Commercial Break: Too Much Awesome In One Video

Its about time the commercial breaks return. I'm not sure what to even comment on in this video. What would you comment on? The band? The obvious couple that we are all deeply envious of? The fact that the drums sound like paper airplanes hitting a dart board?

FYI: We Know The PS3 Was Hacked & The PSP2 Will Be Announced

A Blog talking about how there are too many blogs. Irony.

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The Brog's Worst Of The Worst List Of 2010

Read of my experiences and tell my story.This list has been a long time coming so let's not delay. What you will find below is a short list of all-things-awful that I've subjected myself to within the last year. Read below and know that every ounce of these individual medias consistently haunt my dreams.

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The Brog's Best Single Player Game Of 2010: Heavy Rain

After great debate, Heavy Rain takes the crown as a game that means more to the culture than it may to the gamers that played it.

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The Brog's Best Multiplayer Game Of 2010: Battlefield Bad Company 2

Even with the ability to snipe someone from across the map with a shotgun, Bad Company 2 functions both as a stress reliever and an intense moment-to-moment exercise in what makes the standard FPS worth buying in to.

The interesting thing I've noticed in my multiplayer habits is that there is no room for being exceptional at a wide variety of these types of games. Out of the dozens of multiplayer games that came out for PS3 and PC this year I only had time to really get into the games listed below and especially this years winner: Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

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The Brog's Best Comic/Graphic Novel Of 2010: Locke & Key -- Crown Of Shadows

Because its been a while since a book captured both child-like curiosity and mature terror.

Truth time. I've been meaning to review several graphic novels and trades since The Brog's inception. Let this year-end award to Joe Hill's Locke & Key: Crown Of Shadows be a step in a brighter direction for trades and collection coverage on this site. The funny thing about this year's collection of comics I read was that all left varying magnitudes of impressions. However, the third book in the Locke & Key series really, took me. It's rare that I'm taken by anything.

Asterios Polyp was an adventure against what conventions I think of as far as form and function of comics go. The sixth book of Walking Dead is great, but it feels as if I'm reading the series almost out of habit as opposed to deeply engrossing entertainment. Brubaker's Criminal and William's Batwoman struck me as something that will make long-term impressions, but nothing immediately gasp-worthy. Hill's Crown of Shadows is my least liked of the three books in the series. It left me frustrated, I've been wanting the series to move faster than it has been. Gone are the horror-filled, bloody massacres found in the first book. The child-like horror found in book two seemed to be venturing into young-adult angst. Yet, the book punctuates, with every page, "You need to keep reading."

Honorable Mention: Walking Dead Book 6, Criminal: The Sinners, Asterios Polyp, Batwoman: Elegy

The Brog's Best Downloadable Game Of 2010: Pac Man CE: DX

I'd write a formal review, but I can't stop playing this game.

Long ago on a Sega Genesis far, far away, my mom routinely mopped the floor with me whenever we played Tengen's Ms. Pac Man. An unflinchingly brutal game that my mom was incredibly stellar at. I would have been better off holding the controller upside-down. Finally I have something I can show her up on. In the final weeks of 2010, Namco Generations re-reinvented their Xbox 360 downloadible hit. Not since Critter Crunch have I let such a small and polished game occupy so much of my time. [As of the typing of this, I am ranked 248th out of 48,000 PSN users on the highly competitive Championship II level].

What is most vexing about Pac Man Championship Edition: DX is that its a modern game. There are tense bullet-time moments when the player is close to death. Possibly an unintentional wink to this age of kill streaks and instant killification [its a word I just made it up], an added layer of creating a 'mambo-like' line is included amongst maneuvering past speedy ghosts before the glorious satisfaction one feels when they get to devour said techno-colored ghost queue. Not since Peggle Nights has there been a game that has shown me that, its okay for videogames to be videogames.

Honorable Mention: Joe Danger, Plants vs. Zombies: GOTY Edition, Alien Swarm, Catan

The Brog's Best Flash Game Of 2010: Closure

"Because ya gotta have it, in order to move on." - Zadi Diaz

This past year I made a handful of friends in the indie [whatever that means] gaming scene so I thought it would only be fair to do a "Best of" for flash and html-based games. Though I had to pick a winner, please pay special attention to the Honorable Mentions. Though these games may be written off by some to be time-eaters or small games, the impact they made on me changed how I look at games. Most notably, Elude, a game centered around depression -- where the goal of the game isn't to win, but to empathize. 

2010's big winner is Closure, a game in the vein of Echochrome and recent Wii release -- Lost In Shadow. Closure relies on the gamer's smarts and ability to play with the path illuminating mechanics. If you can see it, then you should go there. However, if your path is dimmed, then prepare for a grave mistake. Places not illuminated, do not exist. Apropos to life, no? 

Honorable Mention: Immortal, Miami Shark, Elude, Envirobear, Robot Unicorn Attack

For more free games and the culture that supports it go here: Scott Sharkey's 101 Free Games, Newgrounds, Kongregate, Adult Swim Games

Vanquish Review -- If Metal Gear And Gears Of War Had A Baby

Much like Sam Gideon's ARG suit, Vanquish is cool to look at, ridiculous to make sense of, and very few people will get it
Vanquish is a game that is just as challenging as it is beautiful. Platinum Games has managed to squeeze out two eccentric gems within one year that not only challenge several constructs of what makes a game fun, but also keeps the non-JRPG aspect of Japanese games on American gamers’ radar. This being said, there are core principals of Vanquish’s design that are unflinchingly Japanese. Recommending a game like this is like recommending someone hold a beautiful rose with the sharpest thorns. You will die several times. You will laugh at what constitutes a cogent narrative. You will blow stuff up for points and realize how something so simple as this, has been abandoned by most modern games. All these things and you get to casually smoke cigarettes.

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The Brog's Best Movie Of 2010: How To Train Your Dragon

Why? Because Inception and True Grit didn't have dragons this adorable

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