks like Tidus again, only less loud. I don't find him an issue, but for those who do: he's only the nominal protagonist for the first hour or two, then he slides steadily into the background for the real star: PRINCESS ASHELIA B'NARGAIN DALMASCA
Her family line has been destroyed, her new husband killed in battle, and her country has been occupied by an uncaring empire that sees her kingdom as a strategic asset against another superpower. The two empires are locked in a state of cold war, and everyone else suffers as a result.
Ashe's story begins as a quest both for vengeance and to reclaim her country, but it shifts over time. The story is about the human costs of war, and what seems simple at first can become complex and even intractable.
Also there's magical nukes. The ethics of when and how to use or even possess weapons of mass destruction is also a major theme in this game. I swear, this game has the best storyline of any Final Fantasy.
Ironically it had the most troubled production of any Final Fantasy up until that point, which is part of why the English dub script and cast are so fantastic. They had twice the normal amount of time to write and seek out voice actors.
They were so good that the Japanese wing of SquareEnix decided the English script was superior, and it's the default option on all following versions of the game.
These five are the Judge Magisters, and oh my god. They're well-read and articulate legal experts who are also expected to, at any moment, command troops or personally beat the everloving bejeezus out of anything and everything.
Their dialog is the best in the game. There's scenes that are just them debating or engaging in political conflict and I wish there were more of those scenes.
He's fantastic, and I wish there was more fic about him and the equally majestic Marquis Ondore. They have a diplomacy scene that's conducted entirely in innuendo on both sides, it's beautiful
and I will ramble about this goddamn game for YEARS if I let myself, but I'll stop now. Unless someone wants to ask me questions about it in which case I WILL TOTALLY RAMBLE MORE
Featuring Iko Uwais, a fantastic martial arts star, and Yayan Ruhain, who looks like you could pick him up and put him on a shelf, whereupon he would murder you
Daft Punk: The MusicalTron Legacy. Just don't give it a human face, and I'll love it.