I only paid attention to Florence + The Machine after I heard the song Seven Devils somewhere, I think on a soundtrack. Now I'm sad that didn't listen to Florence Welch and her band earlier. I could've seen them on Lowlands years ago!

I guess it's only natural I didn't pay attention. Usually I don't like baroque, stately music like this all that much, especially not when it leans this heavy on the vocals. Really, sometimes Ceremonials sounds like a showcase of the technical perfection of frontlady Florence's singing. There are all kinds of excellent music going on in the background but it's clear that her vocals are defining the songs. And with good reason — Welch's reach and power is amazing and she controls her voice in subtle ways. While I can get bored by technically proficient singers because they lack emotion or passion (or I just don't detect that), not so with Ceremonials.

My friend Steven pointed out another thing I like in this kind of music: it sounds cinematic. It's big, it's bold, it's reverberating through your living room as if it's echoing through a cathedral.

I've been a fan of Morcheeba ever since a friend of mine introduced me to their second album Big Calm in the summer of 2002. Their warm, soothing trip hop was unlike anything I'd every heard and it's still one of my favourite albums. I liked the subsequent album, Fragments of Freedom, as well, but then I bowed out of the next trio, once condemning Charango with a harsh "we heard this before".

I became a fan again with 2008's Dive Deep, an album that can be a bit too saccharine in retrospect. Blood Like Lemonade didn't do much for me, but Head Up High is another big success in my book.

Dive Deep had variety because original vocalist Skye Edwards' place was taken by a passel of guest vocalists. She took her rightful place back at Lemonade and she lends her beautiful voice to this album as well, but it's not a boring album at all. Still helmed by the brothers Paul and Ross Godfrey, Morcheeba explore a lot of genres this time: with ballads (Call It Love with guest vocals which remind me of The Black Keys), grooving dance (highlight Make Believer) and traces of hip-hop (To Be, Face of Danger). Sometimes I wish Morcheeba would make an entire album of up-tempo songs, but then again, I really like their drowsy songs as well, and Head Up High is a nice collection of both extremes and everything in between.

It seems I've never given the Editors sophomore effort, An End Has a Start, a shoutout or even a mention. I find this somewhat odd, as it's an album I often listen to. I especially like the first four songs, in particular opener Smokers Outside Hospital Doors and the majestic Bones. While I didn't care for their next album, In This Light and on This Evening as it was a bit too "synthesizer-y", they regained my appreciation with The Weight of Your Love.

It's another meticulously crafted indie-rock album with clear influences from Joy Division (or so I'm told, I don't know Joy Division very well). Also present in spirit is the stadium rock of U2. This album brings a big sound and big gestures, with wailing, echoing guitars. Frontman Tom Smith's dark baritone is given even more space than on An End Has a Start.

Below I'll talk about the movie Pitch Perfect, but the soundtrack deserves its own spot. The movie is about two a cappella groups so yes, we have a compilation of a cappella songs here. That could've turned out boring, but the variety of the songs takes care of that. It's compilation of oldies and new hits, impeccably mixed and performed lovely by the actors. Maybe not all of them are as proficient as real singers, but that is easily compensated for by their dedication. (Much like Buffy's musical episode "Once More, with Feeling" didn't have the best of singers.)

I'm not hip to the latest pop songs so a lot of the music was new to me. On the strength of this album, I've tracked down most of the originals and I still prefer most of the a cappella versions. I guess that makes me a heretic.

The album is not a straight copy of the soundtrack, there are little differences. Anna Kendrick's performance of Cups, for example, only has one verse in the movie and has two here. The "riff off" performance was a lot less fluid than it's presented here, which is a bit of a pity. Anna Kendrick's adorkable rendition of Blackstreet's No Diggity should've been preserved. There's also one glaring omission: the Kendrick and Brittany Snow duet of David Guetta's Titanium is nowhere to be found.

Still, there's lots to be enjoyed: an all-male version of Rihanna's Don't Stop The Music, the delicate mix of Bruno Mars' Just The Way You Are and Nelly's Just A Dream and the swaggering Bright Light Bigger City / Magic mashup. The all-but-last track is the show-stopping finale and it really brings it all home, with the Simple Minds' Don't You (Forget About Me) being its centrepiece.

Last year I talked about the anime FLCL and the "gnarly soundtrack by the underground band the Pillows." While I maintain that the soundtrack is integral to the atmosphere of FLCL, it's also a great stand-alone listen. The soundtrack of the series is a grab bag of the Pillows' three most recent albums at the time of FLCL's release, plus two new songs. The first two soundtrack albums span episodes 1-3 and 4-6, while this one is a compilation of those two albums. As such, it's more or less a "greatest hits" compilation but as it only spans three original albums, the sound and feel of the songs are similar, making it a cohesive album.

I have trouble with pinning down the style and have to resort to "alternative rock". It's a bit of Weezer, a bit of Pixies, a dash of the Beatles. Guitars and bass are well-represented, which is appropriate as they are somewhat of a leitmotiv in the anime. Note that the lyrics are a mix of Japanese and English. It's actually refreshing to listen to the Japanese lyrics: they make absolutely no sense to me but it doesn't matter. The English lyrics aren't that much more intelligible, but yelling along with the anthemic choruses works just as well if not better than "real" English songs.

Iro asanai KIDDONAPPU MYUUJIKKU
Te to te ga shitte iru
Onaji DOA o NOKKU shitai
Kono koe ga kikoe tara tobi dashite

With the kids sing out the future
Maybe, kids don't need the masters
Just waiting for the little Busters (oh yeah... yeah yeah yeah!)

A nice example of music transcending cultures.

Sometimes, entertainment makes more of an impression on you just because of the circumstances you experience it in. Case in point: Any Way The Wind Blows is a good movie, certainly. But I saw it after a trip to Antwerp on a splendid summer day, together with two of my best friends so it was elevated into my top 20 of movies.

Something similar happened with Pitch Perfect. On the face of it, it's just another easy high school movie in which the protagonist is a relative outsider and joins a team of misfits. They learn the value of friendship and teamwork, and together achieve their goal, often culminating in a season's finals. It's a formula that brought us Bring It On (and its sequels) and Stick It. If the protagonist is mostly solo the results are movies like Save The Last Dance and Make It Happen. I have a soft spot for these feel-good movies, but Pitch Perfect hit me harder than I expected, even considering the less-than-stellar mood I was in.

The short version: Beca (Anna Kendrick) is a freshman at Barden University. She doesn't want to be there though: she wants to go to L.A., be a DJ and produce her own music. But her father makes her a deal: stay at the uni and join a club and make an effort. If it doesn't work out, she can drop out and he'll help her move. Barden University happens to be the home of two a capella groups, the all-male Treblemakers and the rival all-female Barden Bellas. The Bellas messed up last year at the finals, and all they can get are a bunch of misfits — of course, lead by a bitchy control freak (Anna Camp). There's also a love interest named Jesse (Skylar Astin) who joins the Treblemakers. I'll stop summarising here, as you can see where this is going, right?

So what makes this one different, or at least worth the effort? Well, I ruminated on the soundtrack above. Next up is the casting: Anna Kendrick's understated performance and excellent comedic timing easily carries the movie, but her co-stars are equally impressive. (How is it that Brittany Snow is not a big star?)

To top it off, Pitch Perfect is very much aware of its pedigree and riffs on it. The love plot revolves around The Breakfast Club and its use of (Don't You) Forget About Me, and there's dialogue like this:

But if you think this is just some high school club, where you can sing and dance your way through any big social issue, or confused sexuality, you have come to the wrong place.

It's easy to point out flaws in the movie (not all the jokes are strong, some subplots seem irrelevant) but for me, Pitch Perfect was the Movie of the Year.

As a voice-over tells us, in Pacific Rim, alien life doesn't come from the stars but from a portal beneath the Pacific Ocean. To fight the enormous monsters, humanity builds enormous robots, called "Jaegers". They're helmed by humans, and in a flash of genius by the scriptwriters, it takes two pilots to "drive" one Jaeger. This sets the stage for a blockbuster of epic scale that has everything: sweet kaiju-vs-mecha action, excellent monster/robot/set design, solid acting and even some psychological drama. But yes, the kaiju-vs-mecha action is of course the big draw.

It's been said that geeks rule Hollywood nowadays and Pacific Rim is all the proof you need. This movie could not have been made 15 years ago. Without the success of The Matrix, without all the superhero movies or the Avatars, this would not have been funded. Without the advances in CGI, it wouldn't have looked so good. And without the mad genius of Guillermo del Toro it wouldn't have looked so awesome, or be well put together. Seriously, the kaiju look amazing: terrifying, monstrous and alien.

There are a lot of tropes associated with the kaiju and mecha genres. I'm not well-versed in them and just about my only points of reference are the Neon Genesis Evangelion series and the movies, so take my assessment with a grain of salt. I'll just say that Pacific Rim takes a lot of ideas from that series, but adapts them and improves on them in various ways. For starters, it's much more grounded. The world looks lived in and believable: no enormous transforming Tokyo here. It's full of little touches, like people going on their lives after a kaiju attack, rebuilding the city around its skeleton. A revelation later in the movie (spoiler alert!) shows us that to build the Jaegers in time after the first few sudden attacks by the kaiju, corners had to be cut and the consequences of that have impact later.

The idea I referenced above, the fact that the Jaeger can only be piloted by two pilots, allows for a greater focus on the main characters and the people around them. No single heroes, but actual teamwork here. It also gives us the character of Mako Mori, a very interesting and strong female character, played with verve by Japanese actress Yuriko Kikuchi.

One of the RPG campaigns I played in this year was based on procedural investigative shows like CSI, NCIS and various other acronyms. I did some research as I was not familiar with the genre and its tropes and watched single episodes of some series. The only one I kept watching was Bones and I quickly devoured four seasons of it.

Bones tells us about Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan (Emily Deschanel), a brilliant forensic anthropologist who works with Special Agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) to solve murder cases in the DC area. She's assisted by her team of "squints" (scientists) working at the fictional Jeffersonian Institute. Bones is a very rational woman with little in the way of people skills, while Booth is an alpha male who's very good at reading people and their motivations. This juxtaposition is the meat of the series and it works very well. Like in Castle the two lead actors are a great match and have great chemistry. The supporting cast is likewise great, with Michaela Conlin's Angela and Tamara Taylor's Dr. Saroyan being standouts. Both play strong, independent characters and they have a gift for comic scenes.

There's little in the way of an overarching plot, however. Every episode concerns itself with a new murder and a B-plot, and most are entirely stand-alone. While Castle has a few episodes every season that build a story arc, Bones has even less. It doesn't help that Season 3 was severely cut short by the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America strike, resulting in a messy, uneven season where the Big Reveal came out of nowhere.

Note: it takes some time before you're accustomed to the gruesome visuals of dead and decomposing bodies. Like Dexter, this is not a good series to watch while you're eating.

Ever since watching The West Wing I've been a fan of Aaron Sorkin's writing. I'm a sucker for intelligent scripts where people talk in impossibly witty, well-constructed sentences. The Social Network delivered that in spades, Charlie Wilson's War did so in a lesser way, and Moneyball wasn't exactly bad, but not that great either.

With The Newsroom, Sorkin returned in full force. It's a look of how Sorkin would like the American news to be delivered, much like The West Wing did for politics. He's been criticised for being too "left" and romanticising of his subjects, but as a non-American, I can't be too bothered about his political leanings. (The American "left" is still rather "right" for us Dutchies.)

In The Newsroom, Sorkin focusses on the running of the fictional "News Night", a news show on American cable. The anchor and lead character is Will McAvoy, played by Jeff Daniels. He's an oaf and hard to work with, and is "damaged goods" ever since he had a public tirade about America's shortcomings. With the return of his former lover MacKeenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) as his executive producer, his ideals to bring the truth and actual news to his viewers are rekindled.

Rounding out the cast are the co-workers in the newsroom: the clumsy Maggie Jordan (Alison Pill), the insufferable know-it-all Jim Harper (John Gallagher), the attractive but socially awkward Sloan Sabbith (Olivia Munn), the nerdy Neal Sampat, etc. Pretty much every archetype is present, played ably by the excellent cast. Their interaction and energy drive the series.

Sorkin uses real-world events as the backdrop of his fictional universe, saying "it gives me the chance to have the characters be smarter than we were." As I said, it's about impossibly smart people. The themes are reminiscent of those of The West Wing: doing the right thing even if it hurts your ratings. How do you survive as a show if your bosses only seem interested in the money? How do you present important news to an audience that only seems concerned with the latest gossip from Hollywood?

Borgen is like a mix of The West Wing and The Newsroom, in Denmark, without optimism or laughs. While The West Wing concentrates on the president and his staff, The Newsroom on the media reporting, Borgen does both. We follow Birgitte Nyborg, a party leader in the political centre, in her unlikely ascension to prime minister and the sacrifices she has to make in both her work and her private life. We also follow Katrine Fønsmark, a young and idealistic report/news anchor. In between them is Kasper Juul, Birgitte's communications chief and an old flame of Katrine.

This could be the setup for a bad rom-com, but it doesn't focus on romance but on the sacrifices people have to make, their motivations and how they clash. I watched Borgen sandwiched between the two seasons of The Newsroom and it took me some time before I could place my finger on it, but Borgen is so much more real.

While both of Sorkin's shows have some glamour over them, Borgen is devoid of that. It's helped in this by the fact that it is set in Denmark, just about the most unglamorous place you can think of. The political issues are very similar to those of the Netherlands and the series can hit uncomfortably close to home.

Made while Joss Whedon was also working on Avengers Assemble, Much Ado About Nothing was ostensibly a palate-cleanser for him. It is everything the Marvel blockbuster was not: a small, character-driven modern adaptation of the venerable Shakespeare play in the style of screwball comedy. Instead of the grueling process of making the long-awaited finale of the first act of Marvel's "cinematic universe", it was shot in 12 days at his own home. You may recognise many of the actors from his earlier productions. Amy Acker (Angel, The Cabin in the Woods) takes up the role of Beatrice, the sharp-tongued niece of Leonato (Clark Cregg, Avengers Assemble) that is attracted against her own will to Alexis Denisof (Buffy, Angel) as the equally sharp-tongued Benedick. They have the chemistry required to make this romance sparkle and deliver their witty lines with conviction. In the smaller roles we can find Sean Maher as the malevolent Don John, Fran Kranz as Claudio and Nathan Fillion delivers a totally straight constable Dogberry.

While it takes some time to adjust to the original lines, it feels natural after some scenes, just like in Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet's. Unfortunately, some of the marriage-related stuff is less convincing in a modern setting. Fathers don't give away daughters to be wed as they did in the Renaissance, and maidenhood is not the big deal it once was. Kenneth Branagh's rendition dodged this bullet by setting the play in its contemporary surroundings, but Joss Whedon does an admirable job nonetheless. Hopefully you can step over these things for the acting is spot on and the photography is very unorthodox and interesting.

Offically Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion (Kôdo giasu: Hangyaku no rurûshu) and Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion R2 (Kôdo giasu: Hangyaku no rurûshu R2), this series' premise is one you'll probably only find in a Japanese anime. How do they come up with this stuff? Not only that, how does this get published and be a hit?

Code Geass' setting is a alternative future, one where Great Britain won the American War of Independence but subsequently lost against Napoleon, causing the Brits to move house to America. Britannia now is one of three superpowers (the European Union and the Chinese Federation are the other two) and has occupied Japan and renamed it to Area 11. Are you still with me?

The series centres on Lelouch Lamperouge, an exiled Britannian prince who has vowed revenge. He obtains a supernatural power called "geass": once he has eye contact with a human being, he can order his target to do anything. Well, that's a potent weapon in the hands of a genius mastermind like "Lulu" and nicely makes up for his physical shortcomings. He sets out to head the brewing Japanese rebellion against his homeland, styling himself Zero. Oh, he also has to keep up his cover as a high school student, and keep an eye on his blind and disabled younger sister.

Code Geass features a rich and large cast of characters. The elongated character designs take some time to get used to, but are certainly charming. There are a lot of genres mixed in this sprawling epic — not all of them obvious pairings. We have mecha and high-tech sci-fi, supernatural influences, high school comedy, Machiavellian court intrigue and political manoeuvring. You can easily get confused by the convoluted plot and wind up with mood whiplash, but the 50 episodes mostly maintain a very high level of quality. Only a few episodes could be considered filler, and those are mostly chock-full with fan service to distract you.

There are movies that age well, that are still worth seeing decades after they were made. This is not that kind of movie. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex is a compilation of unfunny sketches. There are some good jokes to be found, but they're few and far between. The only section that still holds up is the final one, where we see the inner workings of a male trying to "get it on", with Woody Allen as a neurotic spermatozoon with performance anxiety.

We're all familiar with the archetype of the Hardboiled Detective and the surrounding tropes of film noir, but I'm not sure how we did. It's been ages since those stories and movies were in vogue, so I guess we got acquainted via imitators and "cultural osmosis". Frank Miller's Sin City graphic novels, for example, borrow heavily from the genre, and it also gave birth to Calvin &s Hobbes' "Tracer Bullet".

This year, I finally read some of the defining material, in the form of the first two stories from this omnibus by Raymond Chandler. The Big Sleep was his first novel and was published in 1939, while Farewell, My Lovely was published in 1940. (I didn't read The Long Goodbye yet.)

Chandler's protagonist was Philip Marlowe, a complex private eye. Tough, wise-cracking, hard-drinking, but also smart, insightful and contemplative, he's an engrossing character that easily pulls you in. The stories are sometimes hard to follow, as the mystery is not served straight and the characters' motivations are murky. There's no black-and-white morality here, only shades of grey.

It does not help that Chandler's style is heavily stylized, full of jargon that's hard to understand in this day and age. He also gives us many sardonic remarks and incisive similes. I'll leave some gems here:

He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn’t owe too much money.

She gave me one of those smiles the lips have forgotten before they reach the eyes.

She brought the glass over. Bubbles rose in it like false hopes.

This was the time to leave, to go far away. So I pushed the door open and stepped quietly in.

— The Big Sleep

It was a nice face, a face you get to like. Pretty, but not so pretty that you would have to wear brass knuckles every time you took it out.

I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

— Farewell, My Lonely

Over the years, I've developed an interest in the recurring patterns in storytelling, whether they are in television series, movies or books. The first book I read on the subject matter was Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and a few years ago I read Christopher Vogler's (disappointing) Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, which borrows heavily from Campbell. Last year I added Hamlet's Hit Points to the list. While the first two books look at the big lines in a narrative, Robin D. Laws instead zooms in at what he calls "beats": scenes or parts of scenes that serve a specific purpose. For example, a "procedural beat brings into play a protagonist's external or practical goal", while "a dramatic beat invests us in the protagonist's inner goals". Robin helpfully gives examples from various sources for each type of beat. An example of the first would be when "Obi-Wan Kenobi uses the Force to convince the stormtroopers that these aren’t the droids they’re looking for".

After having explained the various beats, Laws gives then proceeds to analyse Hamlet, the film version of Dr. No and Casablanca, showing that his system is robust enough to work for such diverse genres and media. It made me read Hamlet and watch Dr. No and I gained a greater respect for the works involved.

Robin D. Laws writes in a witty and terse style, easily keeping the pace up throughout the book. What's more, his background as an RPG designer (he's brought us gems like Feng Shui: Action Movie Roleplaying and the GUMSHOE system) gives him a unique perspective. Hilarity ensues when he describes Shakespeare's characters as NPCs in an RPG.

Hamlet's Hit Points' analysis of Hamlet and the foundations of the beat analysis can be found on the author's LiveJournal and his current website. He also applied the ideas from HHP to RPG system design. I supported the KickStarter for the resulting game Hillfolk, but haven't read it yet.

It appears that in May 2013, the trailer for the movie adaptation of Ender's Game was released and/or was brought to my attention. That reminded me that the book was supposed to be a sci-fi classic and after asking some opinions I decided to read it. I'm happy that I did because it and its "parallel sequel" Ender's Shadow are great books

In the 22nd century, humankind has fought two battles against the insectoid aliens called "Buggers". To prepare for the inevitable third invasion, a group of military people sets out to train highly gifted children to lead Earth's fleet of spaceships. In Game we follow Ender, one of such children, as he's subjected to increasingly difficult classes, physical games, psychological torture and so on. Not leaving anything to chance and apparently subscribing to Darwinian teaching methods, Ender's teachers make his (and, to be fair, every pupil's) education a gruelling path. As if being the youngest and the smallest of the bunch isn't enough, Ender is further singled out as his mentor feels he could be the one person who could save humankind. So the mentor devises extra hurdles for Ender to clear, like stirring up the enmity of his fellow students just to see how Ender will react.

The secondary plot revolves around Ender's brother and sister, children who are almost as gifted but were deemed too psychopathic and too empathic, respectively, to be good leaders. Their machinations play out in the background but are very important nonetheless.

Ender's Game is an expansion of a 1977 short story, and Orson Scott Card further fleshed out its universe through various novels. In 1999 he published Ender's Shadow, a novel that roughly covers the same events as Ender's Game, but focusses on another protagonist: Bean, more or less the understudy of Ender — something Bean knows but Ender doesn't, interestingly. While there's 14 years between their publication, Card pulls it off and makes the latter book almost as interesting as the former, while staying consistent in style.

While both books have children as protagonists, these are not children's books, I feel, more "young adult". Or maybe they are, it's hard to judge in this post-Harry Potter world. Also know that there's a "big twist" in the finale of the book, but since I figured it out beforehand it's probably not a very good or surprising one. I'm usually horrible in figuring these things out.

There are also uncomfortable references and parallels to real-world history and schools of thought, much like in Starship Troopers (especially in the film). You could easily miss the similarities but once you see them it'll change the way you'll view the books, and possibly their author.

This one is a bit of a hard sell, I guess. Jane McGonigal argues that playing games can teach us things. Not just things like timing and eye-hand coordination or even decision making and cooperation. She argues that games teach us "urgent optimism", that gamers weave a "tight social fabric", have "blissful productivity" and find "epic meaning". That's nice to know, as a gamer, but it's all virtual, right? The trick then is to figure out how to these skills into something concrete.

McGonical's book starts off slowly in Part One ("Why Games Make Us Happy") by defining what a game actually is and giving some background and numbers on games and playing games. That's already very interesting, but in Part Two ("Reinventing Reality") she ups the ante and gives the concrete examples of applying games and "gamification" to real-world problems. She doesn't stop there, as Part Three's title denotes: "How Very Big Games Can Change the World".

To be honest, at that point I was a bit dazed with the endless drive and optimism and my natural scepticism came back, but the author has a lot of good points that are well made. Still, a hard sell. So I'm fortunate that I don't have to convince you, I can let McGonical make her pitch herself:

Coincidentally, the book nicely prepared me for my first online course ever: Kevin Werbach's Gamification course as offered through Coursera. It made the high-flying theories of Reality is Broken more grounded and applicable. Very interesting and the best-taught course I followed last year.

The publication of the quartet of anthologies was was yet another Kickstarter I backed the last few years. If that seems like a theme, I guess it is. There's something very satisfying in helping smallish (RPG) publishers getting a product out of the door. It also helps that I now have an e-reader. I don't have to buy the paper article, which can be very expensive with the overseas shipping costs.

On with the actual books. All four collections feature many, many short stories from many different authors — most of them unfamiliar to me. This meant a change in the way I read. Usually I read series of big fantasy books, my favourite being The Malazan Book of the Fallen, which consists of 10 big fat hardbacks. Instead, The New Hero, Vol. 1 clocks in at 280 pages and has 14 different stories. On one hand, this helps reading them if I don't have a lot of consecutive time available. On the other hand, I can't recall most of them as their individual impact is lessened by their brevity.

In both volumes The New Hero the authors provide us with "iconic" heroes. As editor Robin D. Laws informs us in the preface, we're used nowadays to the "dramatic hero". Its "conventions arise from the novelistic tradition of psychological realism" and "[she] appears for the purposes of a single story. It's always one of transformation. (...) She begins in one emotional condition, and from that state faces a crisis that puts her at odds with the world. This confrontation with the world changes her, completing her arc." By contrast, "the iconic hero encounters a disorder in the world. As it does the dramatic hero, the world test the iconic hero, trying to change her. Where the dramatic hero transforms, either for better or worse, the iconic hero prevails be reaffirming her essential identity." With this single thread tying them together, the stories in the anthologies run the gamut from horror, to fantasy back to science fiction.

Shotguns v. Cthulhu instead pinpoints its theme as "double-barrelled action in the horrific world of H.P. Lovecraft" and collects 15 stories of the so-called "pulp Mythos" vein. When thinking of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories, we remember them for the stilted intellectual horror — but there is physical action in those stories. Usually it's futile in the face of cosmic dread, but it's there. This selection dials the action up to eleven.

Last not but least, The Lion and the Aardvark is a collection of fables. 59 stories across 216 pages means that each story is only 3 or 4 pages long, but most authors show that that is enough for a poignant fable with a nice moral.

Last year I mentioned that I'd probably spend my gaming time playing Heart of the Swarm, the second instalment of the StarCraft II story, after 2010's StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. That prediction came more or less true: the first half of 2013's gaming was indeed spent in HotS. I pre-ordered the Collector's Edition and got into the closed beta to play the multi-player. The game came out in March and I played the campaign at Hard difficulty. WoL's story focused on James Raynor and the Terran faction and served as a half-hearted stepping-stone to the multi-player experience. In contrast, HotS focused on Sarah Kerrigan and the bug-like Zerg: an interesting character and my favourite race respectively.

The single-player campaign does a lot of thing correctly. The focus is squarely on Sarah Kerrigan and instead of a primer on the real-time strategy genre, the campaign is more of a role-playing game experience with Sarah as a hero unit which you'll control every mission. (The RPG-like campaign reminded me of the Orc campaign in WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne.) She'll gain experience and buy amazing abilities with that, transforming her and her army into a terrifying force. The focus on Sarah is a nice change from Wings of Liberty's meandering story and it fills gaps in her narrative that have been there ever since the original StarCraft. Unfortunately, the campaign starts off by undoing much of the changes that were wrought to her in WoL. After the first three missions, she's pretty much back to where she was at the start of WoL, rendering your efforts there in vain.

You'll also be able to unlock upgrades ("evolutions") for your units, which are hilarious and will make you wish they were available in singe-player as well. Blizzard went wild with the units and upgrades, knowing that they didn't need to adhere to any notion of balance. Coupled with the relative ease of the campaign, this gives everybody the chance to lead the Zerg swarm in the way it's meant to be: an unstoppable force of waves and waves of expendable units, drowning enemies in sheer numbers. You'll be able to test the various evolutions in mini-missions before you pick, which is a nice touch. The "Feral Zerg" storyline is also nice, giving the Zerg some much-needed background. The focus on the Zerg and their history leaves no room for the Terran or Protoss, though.

While I enjoyed the campaign, I though it was far too easy even on Hard and quickly went back to multi-player. This was more enjoyable than ever, as the handful of new maps, units and changes to old units shook up the tired Wings of Liberty meta-game. It also revitalised the pro-gaming scene, giving it a shot in the arm. Together with Blizzard's restructuring of their World Championships, this resulted in a lot of broadcasted professional games, of high quality and great production values. The storylines that developed were a treat to follow (if you're into that kind of thing). TeamLiquid's The Best Games of 2013 serves as a great collection to see the best of the best.

In the past, I've lauded games for various reasons that in retrospect still make sense and hold up to scrutiny. I still think Portal is great for being very intuitive and having an excellent introduction. The characters and stories told in the Uncharted series are still amazing, to say nothing about their graphics. I appreciate good soundtracks (StarCraft II, Uncharted, Brütal Legend) and even the immersive open-world experiences of Skyrim, Assassin's Creed and Brütal Legend.

So it makes little sense that my undisputed game of the year is Dota 2. While it officially was in beta until July 9th, 2013, there have been world championships with multi-million dollar price pools since 2011. How can this be? Well, Dota 2 has a long history. Its origins are in the Aeons of Strife custom map for the original StarCraft. This map was recreated in WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos and its expansion The Frozen Throne as Defense of the Ancients. It was by far the most popular map, with an active community and many developers. It was so popular that it outshone regular WarCraft III.

Being a WarCraft III mod meant that it was constrained by the WarCraft III engine in both graphics and mechanics — an engine which development started in 1998. (In computer gaming terms, this is the Stone Age.) A bunch of Valve employees, a developer mostly known for Half-Life and its sequels and the Steam distribution service, were big fans of the game. They contacted the enigmatic developer of Dota, IceFrog, and hired him in 2009. He and his team slowly remade the original game as Dota 2, in Valve's Source engine, while still expanding the original WarCraft III map. Dota 2 was shown to the public in 2011 and entered invitation-only beta. In this state, it had an ardent following and indeed, a thriving pro-gaming scene. Pretty amazing for a game in beta, but as a remake of an existing, successful game and a developer as hallowed as Valve, it's understandable.

Let me quickly explain the basics of the game. Dota is team-based game, where two teams of five players each compete against each other. One side is called the Radiant (green), the other the Dire (red). Each player controls one "Hero" unit, which spawns at the team's base. The bases are the titular "Ancient" and are placed in the bottom-left and top-right of the map. From these bases also regularly spawn AI-controlled "creeps", weak units that mindlessly and suicidally attack everything in their path towards the enemy base. These paths are formed by the three "lanes" across the map, while each lane and each base is defended by "towers", sturdy structures that attack enemy units in their vicinity with powerful attacks.

The players choose from a roster of more than a hundred heroes, each with 4 or more unique abilities. They gain experience and gold by killing enemy heroes and creeps and levelling enemy buildings. Gain enough experience and a hero is granted a level, which bestows a (more powerful) version of a single ability. Gold is used to buy items, which can make the hero and its allies more powerful, or grants unique abilities.

Even a short summary like this already drowns in jargon. Learning Dota 2 is often frustrating, as it seems its design was an exercise in how to make the most unintuitive and obtuse game ever. You control a so-called hero, but this hero starts out weaker than the creeps that spawn in hordes. You get money for killing creeps, but only if you deal the killing blow. The ultimate goal is to destroy the enemy base, but you won't reach it until 15 minutes or more into the game. To get there, you need to destroy enemy towers, but to reach those you need to kill enemy creeps. But you don't want to actively attack those until much later, you just want to last-hit them. As mentioned, there are more than a hundred heroes, each with unique abilities that interact in weird ways with each other. There are tens of items, that also provide unique abilities which also interact in weird ways with each other and hero abilities. For every rule, there are multiple exceptions. There are four types of damage (or five, or six, dependent on how you count), three types of defence, about twenty sorts of disables and roughly ten hero categories ("roles").

"Well," you might think, "I'll just watch some professional games and I'll grasp the basics soon enough!" Except that most of the pro-casts are geared toward veterans and use jargon and abbreviations freely, often carried over from WarCraft's DotA. So you'll hear them talking about "Furion", while you'd swear there is no such hero. Later, you'll learn that the hero called "Nature's Prophet" was called "Furion" in DotA. He's also referred to as "Nature's Profit" and "NP".

Wow, I already wrote so much and I didn't even talk about Valve's ways to monetise this free-to-play game and how the community can, too, or how it's a great game to watch, or the blossoming pro-scene, or Valve's great "world championship" called The International.

The original Civilization PC game by Sid Meier was an adaptation of Francis Tresham's board game. In the board game, you develop grow your civilization from a single settler to a world-spanning empire that eventually launches an expedition to Alpha Centauri. Along the way you build cities, research technology, build armies and conduct diplomatic missions. It's truly epic in scope and took the better part of an afternoon and evening to play through. Sid Meier's adaptation was faithful to the original and improved on it in many ways.

My copy of that original game came on three 3.5" floppies that I had copied from a friend. Said friend and his little brother had creatively "revised" some of its text sources, so when the enemy civilizations got angry with me, they shouted "Wij hakken dood!" in a butchered Dutch translation of "We'll attack you!".

We've come a long way since then, but there's has always been versions of Civilization on the PC, and multiple adaptations of the computer game back to the board game space. I skipped Civilization II and most of IV, while I played a bit of III. It changed and added some things, retained others and in general polished and streamlined the gameplay.

2010 brought along the fifth instalment of the series, which I largely ignored because I didn't really like IV, but when it was on sale for cheap after I stopped playing Heart of the Swarm, I gave in. The first few matches didn't really satisfy, in retrospect because I set the difficulty level too low. It's like walking a tightrope, really. Set it too low, and the endgame is just building invincible armies and crushing everything in your path. Set it too high and you never get your empire going.

I saw a lot of potential, however, as Civilization V really streamlines a lot of clunky old gameplay from the older editions. It's easier to see what needs to be done, there's less micromanagement required (although it's possible if you're into that kind of thing) and the interface is a lot more intuitive. It slays some sacred cows, like stacking armies and even abandons the square-based movement in favour of hexagonal tiles, which makes everything feel more "organic", for lack of a better word.

Subsequently you install Gods & Kings, the first expansion pack and it feels like a new version all over. It improves the coarse-grained combat system into something more detailed and introduces Religion and Espionage. The latter doesn't have a large impact but gives you a nice diversion, while Religion changes the game in a dramatic way. Suddenly your followers are believers, and you can dictate the tenets of their faith. Neighbouring civilization and city states may adopt your religion peaceably or you can send out missionaries to convert them to your cause. In the best feature ever, you can even name your religion, giving you the same power that my friend craved all those years ago.