This year I hardly hid the fact that I went a little crazy with my movie-watching. With enough 2017 cinema visits under my belt to do a top ten three times over, I figured this was as good a year as ever to expand the list to fifteen. I may have lacked the time to write up full reviews over the last twelve months with enough consistency to make it worthwhile, trying a new approachinstead, but right now is the time to get into my favourite films of the year with some actual detail. I happen to think this is a very strong list worth recommending to a wide range of movie fans, with only one or two spicy picks that I seemed to like more than most people. Thank you for reading.
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VR BEST OF 2017 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you actually agree with me 100%, that’s strange. Intriguing, but strange. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
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15. Power Rangers
Yes. I know 2017’s Power Rangers isn’t going to win any awards for earth-shaking acting or plotting, but I just had to have it on this list. The original Power Rangers show was one of my absolute favourite things as a kid – I was obsessed with it. I watched this movie with a stupid grin from ear to ear for almost its entire run time, because Dean Israelite manages to nail the important parts of what I loved about the show back in the day, cheesiness well and truly intact. I particularly enjoyed the slow burn of getting to know the main cast Breakfast Club style before the real action kicks off late in the piece. RJ Cyler as a new interpretation of social outcast Billy steals the show in every scene not featuring Elizabeth Banks’ hammy Rita Repulsa, who just seems to be having the time of her life acting opposite Bryan Cranston’s gruff Zordon.
Here we are. Time to count down my favourite videogames from a truly phenomenonal year for the medium (The best in ten years?). There are some games on this list that I would wholeheartedly recommend to anyone even remotely interested, but the real measure of 2017 is the games that don’t make the list because I just didn’t have time to get into them. And no, I don’t just mean games other people liked but didn’t really grab me. I’m talking Horizon Zero Dawn, Cuphead, Yakuza Zero, Steamworld Dig 2, Night in the Woods, Tales of Berseria, Golf Story, Gang Beasts. Games that in any other year I would have been all over. Games I’ve already seen on many other top ten lists across the internet.
Part of this can probably be attributed to my conscious decision not to ignore good games on the 3DS as long as they were coming out. I clocked nearly 200 hours of combined 2017 playtime on my 3DS according to its activity log – mostly on trains and buses – and if it weren’t for the Nintendo Switch overshadowing it on every big site and YouTube channel I would have been shocked that I wasn’t seeing some of these 3DS games on more people’s lists. Of course, the Switch was still a thing, so there are more Switch games on this page than on any other console. The rest of the numbers are made up by some delightfully surprising indie and triple-A games gripping enough to help me temporarily forget about all the other games I could be playing. What an insane year.
A game qualifies for the list if I play it for over five hours or finish it. You’ll see the platform on which I played each game in parentheses next to its title.
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VR BEST OF 2017 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you actually agree with me 100%, that’s strange. Intriguing, but strange. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
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15. ARMS (NS)
Major new IPs from Nintendo are rarer than a PC without Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds installed, so it’s a big deal when one comes along. Following in the spiritual footsteps of 2015’s Splatoon, ARMS is an attempt by Nintendo to refresh what players can expect from a fighting game, in much the same way that Splatoon injected new life into the shooter genre. Taking stylistic cues from Blizzard’s Overwatch in the character design department and infusing these designs with Nintendo wackiness, ARMS is a charming game with deceptive mechanical depth and phenomenonal 1v1 duel multiplayer. Though the rest of its modes are inherently less deep and the game’s single player mode is basic at best, ARMS is my pick for most improved game of the year post-launch, with extra incentives, modes and characters now part of the package. And let’s not forget that theme song, which slots right in alongside Nintendo’s catchiest first-party tunes. ARMS should not be overlooked by anyone buying a Switch.
As we roll into the business end of these countdowns and the final hours of 2017, it bears mentioning how difficult I found it to finalise these last three lists. You’re about to see two Top 15s where previously there was only one, but I very nearly made this one the third. If it weren’t for the fact that I couldn’t find another list worth cutting down to compensate, I would have. 2017 was that good of a year for K-Pop albums – especially in their shorter “mini” format. I’ve often joked that all a K-Pop album has to do to get my attention is not put its MV track in the first slot, and maybe divide some group members up for solos/duets (i.e. just not be generic) but I can’t even fall back on that crutch this time, because so many albums did just that in 2017. Some even went a step further in the structural experiment department.
Wow, this is such a nerdy list.
I consider mini-albums to be between four and seven tracks long. Anything shorter than that is a “maxi single” or “single album” (Not even my words), anything longer is a full album.
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VR BEST OF 2017 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you actually agree with me 100%, that’s strange. Intriguing, but strange. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
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MINI ALBUMS
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5. Eclipse – EXID
They say necessity is the mother of invention and in the case of EXID’s Eclipse that certainly rings true. By all means, on an album you can pair off your members or give them solos to spice things up and make the group feel more like everyone is putting in work, but when you’re also down not only your most gifted vocalist, but one of the most gifted vocalists in all of K-Pop, you need to take things a step further. Eclipse somehow works without the incapacitated Solji thanks to a heavy injection of driving electronic bass as well as some truly impressive fill-in work from secondary vocalist Hyerin. Album opener Boy is the tone-setting stylistic codifier, giving each able member her own unique stanza but leaving the hook entirely electronic. Its lyrics are a prologue of sorts to MV track Night Rather Than Day, which works far better as an audio-only throwback to the group’s early sound (The video is pretty awful). But Eclipse‘s greatest achievement is How Why, which has such a booming chorus that I hope this isn’t the last we’ve seen of electro-EXID.
A movie scene isn’t just there to get you from Story Point A to Story Point B. That’s certainly one of its purposes, but using the constraints of a single setting or moment in time a scene can go far beyond mere mechanical function. It can hit the audience with a concentrated dose of adrenaline, fear or laughter that they aren’t likely to forget in a hurry, slotting into a larger narrative in a way that usually adds to a film’s quality – though occasionally it can stand out like a sore thumb from a lower-quality movie. My 2017 list is thankfully filled with scenes from the first category for the most part. I tend to be drawn towards memorable action sequences or moments of unbearable tension, so they make up the lion’s share, but there’s a bit of inspirational exposition and a song in there, too. Spoilers, obvs.
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VR BEST OF 2017 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you actually agree with me 100%, that’s strange. Intriguing, but strange. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
Spoilers are in this list!
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10. Wednesday – Kingsman: The Golden Circle
The Golden Circle‘s action scenes are almost all riffs on the insane church brawl from its predecessor, Kingsman: The Secret Service. It’s crystal-clear that Matthew Vaughn really enjoyed shooting that scene, because the sequel is loaded with similarly kinetic close-up camera acrobatics. Though any scene in which Pedro Pascal’s agent Whiskey gets in on the violence is well worth an honorable mention, the best instance of this unique style is the final one, when our hero Eggsy and his resurrected former mentor Harry engage with countless goons outside a 1950s-themed villainous hideout to the tune of Elton John’s Saturday. This fight has it all – gadgets, wince-inducing Vaughn brutality, cool team-up moves – It’s my favourite straight-up action beat of the year.
Now that we’re finally talking about the games of 2017 themselves, it’s time to start asking the question – Is this the best year for videogame releases since 2007? Do we at last have an annum worth blowing past 2011 and taking on the year that gave us Bioshock, Modern Warfare, Mass Effect, Portal and Mario Galaxy? It’s a short question with a long answer, but perhaps so. If it is, then the ease with which I came up with content for this list makes an awful lot of sense. 2017 was a sensational year for gaming moments that encouraged some good old fashioned water cooler chat.
Even compared to previous years’ lists, this one is positively packed with story-related moments, so seriously, proceed with caution. Or don’t proceed at all.
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VR BEST OF 2017 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you actually agree with me 100%, that’s strange. Intriguing, but strange. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
Big videogame spoilers follow!
Seriously!
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10. Simulation – Prey
Oftentimes you’ll need to get through several hours of a game before reaching any big twists, rug pulls or otherwise shocking plot developments, but Prey gives you several inside the first two hours. The fact that they make such an impact is testament to how well Arkane Studios builds up the pretense of one reality before literally and figuratively shattering it with one melee attack to a glass panel. Prey mixes together a visually arresting Hollywood-style title sequence with some unsettlingly clever tutorials ending with a terrifying first encounter with an alien species, then uses a detail-rich apartment environment and a tiny bit of familial drama to turn your attention in one direction before jolting you back the opposite way. This is all rather effective to say the least at leaving you on edge, setting the stage for a claustrophobic journey of fear and intrigue.
A good year for movies is a good year for movie characters. The fictional people who graced our screens both big and small throughout 2017 made the stories unfolding before our eyes more tragic, more believable, more ludicrous, more fantastical, more real. From the characters who anchor down the movies they lead, to the enemies they face, to the bundles of energy and accidental comedians with whom they cross paths, these celluloid creations are worth remembering for a moment. There are some vague plot spoilers here but I’ve avoided them where they aren’t necessary.
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VR BEST OF 2017 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you actually agree with me 100%, that’s strange. Intriguing, but strange. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
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10. Hercule Poirot – Murder on the Orient Express
The joke is easy to make – Murder on the Orient Express director Kenneth Branagh greatly expands the role of one of fiction’s most legendary detectives and then casts himself in the lead role just so he can ham it up for the cameras in partnership with one of the great cinematic moustaches of all time. Regardless of how it came to be, however, Hollywood’s newest representation of Hercule Poirot is a relentlessly entertaining reason to check out Murder on the Orient Express. All introspective monologues, furrowed brows and mad quirks, Branagh somehow ensures that he stands head-and-shoulders above everyone else in a truly star-studded cast.
At this time of year, as people look back on the 12 months that were and attempt to make sense of them, it’s not uncommon to hear phrases like “It was a year of two halves”. Well, this is a list of two halves. Or it would be if you could divide five in half cleanly. You know what I mean.
By the standards I use to make this short list every year (quality of exclusive gaming releases, features and/or general usability improvements), two major gaming consoles had a pretty dour 2017, two had an absolutely incredible 2017, and one in the middle surprised a lot of people with its tenacious refusal to die. Even outside the spheres of online fanboy arguments, there were some clear winners and losers when it came to videogame consoles in 2017. It was a truly fascinating year to be an observer of the console gaming space, let alone a participant in it.
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VR BEST OF 2017 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you actually agree with me 100%, that’s strange. Intriguing, but strange. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
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5. PlayStation Vita
(LAST YEAR: 4th)
Some might question why I even see fit to include the PS Vita on this list anymore. After all, by this point Sony’s most recent portable has been declared either dead or dying for most of its actual life. Such a narrative continues to echo (faintly, it must be said) throughout a general gaming community that has long since written it off. In a year that saw the debut of the Nintendo Switch, a handheld so rich in quality indie and Japanese games that some have taken to calling it the “Vita 2”, plenty of Vita die-hards finally pulled the plug on Sony’s little beast. All things considered, the Vita’s 2017 records shows a much lower output of the fresh indie games, JRPGs and visual novels that were once its bread and butter. There were some exceptions of course – Stellar portable versions of Undertale, Danganronpa V3 and Ys VIII gave the Vita some semblance of relevance over the Switch at times throughout the year, if only for a small community of gamers – but with such a dripfeed of indie support and the (tragically) dwindling mainstream relevance of PSN trophy-hunting, the truly wondrous Playstation Vita may finally be on its last legs. Like, actually. For real this time.
NOTE: This list was already written when we received the news of the apparent suicide of SHINee’s Kim Jonghyun. At the time of publication this development is still less than a week old, but I cannot write it into the main article without sounding flippant about it, and so have left the list un-edited. Kim Jonghyun was literally the first male voice I heard after discovering that I liked K-Pop, and his voice also kicked off my first K-Pop Top 15 at the end of 2012. His loss has rocked the K-Pop community worldwide, and on a personal note has hit me just as hard as the Chester Bennington tragedy earlier this year. I can only imagine how his family must be feeling. He will be missed.
Ah, 2017. If you were a K-Pop fan around when I started being invested in the genre (is it even a genre anymore?) half a decade ago, and you’re still here, then congrats. Your ears have clearly been through a lot and your tastes must be resilient. Though 2016 saw many more big-name K-Pop groups bite the dust, the official dissolving of Sistar and the Wonder Girls in 2017 – alongside respective three-member exoduses from T-ara and Girls’ Generation – meant a 2017 K-Pop fan can hardly be accused of holding on to past glories.
There were quite a few fresh influences and trends worth getting excited about this year, even if they flooded the market so quickly it was hard to find quality at times. The most prevalent surely must be the KARD-and-Winner-led influx of tropical house, because at one point it felt like every group was trying on the sea-and-sand beats. Korea’s ongoing recent fascination with contemporary EDM beat drops also spread into the realm of American DJ collaborations this year – particularly so among the top-tier boy groups – and that helped solidify BTS in rarefied air on the Billboard Top 10 Artists chart in the USA. It seems K-Pop’s year-on-year growth in online popularity around the world has reached a point that no “niche” categorisation can hold back some fandoms. Let’s not forget that we now live in a world where the CinemaSins guy can riff on a Red Velvet video and get views for it. But fear not, because K-Pop was still pulling out plenty of offbeat gimmicks all its own in 2017, from the song-a-month themed schedule of Day6 to the slow revelations of new LOONA members one solo performance at a time. I found a decent amount of K-Pop to enjoy in 2017, and hopefully you did too.
As always, some rules I like to hold myself to: No more than one song from each act and no B-sides. A song needs to have its own official music video and be sung primarily in Korean to be on the list, even though this disqualifies some pretty good songs like Girl Next Door’s Deep Blue Eyes, EXO’s Electric Kiss and Dumbfoundead’s Water (although, to be fair, the latter comes from an actual American rapper). Here’s my sixth annual K-Pop Top 15 list.
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VR BEST OF 2017 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you actually agree with me 100%, that’s strange. Intriguing, but strange. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
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15. Don’t Wanna Cry – Seventeen
It felt like this song was around every corner when I was looking for K-Pop throughout the majority of 2017 – on YouTube, on curated streaming playlists, on podcasts – and for good reason. It may not have the most exciting backing track, bridge or rap section, but it sure has one catchy hook. Some nights I just can’t get that chorus line out of my head. I want to scream it out right now. Also, it’s Seventeen, so the choreography is amazing and executed with ridiculous accuracy to boot. Who actually wants to cry, though, Seventeen? Who?
As we switch from negative to neutral, its worth pointing out that 2017 was a year packed with worthwhile videogames to play, and this sheer volume drives the bulk of the year’s trends list. One of the reasons we arrived at such a huge number was that three big genres enjoyed quality years in the business, as did one traditionally strong geographical hotbed of development talent and one particularly noteworthy company from that location. The rest of the list is filled by an ongoing discussion on the very nature of modern game releases. But I don’t know why I’m being so cryptic – You’re about to read the list anyway (My brain is on ice as I write this in a very-well-air-conditioned waiting room – That could be it). The way I see it, these are the five biggest non-disappointing trends that guided 2017’s videogame presence.
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VR BEST OF 2017 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you actually agree with me 100%, that’s strange. Intriguing, but strange. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
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5. A-Fightin’ & A-Racin’
When you stop to think about it, it’s a little strange how few representations of certain genres crop up every year when there are so very many games coming out all the freaking time. If you’re not an open-world action adventure, sports game, competitive shooter or 2D platformer nowadays, you might as well be a curiosity. But occasionally, the stars align for a certain type of videogame, with multiple major instances of a genre releasing within a single calendar year. In 2016 that genre was the JRPG, which kind of paved the way for a somewhat more open mainstream acceptance of Persona 5 this year. In 2017 there were arguably two genres with enough clustered big releases to raise an eyebrow at – racing and fighting games.
In the former category you had the typically excellent Forza Motorsport 7 in the green corner, doing the reputation of its series no harm while doubling as the major showcase title for super-smooth 4K HDR on the Xbox One X. In the blue corner landed the beyond-long-awaited Gran Turismo Sport, holding the dual mantles of the first GT game AND the first splitscreen track-racing game on the PS4 (almost four years into its life, mind). In the middle was Project Cars 2, which received rapturous applause from the uber-hardcore sim racing community while Dirt 4 picked up its own share of good reviews for its off-road antics. And let’s not forget perhaps the best Mario Kart package in history, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
As far as fighting games are concerned, 2017 was an even bigger year, with the long-awaited (if controversial) return of the Marvel vs Capcom series in the form of Infinite and the almost universally-lauded launch of Injustice 2. A celebrated veteran returned to action for the seventh time to round out the year’s glamour trio (that’s Tekken, yo) while Street Fighter V and to a lesser extent Killer Instinct continued to receive new content and balance tweaks. But the year didn’t stop there. Fighters kept showing up in all shapes and sizes, from throwbacks and re-releases (Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers, Pokken Tournament Deluxe) to blockbuster indies both established and fresh (Nidhogg 2, Brawlhalla, Brawlout) to anime-styled (Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm 4, Guilty Gear XRD Rev 2) to completely fresh takes on the genre (Absolver, ARMS). It’s exhausting just listing them, let alone thinking how badly I get routinely beaten in every new fighting game I try.
As usual we’re kicking things off with a look at some of the less rosy parts of the year in entertainment media, but this time list number one is presented in an ever-so-slightly different way. Due to a list later on in my countdown series needing to be expanded, as well as the emerging patterns in 2017’s lamest entertainment news and trends allowing for some easy grouping, I’ve decided to reduce this Top 10 to a Top 5, meaning this time around I’m talking less about individually disappointing movies/games and more about the way history repeated itself in some of the least encouraging ways imaginable throughout the past year (as well as one deeply personal gaming-related frustration). These are my personal picks for the biggest entertainment media disappointments of 2017.
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VR BEST OF 2017 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you actually agree with me 100%, that’s strange. Intriguing, but strange. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
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5. Warner Bros Does Australia Dirty Again
Three years ago, Warner Bros Entertainment Inc. released two of the most talked-about films of the year, The LEGO Movie and John Wick. The former was a family movie and the latter most certainly wasn’t, but both flicks enjoyed a ton of critical praise for their fresh and surprising approaches to toy-spruiking animation and straightforward action respectively. But Australians who happened to take in the buzz online for the pair had to wait for their chance to watch them legally, and if piracy estimates were to be believed, many simply didn’t. Despite the fact that The LEGO Movie was largely produced in Australia, it had the greater of the two delays, and after its release the higher-ups at Aussie distributor Village Roadshow claimed their calculated lost income as a result meant it wouldn’t happen again. But alas, it happened again. The delay of The LEGO Batman Movie sucked, but John Wick Chapter 2 didn’t even have an Australian release date listed anywhere when the film hit the US in February. We ended up getting it in May, and that sure didn’t help its performance down under. Yay.
Vagrant Rant 