Top Eleven: Tips For Steven Spielberg Regarding Filming Ready Player One

So, the Ready Player One movie is happening.  While I realize that my giving tips to Steven Spielberg about movie making is akin to Tommy Wiseau giving acting tips to Marlon Brando, there are a few things that I remember from my time listening to the audiobook version that have stuck with me, things that I don't think worked in a medium that wasn't "words on paper/screen" and are things I hope the movie would address.

Because I'm sure there's a good movie in there somewhere.  I'm just not 100% confident in Hollywood's history of portraying video games in any way, shape, or form.

But maybe I'm just cynical.

So here's eleven tips that, at least to me, should be kept in mind while creating a film that's one part huge "anybody can be a hero" adventure in the vein of Star Wars and Harry Potter, and one part "look at all the pop culture references we can make!"

Top Eleven Most Viewed Posts

I- wow.  You know, sometimes you start something and you wonder if anybody will ever really think it's that great.  Maybe it's a painting, or a music track, or a short story, and you repeat to yourself over and over again "nobody else is going to care about this.  Nobody is going to want to see/hear/touch/taste/read/whatever this is."  But you go through it, and later you discover that, somehow, people have found what you made either by word of mouth or something else, and that they apparently shared it because it's somehow gone out and become something in the world.

When I started this, I was rather proud of some posts.  "Hey, my look at the American Rabbit movie has 115 views!  Huh.  My list of Xbox games I'd love if I was still thirteen got 212 views.  How the heck did part two of my Street Fighter review get nearly 110 more reviews than the first part?"

Then I realized that there were certain posts that blew those numbers out of the water.I started seeing posts in the upper two hundreds, then the three hundreds.  I kept going further back, and I found four hundred, five hundred, and more views on certain posts!  These were things I had no idea anybody would ever care about to click on if they found it on a Google search!  I think some of it might have to do with the person I talked about perhaps linking to my post, but a few I have simply no explanation for.

So, to celebrate my doing four years of this blog (with a few gaps here and there), I'm looking at the most-viewed posts I've ever written.  Some of them make no sense whatsoever.

Top Eleven: Things I Blogged About In 2015

This is coming a bit late, but to my credit, I was visiting family over the holidays.  Plus, it's my blog, so I'm entitled to a vacation every now and again.

Planned ones, anyway.  I'm going to try to cut back on the unplanned ones.

Anyway, another year come and gone and- holy cow, I've been doing this since 2013?  This is going to be my fourth year in a row working on this blog.  That's pretty impressive!  I'll have to shake up some of the stuff I was going to post (I saw a bunch of movies during those long plane rides) and do a few looks back at some of the more popular things I've talked about.

But that's neither here nor now!  Now, we're going to look back at the past year of posting and look at what I enjoyed the most enjoyed about the year 2015!  At least, it'll be the things I enjoyed talking about during 2015.

Here they are, in order of how much fun I had.

First, an honorable mention:

My trip to Vermont was amazing.  Seeing one of my favorite radio programs live again in a completely unfamiliar setting, seeing sites and eating at places I had never been to before, there wasn't a single thing that I think back to and go "man, that part of the trip was unbearable."

I'll only say that if you're going to have that many steep cliffs for people to drive past, you could at least decorate them some.  Draw a giant smiley face, or hang large posters or something.  Also, when did hotel bed sheets just become pathetic?

Number Eleven: Wytches

Okay, so to be fair, I didn't so much "enjoy" Wytches so much as I felt exhilarated and terrified every time I turned the page.  It's one of the few times a book has genuinely made me feel fear for the characters within it without feeling cheap or like there was an editorial mandate to simply "kill people off to be shocking" (looking at you, Marvel and DC).

Number Ten:  The Law Enforcement Guide To Satanic Cults

There are not enough words to describe the enjoyment that comes from watching something that someone genuinely meant to be engaging, informational, and interesting, and instead having it only succeed at one of those by being the professionally paid and produced movie about satanism version of your friend falling down and not hurting himself.

That's a terrible analogy, but I'm not going to put more effort into making a comparison than the production company did in researching the data behind this movie.  It's terrible, but so bizarrely interesting, not for the subject material, but because you spend the entire time wondering about every single decision the primary characters make.  Why did they choose this location?  Why did they film from that angle?  Why are they saying these things?  Was there an editor?  What does the unused footage look like?  How much was that camera guy paid?

Number Nine: The Walking Dead: Season Two

As promised, we have the second season of Telltale Games' foray into zombie storytelling, and while I am a bit wiser now about how games are made, the fact that the series was willing to go out on such an emotionally charged ending that leaves you with a choice that will genuinely affect the start of the next season (provided it features Clementine, naturally) is amazing.  I look back at the choices I made during the game, and still wonder if I would have done anything differently.  I know that many characters would have died regardless of what I did (the circumstances of "when" and "how" would be all that was altered), but I think that I would have still made the decisions I did regardless.

Number Eight: The Great Race

This movie is to movies what Rocky Road is to ice creams.  It's an almost perfect combination of flavors put together with expert precision, and anybody who doesn't like it is wrong.  With an amazing cast, perfect delivery of jokes, slapstick humor that rivals any of the best I've seen, and a story that veers into madness so quickly that it lets you accept anything that follows, it's a (extremely long) viewing experience that leaves you in stitches.

In this place I almost put my experiences watching Rifftrax, which did regularly have me howling with laughter while watching the movies, but the only condition is that you're also required to watch some really bad cinema, and sometimes the jokes don't outdo the movie itself.  This isn't the problem in The Great Race, which is simply wonderful from start to finish.

Number Seven:  The Tale of Princess Kaguya

Like the last entry, this movie is an absolute delight to watch.  It's not funny, by any means, though there are some cute, humorous moments.  Instead, this movie is a delight for the eyes, daring you to blink and miss something.  Expressions are simplified, but still so engaging that when the main character is happy, you feel happier.  When she's upset, you want to reach into the screen and offer comfort, except the sharp lines and quick movements would cause you to lose a finger.

Plus, it's impossible to reach into a screen, so there's that.

The movie does take a very "Japanese" twist at the end (which I don't imply to be racist, simply that if an American director put a similar ending into one of their movies, I'd assume there was a gas leak during production, plus, it is based on Japanese legend) and it might throw off some viewers who expected an ending to bring real closure or make sense, but I think it still strongly holds up with everything else the movie brings.  The tree with the blossoms scene still gets me, to this day.

Number Six:  Bioshock Infinite: Burial At Sea

Taking the story from one of my all-time favorite games and shaping it so that many loose threads were brought together from the rest of the series, Burial At Sea manages to be a brilliant stand-alone story that's truly enhanced by having played the rest of the franchise first.  Why you would play a follow-up game before playing the lead-ins, I have no idea.  Then again, I accidentally watched a movie sequel without watching the (probably) terrible original movie, so there's that.

It also finally gave closure to one of my favorite characters of all time, and while I was saddened by the ending, knowing how her actions would affect entire worlds left me satisfied that the story's ending wasn't pointless.

It was a perfectly folded bow tying together a wonderful package of a franchise...as long as you keep ignoring the second game.


Number Five: The Martian

The second book on this list (and the only actual novel), the Martian was probably one of my favorite stories this year.  Spoiler alert, the movie will probably be on this year's list, because I watched it during my vacation.  Being a total math and science nerd, I loved the descriptions of how things work, how the main character was able to cobble things together, and every fun description of how he solved problems that kept cropping up.

The math was a delight (and seriously, how often does that phrase get used?), the writing was fun, and the story had me engaged from the moment I started reading.  The humor was sharp (though often juvenile, creating a great contrast with the strict science and "professionalism" of what was being done).  There were no wasted characters, everybody has a clear purpose, and though I doubt there would be any kind of sequel, I would love the idea of the author putting out another book.


Number Four:  Avatar Week

As I think I said before, sometimes I really need to remind myself that the reason something becomes popular is because it's really good.  All the praise I can say for this series would simply be drowned out by the massive amount of praise and analysis I already gave it, plus the fact I gave the series its own Top Eleven list.  So just click those links and find out why this series has joined the 90s DC Animated Universe, Animaniacs, and just a few others on my list of my all-time favorite animated series.

Number Three: Tink Week

I honestly did not expect to like any of these movies.  A few people I knew asked me to watch them, stating that they wanted my analysis of them.  I ignored them.  Someone I knew who I respected the opinions of pushed me, quite hard, to give them a try.  I finally relented, and wound up being completely blown away by the quality of the animation, the storytelling, and the acting.

Look, I'm not going to claim that every fraternity in the world should watch these.  Most guys probably wouldn't get a lot out of it.  But people with daughters (or boys who like nature and good stories and parents who won't get weird about it) should let their children watch these.  Together.  As a family.  You might also be impressed with what they're doing with classic Disney characters to keep them fresh, especially if, like me, you remember some of the absolute travesty "straight to video" sequels that Disney was grinding out for a while.

Number Two: Danganronpa and Danganronpa 2

Some things just change you when you experience them.  It might be that watching a movie about a shark convinces you to never swim in the ocean again.  Maybe A Christmas Carol convinces you to donate more to charity.  Bio-Dome might convince you that mankind is doomed.

For me, the Danganronpa series taught me to stop trying to predict plot twists in video games, that story-based games were not dead (yet), and that I really, really need to stop getting attached to characters in games.  It only leads to heartache.

Plus, it left me seriously pondering the idea of what it would take to "break" people.  Between the surprise twist towards the end of the first game that absolutely blew my socks off and my pathetic attempts to force my feelings certain directions in the second game, Danganronpa managed to hit me hard every time a character was killed because it was at that exact moment that I thought I had everything figured out ahead of time.

There's another game out that takes the formula and shakes it up some into a shooter, but there's a third Danganronpa game in the works, and I know it'll be on my "must buy" list.

Number One: Moribito

I don't talk about this series as much to people as I do other things on this list, but Moribito holds the top honor because it did something I thought was going to be impossible.

It got me excited about anime again.

Without this series, I never would have started into watching Sword Art Online, or gone back to rewatch classics like Ghost in the Shell, eX-Driver, or others that were simply gathering dust on my shelf.  It's inspired me to browse through the shelves at my local video peddler seeing what new and amazing things I can discover and then actually looking them up to see what other people think.

It has me interested in doing two full weeks at some point in the future of nothing but Studio Ghibli reviews.

It got me to convince a friend to watch it, and I'm pretty sure it's gone up into his top three favorite series of all time.

This was the series that I most enjoyed watching, that changed how I viewed classic storytelling tropes, and kept me on the edge of my seat as I watched, waiting to see what would happen next.

Top Eleven: Japanese RPGs

Lately I've been playing a lot of Eternal Sonata (review to come once I can find someone to help me discuss the absolutely insane outfits these characters wear), and I managed to get two other people I know interested in playing it.  The question then came up, "What are you favorite Japanese RPG (jrpg) games?"

Now, I could've done this as an Ask Erik, but then I was afraid it'd get lost in the shuffle.  Titling it a "top eleven" makes more sense, in my eyes, because it is, at its core, a list.

I'm also amazed I haven't done this list before, because I've played a lot of these games over the years.

Now, one has to ask "what makes a role-playing style video game a "Japanese RPG?""  Well, there are a few qualifiers.

The first of which is "at least one person needs to have an absolutely ludicrous costume and/or weapon.
The more characters that look like they gathered everything they own from the blown up ruins of Party City, the better."

Top Eleven: Things I Blogged About In 2014

Another year of writing, complaining, and commending down, hopefully many more to go.

Each year I've done this blog (read: last year) I've done a year end "wrap-up" where I scour through my archives and attempt to locate the eleven articles that mean the most to me.  Maybe they're connected to an important memory, maybe they were extremely emotional to write, or maybe I just had fun writing them.

And yes, there will also be a "bottom eleven" coming as well.

But for now, let's look back at the articles I'm the most proud of from the past year.

Top Eleven: Songs I Forgot About For My Top Twenty List

The problem with attempting to list the best (or just personal favorites) of anything is that there's people who know better than you and can connect you to other things they know you like.  Such was the case with my father, who called me out on forgetting a song I loved since I was young.

So, now in hindsight, I present the Top Eleven Songs I Forgot To Put On My Top Twenty List even though I know that math doesn't work.

Top Eleven: Reasons Why Luigi Is Better Than Mario

There is no bigger video game mascot than Mario.  

Okay, actually, that's not correct.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Pac-Man is actually the most recognizable video game mascot/character of all time, with Mario a very close second.

However, while I've played so many of his video games that any time anybody says "Who is it?" in a movie, my brain automatically fills in "It's-a me, Mario!", he hasn't been my favorite brother.

No, that honor goes to Luigi.

So why is it the world's most standard second banana is my favorite?  Here's a list of eleven reasons why.

Top Eleven: Top Eleven Of 2013

So yesterday I decided to revisit the source of most of the pain I felt doing this blog and look at the eleven worst things I had to deal with.  So let's turn it around for the eleven things I enjoyed reviewing, discussing, or simply prompting like an unpaid advertiser in the year 2013.

Top Eleven: Bottom Eleven Of 2013

Is there really any better way to address the changing of a year than to completely fixate on everything that happened in the previous year?  Who cares what might come up in the following 31,536,000 seconds when we can stare back nostalgically like someone unaware of an oncoming bus heading towards them.

But hey, how are we going to manage to make the future better if we don't remember our regrets from the previous year?  It's why I'm doing my Top Eleven Bottom Eleven Of 2013, the things I covered in this blog that frustrated me, drove me nuts, or just infuriated me with either how hard it was to write about, how painful it was to watch, or just something that I really didn't want to do.

I hope my suffering was worth it.

But first, of course, we're going to cheat a little.

Top Eleven: Silly Crushes

We all have them.  It's that actor or actress whose movie you'll sit through even if it's complete garbage.  It's the athlete or sports star you cheer for even if you know they won't win.  It's the model you recognize from several advertisements based just on a familiar smile or twinkle in their eye.  It's the television star or reality program personality whose program you might not really like, but you'll sit through it just to see if that person shows up.  It's the individual who catches your eye from the magazine rack at the grocery store and you feel compelled to pick up that issue just to learn more.

It's your silly little crush, and don't pretend you don't have one.  In fact, don't pretend you don't have more than one, because we all do.  We're genetically built to find them, though we're now evolved enough that we don't let those urges control our daily lives.

Well, most of us are, anyway.

Top Eleven: Openings From Anime

I've gone on before about theme songs in shows and how important they are.  Something I hadn't originally considered is how difficult it must also be for shows that are going to be transferred from one country to another.  Do you dub over the voices with new words?  Do you leave it as it is and just add subtitles?  Or do you simply have no words at all and let the words speak for themselves?

This became more apparent the more I thought about a lot of the programs I watched from Japan, and which ones had me hooked just by the theme song and which ones pretty much lost me right from the get-go.

So, in honor of that, here's my completely self-absorbed list of my eleven favorite themes from anime.

Top Eleven: Video Game Women Teenage Erik Would've Shelled Out Money For A Game Just To See Them In It

Damn you, C.P.  You know who you are.

In my last top eleven, I discussed female characters that I found to be great in video games.  Some had some issues (Juliet Starling is by no means perfect, I've said several times before), and some were quite solid, but I really thought each one had something that made them special in a form of media that can either leave a women to simply be so much eye candy, to be regulated to a maternal/healer type, or simply have it be the princess waiting to be rescued.

But apparently that's not enough for some people.  Some people apparently want to see just how low I can bring myself down and turn on that base part of the human brain that thought that USA Up All Night and late-night Cinemax were the greatest inventions mankind ever created.  The part of my brain that thought the picture of Teri Hatcher wearing nothing but a Superman cape wrapped around her was the pinnacle of art.  The part of my brain that was actually willing to give Melrose Place a chance because, the first time I accidentally channel surfed past it, Josie Bissett took her shirt off.

(That one didn't last long.  ...at least, not the first time I figured I'd try watching.  Now, when Laura Leighton joined the cast, I stuck around for a few more episodes)

In other words, they want me to act like a teenager again.  That sound you hear is teenage me trying to go Superboy Prime  and high-five me through time and space.

So here it is, the top eleven characters that, if I had the money at the time and/or could sneak it into the house, I probably would've bought the game just to see these women.

...I'm going to feel so dirty after this.

Top Eleven: Interesting Video Game Women

If I had to think back to all the video games I've played (and there's a lot), I'd probably notice an interesting trend.  A lot of the games with a female lead (or optional lead) tend to be more fun than the games with male leads.  It might be simply that a game with a female lead might need tighter controls and game play to sell as many units as a game where a guy is the lead star, but I think it goes deeper than that.

I'm going to take a look at why I think this might be (just an initial impression, and one I'll probably touch on later once I have more hard data), and also present what I feel are eleven of the best female characters in video games.