Archive for Jun, 2012

30 Jun

Album Review: Living Things – Linkin Park

Posted by vagrantesque in Music. Tagged: , , , .

The latest major offering from the ever-present Linkin Park came out last week and I’ve been listening to it pretty heavily so I could form a proper opinion on it before the end of the month.

-◊-◊-◊-◊-
Released: April 2012
Label: Warner Bros
Genre: Alternative/Electronic Rock
 -◊-◊-◊-◊-

Mummy... thing

Typically abstract stuff here.

.
TRACK LISTING

1. Lost in the Echo
2. In My Remains
3. Burn It Down
4. Lies Greed Misery
5. I’ll Be Gone
6. Castle of Glass
7. Victimized
8. Roads Untraveled
9. Skin to Bone
10. Until it Breaks
11. Tinfoil
12. Powerless

I have been a Linkin Park fan ever since I started buying music. My first musical purchase of any kind was Meteora back in 2003, an album I still revisit from time to time without as much as a second thought. That would make me a fan of the band for the better part of a decade, so I’ve been used to their relatively slow release schedule for a while. When I heard that the band was set to release their fifth studio album a mere eighteen months after their fourth, literally half the time they waited between their previous major releases (2000, 2003, 2007 and 2010) I was a little shocked. I didn’t have much of an opportunity to psych myself up for it and in what seemed like no time at all, I had the first track of Living Things blaring from a pair of speakers. I was confused yet pleasantly surprised by what I got. Continue reading →

28 Jun

Game Review: Gravity Rush

Posted by vagrantesque in Games, PS Vita. Tagged: , , .

It has been a long time since I did a game review, mostly since the games I’ve been playing lately are on 3DS and grabbing screenshots of those games is a nightmare. I’ll still get to them in due time, but for now, here’s a review of the recently-released Playstation Vita game Gravity Rush. It came out on June 14th.

The PSN delay made this a long one.

-◊-◊-◊-◊-
Platform: PSV
Developer: Sony Japan Studio
Rating: PG
-◊-◊-◊-◊-

Is she sideways?

The case is a lot smaller in real life.

.
Yes, it’s that game.
.

The one I ranted about as the primary reason why I wanted a Playstation Vita. The one I complained about when it was absent from the system’s launch. The one I’ve been waiting for since, well, since I first heard about it almost a year ago. That game. I’ve almost set myself up to be disappointed by Gravity Rush just due to the sheer weight of expectation I’ve placed on it over the last few months alone. Well, now I’ve played it, and yes, now I’ve finished it (something I rarely do at all with games these days, let alone in under two weeks). Read on to find out how it fares. Continue reading →

25 Jun

Technical Difficulties

Posted by vagrantesque in Games, PS Vita.

So I was supposed to put up my Gravity Rush review today, but neither my PS Vita nor my PS3 want to connect to the Playstation Network at the moment. The Vita needs to be online to transfer screenshots to my PC, for whatever bizarre reason. In the meantime here is some fan art of Gravity Rush from deviantart that I am currently using as my iPod Touch wallpaper.

Credit to *Niking

20 Jun

The Other Ones

Posted by vagrantesque in Games, Lists. Tagged: , , .

This is the second of my two E3 articles for the year. Then on to some more reviews!

The press conferences of the Electronic Entertainment Expo are usually the most hyped part of the show, and for good reason, but they’re only half the story. The show floor invariably reveals a few uncelebrated diamonds in the rough every year and E3 2012 was no different. A great many games that were absent from the five press conferences showed up on the floor and tried their best to impress.

Here are five of my favourite non-conference games from this year’s show, in no particular order:
.

Project P-100
Completely absent from any of the Nintendo press conferences, this incredibly quirky trans-genre… thing looks surprisingly fun to play on the Wii U. Best described as a cross between Pikmin and a drawing-based superhero game, it came as no surprise to me that the sheer hectic pace of the cartoony action was engineered by none other than Platinum Games, developers of the excellent MadWorld, Bayonetta and Vanquish. Bring it. Continue reading →

18 Jun

Conference Call

Posted by vagrantesque in Games, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , .

My internet connection has been giving me real problems of late, which has made this piece a little later than I would have wanted. Alas.

That magic week in worldwide gaming news has already come and gone for another year. The Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3 for the affectionate/professional/lazy, delivered less surprises than in past years, but there was still plenty to talk about. The aftermath has been dissected a million ways already. Chief among the topics of conversation, as always, were the five big press conferences. Here I throw in my 2c on them by ranking them in terms of how strong I thought they were, from least to most.

Continue reading →

16 Jun

Movie Review: Prometheus

Posted by vagrantesque in Movies. Tagged: , , .

I saw this highly anticipated Ridley Scott epic last Tuesday. Thoughts follow!

-◊-◊-◊-◊-
Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron
Director: Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner)
Rating: M
-◊-◊-◊-◊-


If you were Sir Ridley Scott, director of such massive critical and commercial successes as Gladiator and Black Hawk Down and architect of one of the most ponderous sci-fi films ever made in Blade Runner, you could probably do whatever you wanted with your late career. So thirty-three years after he practically reinvented the horror genre by sending it into space with Alien, Scott figured it might be a cool idea to revisit the fictional xenomorph-infested universe he built himself with a new film, Prometheus. In doing so he whipped up a storm of hype and, as so often happens with these things, all kinds of questions started flying around fan circles. Would the film be a direct prequel or just set in the same universe? Why that odd title? How would the advent of CGI impact the atmosphere of the film? And perhaps most importantly, in what new direction would Scott take the series? Continue reading →

10 Jun

What a Wonderful Month

Posted by vagrantesque in Lists, Misc.

Oh June, how you treat me and drain my sleep!

Oh the hidden goodness you contain!

There is a reason why I haven’t had a full night’s sleep since the start of winter. Between scouring for news coming out of the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles and watching Euro 2012 in the early hours of the morning, rest has plummeted ever  lower on my list of priorities. Even though E3 is done and dusted for another year, there still remain plenty of reasons why June 2012 will keep bringing the goods. Here are just five of them: Continue reading →