- DB
Best of 2019
It's officially 2020 now, so it seems like the best time to pick what movie, game and TV show I enjoyed the most over the course of 2019.
Movie of the Year - Avengers: Endgame
Despite facing some stiff competition late in the year from Rian Johnson's Knives Out and Greta Gerwig's Little Women, the Avengers held firm to become the first superhero movie to claim the title of Movie of the Year on this site.
My reasoning? This was a worldwide cultural event that was praised by critics, adored by fans and went on to become the highest-grossing movie of all time. Oh yeah, the film was really bloody good too, capping off a series of over twenty others while providing moments of laughter despite also removing two of the most popular heroes in cinema right now from the playing field. 'Playing it safe' is not an accusation that can be levelled against this movie.
Most anticipated for 2020: Dune (December)
Game of the Year - Disco Elysium
Now this may seem like a 'default' award when I admit that this is the only 2019 release I played last year, partly because I wanted to work at least a little of the way through my backlog, but also because it was the only game released that actually interested me enough to buy it and put time into playing it.
I don't want to go into too much detail about it just yet as I will be writing a review post for Disco Elysium at some point in January, but I will say that not only does this provide a fantastic reason for given an RPG character amnesia, it's actually vital to the core experience of the game. The voices in your head literally have their own voices and their dialogue is some of the best writing in games for a long, long, long time.
Most anticipated for 2020: Cyberpunk 2077 (April)
TV Show of the Year - Chernobyl
As you may have noticed, I don't watch as much TV as I do movies, so for this show to make the impact it did and utterly grip me from start to finish is testament to how damn good it is. With all due respect to the second half of The Good Place's third season and the first part of it's fourth, it was a very bad place that came out on top.
Chernobyl isn't exactly what you would call 'enjoyable' or 'entertaining', but is was so good to watch, no matter how hard it was to see what was happening on-screen. It certainly helped that, despite being based on an actual historic event, there was also an element of cosmic horror to the first two episodes which added a whole other layer of unnerving anxiety to proceedings.
Most anticipated for 2020: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (August?)
