Our panel of two sat down for an epic virtual discussion of our absolute favorites of 2009 — in every category we could think of — and set about explaining why each one made the list.

PLAYING

Best Video Game

Brian: In a move that will surprise no one, I’m going to have to go with Batman: Arkham Asylum. Not just because I’m such a fan of that character and world, but because it’s such a well-crafted experience that I enjoyed every second of it. The fighting was fluid, the exploring was fun, the sneaking and swinging were suitably Bat-like, and it was all densely packed into a tight space instead of spread thin over a huge one like GTA or Assassins’ Creed. I never would have predicted it going into 2009, but a comic license game by a rookie development team wins out; no game this year was as satisfying start to finish as Arkham Asylum.

Spencer: It’s weird…I loved Batman when I was playing it, but it went way too fast.  Of course, that’s excluding the optional 1,000 item “scavenger hunt” they included, like every other game these days. But even your Batman obsession aside, it was an awesome game and maybe the best licensed one ever. For me, I think I’m going to have to say Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer, not to be confused with the horrible and pointless single player campaign. It’s the perfect blend of gameplay, graphics, and nonstop carnage; to quote Homer Simpson, “You know who would like this?  Men.”

Best Downloadable Game

Spencer: Battlefield 1943 was probably the best dollar-per-minute entertainment purchase of the year.  Yes, there were flaws: the inability to select a level, clusterfucks with joining a group and creating private matches, the game sometimes just randomly switching people in your party off of your team without explanation, etc.  But for $15, the WWII Pacific Theater shoot-‘em-up was a deal so jaw-droppingly awesome it was irresistible.

Part of the value came from the diversity of experience you could have, not just in terms of soldier classes you could play as, but even within one life.  You could start as a sniper, hijack an airplane, parachute out after you did some bombing raids, steal a machine gun, hijack a boat, then get blown up by someone flying a plane directly into you.  Was it the most realistic depiction of WWII battle?  Let’s hope not, but it was constantly exhilarating.

As long as there are gaming systems, there will a be a first-person shooter of the moment that everyone is playing.  As the year winds down, it’s Modern Warfare 2, but by next July, something will have replaced it.  What was amazing was that, for Battlefield 1943, the $15 barrier was so low that it really increased the quality of experience, as everyone on your friends list was able to pick it up without hesitation. Too often, the price of value gaming is viewed as permission to significantly reduce the quality and depth of experience for the player. Battlefield 1943 picked what was critical, cut out what was unnecessary, and provided players with an experience typical of a much more expensive game.

Brian: I did love storming up hills together as much as you did, but what’s most exciting about the downloadable games space isn’t just great value per dollar. To me, the best part of this blossoming market is that it allows smaller, more indie developers to push the creative envelope of what games can be. Small teams of creators can experiment at a lower risk without the burden of justifying a blockbuster budget, and make small games with big ideas.

My pick for last year’s best overall game, Braid (which beat out all the huge hits, I might add), was an example of this: a short, strange spin on the traditional run-and-jump platformer with an artsy, emotional angle. While way fewer people would have spent sixty dollars on a ten-hour version of this game, lots of people gladly spent twenty to check out a compact 3-hour game with fresh ideas at every turn. In a similar vein, this year Flower was far and away the most original, engaging, and even moving game I played.

If someone told me one of my favorite games of the year would have me playing as the wind and picking up flower petals, I would have probably laughed in their face. But the elegant motion controls and beautiful scenes gave probably the best sense of flight that any game ever has. Add to that the fact that it’s one of the only games in history where you can’t die and don’t really fight anything (though there is an interesting twist on this toward the end of the game). Then consider that although there is no speech or text, there’s a definite story and powerful message. Overall Flower was thrilling, gorgeous, and thought-provoking, and a must-buy for PlayStation 3 owners at a mere ten dollars.

Best Game to Play with Friends (Online or Off)

Spencer: The dying formats of the card and board game were hybridized in this combination that, by every right, really should have sucked. And yet, Monopoly Deal is fantastic. What’s novel is that while the gameplay is different in the card version, in a clever bit of writing, the overarching strategies parallel those of the board game.

I’ve heard (older) people complain about the complexity of the rules, but it really only takes one round to get down. The volatile gameplay and quick replay factor is basically the card equivalent of auto-respawn: you can never be too angry, because a refresh is right around the corner. It’s perfect, even for those who caustically refer to the original as ‘Monotony’.

Why this game isn’t on Xbox Live (à la their brilliant version of Settlers of Catan) is beyond me. It seems like a no-brainer. It’s an established brand, it would cost about $500 to program, and I’d pay at least $5 for it.  Let’s hope we can add this to the long list of Internet pipe dreams that become a reality after the blogosphere hypes it.

Brian: Bravo to you for picking a non-video game for the list. Still, I have to say the most fun I had gaming with friends this year was in Left 4 Dead. Whether the original or more recent sequel (they’re pretty much the same experience of co-operative zombie massacre), there’s absolutely nothing else that makes working together such an edge-of-your-seat roller coaster ride.

Make no mistake either: it is work. This game gets fucking challenging at the end of each stage when it’s time to hold down the fort long enough for rescue. But where the same set-up solo would make you just turn off the game in frustration, doing it with three friends gives you a constant sense of, “If we just stick together, we can DO this,” unlike any other video game. And where playing other shooters against humans is fun, there’s always another life to come back and try again. Left 4 Dead’s ‘when you’re dead, you’re dead’ style is uniquely constructed to force you to stick together and communicate constantly in a way far beyond any team paintball simulator. Because of that, it’s not only more exciting, but definitely the most intensely social game I’ve ever played.

READING

Best Contemporary Book I Read This Year

Spencer: Well, it’s kind of awesome that despite winning the somewhat-jokey Undie last year for “Best Book of the Year I Haven’t Read Yet”, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 managed to win the best book I did read this year, making it the first two-time Undie Winner. Superficially, the book is HUGE (but still feels like entire sections are missing), and the cover illustration is so beautiful that when you carry it around strangers have to ask you what you’re reading. Parts are hysterical, parts are incredibly sentimental and moving, parts are horrifying in that dry, banality of evil sort of vein, and parts click in that way that makes you gasp and exclaim, “Jesus Christ, I’m reading the thoughts of someone way, way smarter than I am”. If you want to read about it from someone more eloquent than me, try this glowing review from one of Brian’s favorite authors, or the Slate article referenced last year.

Brian: My pick is also a book that everyone raved about in previous years that I can’t believe I didn’t get to sooner: The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Where Blood Meridian turned me off with its long stretches of (admittedly masterful) descriptive prose, The Road is a series of short, blunt passages describing an unnamed Father and Son traveling the post-apocalyptic landscape. Each paragraph is a poetic moment of desperation, while the greater whole forces you to contemplate life, death, and the gray area in between we only hope we’ll never have to face. It’s terribly bleak — like nothing I’ve ever read, really — but so well-written and engrossing it’s still hard to put down.

Spencer: Cormac McCarthy is one of my favorite authors, so I’m glad you liked The Road, but I don’t understand how you can like one and not the other. Is it because one is man’s hypothetical inhumanity in the face of calamity, and the other is pretty much a recitation of man’s historical inhumanity?

Brian: In all honesty, it was the difference between a paragraph describing burnt-out forests in The Road versus pages and pages describing hot dry desert rocks in Blood Meridian. The latter wore me down while the former cuts right to the bone.

Best Nonfiction Book I Read This Year

Brian: This one’s easy. I finally picked up David Foster Wallace’s essay collection Consider the Lobster and absolutely loved it. He’s a master of prose that makes you feel smarter by reading him. He finds deeper meaning in the driest subjects (like an essay on grammar) and humanity in the strangest places (like a trip to cover the Adult Video News Awards) without ever sacrificing wit or readability. If you’re too intimidated to tackle Infinite Jest, pick up this collection and you’ll be able to see his genius on a smaller, more approachable scale.

Spencer: David Grann’s The Lost City of Z is the sort of pop nonfiction smash that comes along once in a blue moon. Think Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: when this thing catches on, you’re going to see it everywhere. Airports. Literally, everywhere. The narrative is about a British explorer who disappears trying to find an ancient lost city within the Amazon in the early 1900’s, another explorer group that sets out in the 1990’s to try to find out how the first group’s story ended, and the author’s expedition to the same territory to find out what happened to both of those groups. The way it all comes together at the end is spectacular.

Best Classic Book I Read This Year

Brian: Last year I heard Harlan Ellison on NPR promoting the documentary about his career, Dreams with Sharp Teeth, and immediately thought, “Wow, this guy is my hero.” He’s so brash and unapologetic and yet obviously more intelligent than 99% of public figures, to the point where he makes me feel dumb and want to do something about it. Shortly after that I bought a 1200-plus-page collection called The Essential Ellison, which I’ve been picking my way through until about a week ago. Hundreds of stories, from wild science fiction to searing editorial, all with his singular style. A good bargain at thirty dollars, but I might recommend the smaller collections to spare your wrist the hefting.

Spencer: I think I was bad and just filled my head with modern trash this year. However, I did read (and loved) Studs Terkel’s The Good War, a panoramic survey of WWII taken from interviews from those who were there. It won a Pulitzer and inspired World War Z, so even if it’s not a classic yet, it will be someday.

Best Book Of The Year That I Haven’t Read Yet

Spencer: I can’t wait for Fordlandia; The City and The City; Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned; and A Country of Vast Designs.  Oh yeah, and in an example of how annoying it is when stuff comes out in other countries but not here, I can’t wait for The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest, the final volume of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.

Brian: That’s quite a list you’ve got there. My main regret was not picking up Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem, considering he’s one of maybe a dozen authors who have yet to let me down. That, and Jedediah Berry’s The Manual of Detection, which sounds like a whacked-out mystery wrapped in a bit of Terry Pratchett/Douglas Adams oddball sensibility. Because when a central character’s name is a palindrome (Travis Sivart), it’s either going to be instantly tedious or nerd-alert fun, and I’m generally a literary optimist.

Best Comic/Graphic Novel I’ve Read This Year

Brian: We’re certainly no experts when it comes to the wide range of comics that come out every year, but I do try to stay on top of a few series by great comics writers. This year the one that got its hooks into me deepest was Ex Machina by Brian K Vaughan. By making a former superhero — Mitchell Hundred, who can talk to machines — the mayor of New York, the stories get to mix sci-fi and political drama, and talk about grown-up issues between scenes of comic-book action. Plus Vaughan’s smart pop-culture sensibilities feel right at home coming from a wise-cracking politician.

Spencer: I can’t say I’m at all good about this category (and not just to avoid the scorn of our more sophisticated readers).  However, a friend recommended Ed Brubaker’s Incognito, and I thought it was the perfect follow up to his noir masterpiece, Criminal.  Get both if you haven’t; it’s the sort of comic book that appeals to even the most lapsed of parishioners, like myself.

Best Paperback Thriller for an Airplane

Spencer: Over the past decade and a half, Lee Child’s series of Jack Reacher novels has become one of the most popular in the world, and Gone Tomorrow is the exact sort of entry in the series that explains why.  Following the weak and ill-conceived twelfth novel, Nothing to Lose, Gone Tomorrow is a strong return to form, starting with a terrorist incident on the New York subway and finishing with a knife fight that has America’s foreign policy hanging in the balance.

The Reacher novels have a pretty standard formula; at this point, they’re almost best to think of as interpretations of and variations on the same folk song.  It’s not about what they’re saying, but about how they say it. Gone Tomorrow’s winding and hyperactive plot, false leads, didactic musings, and steel-cold shit-talking are a combination that makes the book impossible to put down.  You should start the series at the beginning with Killing Floor, but if you’re stuck at the airport without a book, Gone Tomorrow would be a great place to jump in.

Brian: I’m not sure if it qualifies as a thriller, exactly, but if we massage the category to mean, ‘Supposedly Trashy Book That’s Actually Excellent’, my definite pick would be World War Z: The Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks. Instead of another version of the ubiquitous zombie tales, this one takes the Ken Burns documentary approach, looking at the human stories from outbreak to takeover to rebuilding. Told from dozens of perspectives, it’s exciting and fascinating and so much better than a zombie book has any right to be — trust me, I tried to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Ugh.

Keep reading for the Best Album, Most Overrated Album, and a few other special awards…

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