Vagrant Rant M o v i e s . G a m e s . M u s i c . "L i f e".

On this very day all the way back in 2012, I decided to start a blog, hoping it might be a place to order, solidify and essentially catalogue my thoughts on the entertainment media I enjoyed on a daily basis. I had already realised that I enjoyed discussing and analysing movies, videogames and music at least equally as much as actually experiencing them (if not more), and had published small pieces of writing on such subjects with all manner of flavours in all manner of places. But I wanted something to (as much as one can) call my own. So I set it up with WordPress, made sure to sprinkle it with plenty of green, named it after an obscure personal reference and kicked off.

Little did I know that not only would the blog still be around a decade on, but it would hang around despite a massive shift in the internet’s wider priorities and a huge change in its purpose barely three years in. You can just about divide the history of Vagrant Rant into two clear – yet uneven – halves right around 2015: The sheer number of posts I put up in that first “half” dwarfs the next seven years combined; but the individual articles just got so much longer afterwards that I’d wager the word count is just about even.

As uncomfortable as it is to be this self-reflective, I knew I couldn’t let this day go past unmarked – My constantly-compartmentalising brain would not allow it. So here, in no particular order – are my ten personal favourite posts I’ve published on Vagrant Rant.

Game Review: Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster (2014)

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Of all the post formats I used to stick to, my old videogame review scaffolding is the one I look back on with the biggest cluster of hindsight-boosted winces. The idea of homogenising pieces of art as diverse as videogames by using the same structured headings for every single game made writing with any sort of flow quite difficult – though it did usually keep word counts mercifully contained. So my favourite review I ever wrote on the site has to be the April Fools’ Day entry reviewing the FF X/X-2 HD Remaster – or rather, just X’s incredibly addictive minigame Blitzball, which I jokingly passed off as a review for the whole game. It was the one instance I was able to come up with a creative use for the format I had restricted myself to, which probably helped me realise I didn’t enjoy robotically reviewing games much afterwards.