Archive for the ‘Games’ Category

28 Sep

Ranking Every Legend of Zelda, Now That I’ve Finished Them All (PART I)

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

Well, that took forever.

I’ve dragged my feet a bit on this one, for all kinds of ever-changing reasons over the years. But the time is right at last. As far as this site is concerned, 2026 was already shaping up as a year for writing about decades-old games, and now at long last Nintendo has officially acknowledged the Legend of Zelda series’ 40th anniversary. So I finally polished off the last 8-bit piece of my personal mainline Zelda puzzle last week, and now we are doing this.

40 years after the first Legend of Zelda changed the videogame landscape, 26 years after I played my first Zelda game, 13 years after I finished my tenth and then immediately wrote up my first top ten Zelda countdown, and just over a month away from an ambitious remake of the series’ most iconic entry, the job is complete: I can say that I have finished all of the Legend of Zelda games released up to this very point in my life. And in 2026, that happens to mean twenty-one of them. I’m signing myself up for an awful lot of writing, but it sounds like a pair of almost-even countdown posts to me!

A quick technical note for any newer Zelda enthusiasts: traditionally these ranked lists only include videogame titles with the phrase “The Legend of Zelda” in them, with the notable exception of the second game, which uses the prefix “Zelda II”; everything else is counted as a spin-off. That’s also the way I look at it, so you won’t see the likes of the Hyrule Warriors games here.

Furthermore, ports, remasters and remakes are not treated separately from their original releases for the purposes of this ranking, and are only mentioned when relevant to a particular point. Finally, this ranking is entirely based on my personal opinion, which unavoidably invokes emotions and memories that make it extremely unlikely to line up with yours. Plot details may also be discussed occasionally. Please enjoy.

– 21) Four Swords –

First Completed (GBA): 2003

It feels like the eternal – if accidental – punching bag as far as my personal rankings are concerned, but I still have such warm memories of playing through The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords with a friend over two decades ago, so I have to hit you with that time-honoured Zelda ranking cliché from the very first entry in the list: All the Zelda games are pretty good, but something has to be last.

In this case, all the trailblazing inventiveness in the world from long-dead Capcom offshoot Flagship – who are incidentally responsible for almost a fifth of all Legend of Zelda games – cannot save Four Swords from the inherently restrictive structure that just happened to stop me from playing through the whole thing with four players as the developers intended. I also have never played Grezzo’s 2011 single-player-enabled remaster, because that year was absolutely stacked with Zelda content already and I didn’t see the need.

As the first mainline multiplayer Zelda game, Four Swords felt incredibly fresh at launch, even if subsequent games have improved on the concept. The fact it was packaged with the GBA version of Link to the Past made it as much of a marketing masterstroke as the Medals of Courage system was a gameplay one. The title represented the first instance of elementary procedural generation my young eyes had ever witnessed, and the puzzle design is often a match for anything else you might find among the 2D Zeldas. It also features the best of an exceptional class of Flagship title-drop animations, accompanied by possible the single best second of sound design on the GBA. So there’s also that. But something has to go here.

– 20) The Adventure of Link –

First Completed (NES on NS): 2019

These days as soon as you discuss the oldest of the Zelda games on NES – actually, as soon as you discuss arguably any game on NES or a platform of similar power – the subject of restore points and other modern emulation conveniences becomes a bit of an elephant in the room. Well allow me to rip the band-aid off: you can assume I made liberal use of the restore points within the Nintendo Switch Online app for any older game that appeared on the service before the completion year written under each Zelda game’s title across this article.

Now that we’ve got that cleared up, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link perhaps required more use of emulation restore points than any other game I’ve played. AoL isn’t just known as a black sheep of sorts due to its deviance from the series’ naming convention (which, to be fair, wasn’t yet the naming convention when it first released); it’s also structurally bizarre in a way that places combat front and centre like nothing else in the mainline canon. It joins the likes of Final Fantasy II, Dragon Quest II, and (in the west) Super Mario Bros 2 as a wildly experimental second entry in a franchise that would go on for decades afterwards by essentially ignoring everything attempted in that entry.

Dark Souls creator Hidetaka Miyazaki famously cited the very first The Legend of Zelda as his principle influence while formulating the series, but it is the immediate sequel that arguably feels even more Souls-like to play through in the modern era: combat is the overwhelming focus over puzzle design, there’s a rudimentary stat system that rewards either pure skill or the brute force of the grind, even well-hidden and overpowered limited-use magic spells play a role. The Adventure of Link may feel the least like a Zelda game of any title on either half of this countdown, and I’m glad it didn’t turn out to be the blueprint for the series going forward, but I must admit it is mighty satisfying to clap that Thunderbird.

– 19) Phantom Hourglass –

First Completed (DS): 2018

Yeah sure, let’s put the two black sheep of the Zelda series back-to-back; super original countdown idea, man. And yet, considering all the negative feelings I had towards this game for a solid decade after it thoroughly disappointed me at launch, the fact it isn’t dead-last represents a character arc worthy of Linebeck himself. To date Phantom Hourglass is the only Zelda game I have ever outright given up on before seeing the credits; its late 2007 release initially made it seem like the perfect celebratory holiday title, but some major structural design whiffs put the game to bed for me until 11 years later, when a colleague re-framed the game for me with a refreshing pitch and I completed it at last.

The day I reached the end of Phantom Hourglass in early 2018 was the day I knew it might be possible for me to one day go back and finish every Legend of Zelda game, because when I tell you this one boiled my teenage blood upon release, I’m only slightly exaggerating. The Temple of the Ocean King, which gradually unlocks more of its secrets after every main dungeon but must be restarted every time, is almost entirely to blame for this, but the unusually bland colour palette, soundtrack, and story do not do the game any favours.

Proper expectations helped a ton on the second go-around, however, and the game does actually have plenty to offer. The touch controls are almost perfect, especially when using items (at least on a stylus-capable platform like the DS, 3DS, or Wii U), the boss fights are amazing, several of the puzzles are devious – including that infamous clamshell stamp moment – and the arc/musical theme of Link’s sailing companion Linebeck makes him genuinely one of the most memorable characters in the series. Finally, there’s the surprisingly addictive collectable ship part economy, which deserves a big mention because trading parts with that aforementioned colleague was the main feature that kept me pushing through the worst parts of the game. Nintendo simply does not respect loot systems enough.

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21 Jul

DK 64 in a Resurgent DK World

Posted by vagrantesque in Games, N64, Switch, Switch 2. Tagged: , , , , , , , .

I don’t know if this small-yet-immutable fact blows your mind like it did mine, but last week marked one year since the release of Donkey Kong Bananza on the Nintendo Switch 2. Oh, how much the videogame industry has changed in just twelve short months…

Bananza was once a pipe dream. Eleven years ago, when I lost over a week to the surprise Virtual Console re-release of Donkey Kong 64 on the struggling Wii U, I had very little hope of glimpsing a properly three-dimensional DK game anywhere near the horizon. The critically-acclaimed and commercially-ignored DK Country: Tropical Freeze was barely a year old at the time, and insofar as the once-prolific Nintendo mascot had any future prospects, they appeared to be strictly 2D (Little did I know the Kong was about to endure a considerable major release drought worse than I could have imagined).

And so I latched onto that 2015 shadow-drop hard: the murky legal waters of Microsoft-owned Rareware development assets had long made the concept of a retro Rare release on a modern Nintendo platform seem like a pipe dream, and even the general concept of a sudden “out-now” release was still pretty new to the videogame space. It was an exhilarating dive. I came out the other side of a 20-hour play time blur and landed at my PC, eager to write about the game from the angle of exploring its most widely-accepted criticisms.

At the time, the makings of a wave of nostalgia-powered “3D collect-a-thon” revivals were gathering momentum within the indie scene, and so it felt apt to ask “Did DK 64 Kill the 3D Collect-a-thon Platformer?” The short answer was, as you might expect, no; the game’s occasionally over-ambitious design shortcomings merely made it an excellent scapegoat during a time of turbulent transformation in the industry.

Yet there was a fair amount left unsaid about the game in that article, and much more has changed for Nintendo’s oldest mascot in the years since. We have just witnessed the second official re-release of the game on the Nintendo Switch / Switch 2 just over a month ago, and within the context of the mid-2020s, this curious former black sheep of both Rare’s platformer catalogue and Nintendo’s Kong plans suddenly seems like much less of an oddity. I’m also a decade older now, so there’s that too.

And so, for the second time this year, I have defied a core part of my personality by dropping all the 2026 games I’ve been trying to juggle in favour of a decades-old title I know extremely well, in the hope of gaining some new insights by experiencing it within a vastly different modern context. With Nintendo just weeks on from its second direct re-visitation of Starfox 64, and an even more significant third take on Ocarina of Time steadily approaching, I find myself revisiting a game to which I have already dedicated an entire article. I did not think I would be in this position, but life, much like Nintendo, will do weird shit.

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11 Jun

Close Enough, Welcome Back E3

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

It took eight years, and we have gotten pretty close at a few points along the way (most notably in 2023), but we are back. For the first time since Playstation ostensibly abandoned June’s traditional big summer blowout, the pandemic shuttered the classic Los Angeles showcase branding, and Geoff Keighley began his Summer Game Fest initiative, the traditional console gaming “Big Three” have brought their presentation A-game within the same week, just as Keighley himself finally nailed a Game Fest show worthy of matching hype with the finest of his annual Game Awards celebrations.

There may be a thick cloud of sobering economic realities hovering over the videogame industry right now, but for the entirety of this past week, just about every major publisher added enough of its own flavour to spawn a banquet that delivered on hype, spectacle, and dare I say even joy, with old-school panache. At least for one 7-day period (give or take) in 2026, the real spirit of E3s past was alive and well.

Let’s dig into what we learned!

Dates, Dates, Dates

On the morning of June 3rd, just before the Sony State of Play kickstarted the rapid announcement season, the GTA-free September 2026 release schedule looked promising but just about manageable. We knew ex-CD Projekt dev darling The Blood of Dawnwalker was set to bring it in and Marvel’s Wolverine would own its midpoint, but the rest of the month’s offerings – while meaty in prospect – seemed targeted at specific niche audiences: Phantom Blade 0 for the soulslike fans, Dawn of War 4 for RTS sweats, and Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter for the JRPG sickos like me.

Just over an hour later, suffice to say that was no longer the case – and the situation only got worse over the ensuing days.

Despite a Phantom Blade 0 delay into late October, Playstation’s big summer showpiece was the scene of a brutal calendar crime that had any prospective player with a wide genre lens reeling. The extremely exciting character-action-flavoured Control Resonant now awaits Alan Wake universe stans on September 24th, but so does Silent Hill Townfall, Konami’s first entry in their resurgent survival horror juggernaut since last year’s trailblazing Japanese side story. Kings of 2026 Capcom have seen fit to release Onimusha: Way of the Sword, the next game in their ongoing hit streak, just one day after this double-whammy. And the debut of the gorgeous Rayman Legends Retold at the Sony show hardly helped the big picture, as the ground-up remake of my favourite 2D platformer of all time will launch less than a week later, on October 1st. Oh, and Ace Combat 8 is due the day after that. It’s a lot.

But by the end of the main Summer Game Fest show, Day of the Devs, the Xbox Games Showcase, and the Nintendo Direct, September had also added co-op retro-sci-fi gem Orbitals to the 3rd, ambitious 2D/3D hybrid platformer Screen Bound to the 10th, Napoleon shooter Valor Mortis to the 24th, Minecraft Dungeons II to the 29th, and most upsettingly both Trine 6 and Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave to that treacherous 17th (Trails day; nothing can help me now). October has also filled out somewhat (both Gears E-Day AND Star Wars: Galactic Racer on the 6th feels mean), but the real undersold ambush seems to be on the 27th of August, when the second volume of the Metal Gear Solid Collection will fight it out with A Plague Tale: Resonance, Brigandine Abyss, and Star Wars: Zero Company (two of those are tactical RPGs, by the way). Yes, not only is “September” insanely stacked, it effectively goes for six weeks this year. Publishers really are scared of GTA VI…

…And a Long-Held Promise For the Future

The Sony State of Play did also feature some goodness outside of September 2026, including the welcome return of the Stuntman series and an unexpected full-on numbered sequel to Until Dawn that looks far enough along to make its purported 2027 release window. But in a sign of things to come, the star of the show was a 20-odd-minute showcase of next year’s mythology-mashing God of War: Laufey, and there’s just something so warmly nostalgic about looking at a single extended gameplay demo in early June, wide-eyed in the freezing early morning while wrapped in a blanket or hoodie.

Perhaps emboldened by the positive reception to last year’s long look at The Witcher 4, the hotly-anticipated Final Fantasy VII Revelation reveal at the very end of the main Summer Game Fest show was treated as its own extended blowout, and Xbox doubled up on the deep-dive trend by both beginning and ending their show with long, unbroken looks at Gears of War: E-Day. While the presenting choice flies in the face of recent years’ strong rapid-fire videogame shows, I think there’s still room for a bit of a slower zoom-in on a massive IP now and then; if nothing else, it shows immense confidence on the part of the presenter.

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29 Apr

Pokémon Champions Pays Off 15 Years of Hype

Posted by vagrantesque in Games, Switch, Switch 2. Tagged: , , , , .

As I put down the controller and sit down to write this opening paragraph, I’ve just reached the Master Ball Tier on the Regulation M-A ladder in Pokémon Champions, Game Freak’s new free-to-play dedicated competitive Pokémon battling game. Forty hours of playtime have elapsed in just over a week since the game’s April 8th launch, more than I’ve spent on the rest of the year’s brand-new releases combined (and at the time of publication, that number has shot well past 70). Those dense hours have reintroduced me to an emotional rollercoaster I have not ridden since 2016, when I experienced the fateful launch of Overwatch and then was successfully convinced to play League of Legends for six months.

When you really try to get good at a competitive pursuit, you dig things up inside yourself; you learn a fair bit about the bounds of your patience, your tolerance for tilt. Sometimes you are so frustrated at yourself the only sane play is to stop playing. But sleep on it – even just take a break for some work or a snack – and suddenly you have the greatest idea ever, ready to try against the ever-evolving monolith of faceless online opponents that make up the metagame. It’s currently rather difficult to stay away from the considerable gravity of Pokémon Champions – especially because the list of mental skills it demands does not include fast-twitch reflexes.

But this present compulsion has not simply arisen out of nowhere for me: extremely far from it. In fact in many ways, Champions is the culmination of at least fifteen years worth of personal interest in the proper competitive side of the main series Pokémon videogames, and it feels truly surreal to experience such a gigantic – if hardly perfect – payoff.

The Esport Within

The well-documented key to Pokémon’s success as the biggest media franchise in the world is its one-of-a-kind universality: this very 30th anniversary year, barely a third over, has painted a perfect picture of that power. As the Trading Card Game rides the surprisingly bountiful crest of its biggest wave in history, cosy dream-building game Pokémon Pokopia has recently and rather loudly added itself to the growing list of Nintendo Switch 2 critical / commercial darlings mere weeks after a bald-faced nostalgia push landed the 20-year old Fire Red and Leaf Green on the Switch top sellers list (but I would know absolutely nothing about that). All this while the animated TV spin-offs and exclusive merchandising collaborations continue to proliferate across every major brand imaginable, and mobile sensation Pokémon GO somehow approaches its tenth anniversary.

No matter if you’re in it for the plushes, the fancy threads, the short animated stories, the shiny cardboard, the real-world step-grinding, the button-mashing pixelated playthroughs, or the adorable post-apocalyptic friendship fables, Pokémon can kind of be whatever you want it to be. And to me, it is primarily (though by no means exclusively) a source of thrilling tactical multiplayer.

I am old enough that my Pokémon fandom started more or less on the ground level, where Game Boy link cables were a common school playground sight. For me and my friends, catching Mewtwo in Red, Blue or Yellow version was not the end of the Pokémon experience – merely a dramatic precursor to the experience of using it against a human rival. PvP was always a core part of the Pokémon videogame experience as far as I was concerned, and once Gen III arrived to a world where my siblings were old enough to play alongside me, battling became a core component of the Day 1 new-release vibe as well.

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9 Mar

From Fire: A 30th Anniversary Pokémon Replay

Posted by vagrantesque in Games, GBA, Replays, Switch, Switch 2. Tagged: , , , , , .

Pokémon stops for no man.

In a move that is still rather ambiguous in the extent of its planning, The Pokémon Company saw fit this Pokémon Day to re-release Pokémon Fire Red and Leaf Green in an official digital capacity on the Nintendo Switch. I don’t generally like to replay videogames, but the main series Pokémon titles are a pretty reliable exception given how different they can feel each time depending on the player’s team composition. I did, however, replay Leaf Green on cartridge barely 18 months ago in conjunction with my first Game Boy Micro experience, so I wondered just how much I’d really get out of doing it all again so soon.

For about ten seconds, of course.

Pokémon’s extensive 30th anniversary festivities, the excitement of a few nostalgic friends, a lack of specific experience with Fire Red Version, the promise of screenshots without janky camera glare, a deflating 2027 release window for the upcoming Gen 10 Pokémon games, and a dense approaching block of binge-worthy television content to play in the background all added up to a purchase and playthrough that, let’s be quite real, was always inevitable.

And so I give you Vagrant Rant’s historic fifth Pokémon replay post: a dive into Pokémon Fire Red Version on the Nintendo Switch, and quite possibly my most enjoyable Kanto region playthrough ever.

A Surprising Fit

The Nintendo Switch port of Fire Red divided opinion when it slipped onto the Nintendo eShop a week out from the 30th anniversary Pokemon Presents showcase: some amplified voices bemoaned the lack of the game’s inclusion in the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack service, which already includes plenty of classic Game Boy Advance Games; others celebrated in the opposite direction, welcoming a one-time purchase that requires no further commitment.

Fans have speculated for years as to how the retro Pokémon titles would eventually hit the Switch family, and there were always pros and cons to both approaches. An NSO inclusion would mean restore points that’d make shiny/nature/IV resets an absolute dream and guarantee forced online support; conversely, a standalone release would allow for potential Pokémon Home transfers and maybe even built-in mythical Pokémon events previously locked away on cartridge.

As it turns out, we got the latter, and both advantageous boxes on that side of the equation – which were by no means guaranteed – have thankfully been checked. There are also no ugly grey-gradient bars on either side of the screen, and Start/Select have been automatically re-mapped to both Plus/Minus and X/Y. But for me at least, a standalone port – especially one listed online without an explicit Switch 2 logo – raised further questions about image quality.

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28 Feb

The Unrivalled Joy of the “Capcom Streak”

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

Does anyone remember how dull the Japanese videogame landscape was in the early-to-mid 2010s?

It’s probably a bit too far in the rear-view mirror to feel relevant now, but trust me, dear reader; it sucked. Defined by rapidly-expanding game budgets, western triple-A evolution, explosive online storefront growth, and smartphone panic heralding the apparent death of console gaming, the traditional powerhouses of Japanese development looked a tad stranded.

Square Enix struggled to revive their flagging former-flagship Final Fantasy franchise, started buying up western studios, then needed a Sony loan; Bandai Namco scrambled to release just one all-new entry in their lucrative “Tales of” and Tekken series, getting into bed with Nintendo to keep their teams working; Atlus imploded until the also-meandering Sega bought them out; Koei Tecmo was still fairly small-scale (and technically didn’t exist in its current form); and Konami finished off the rough patch by firing Hideo Kojima and then peaced out of console gaming altogether.

Of the traditional Japanese third-party powerhouses, only Capcom seemed capable of releasing new videogames in a halfway-timely fashion. But with some notable exceptions, uh, let’s just say their output during this period didn’t thrill many loyal fans.

But then, just as the 2010s were entering their latter stages, something changed.

At the very top of the legendary gaming year that was 2017, every single former Japanese heavy-hitter (save for the still-absent, pachinko-obsessed Konami) sat poised and ready to unleash its own critically-acclaimed title on the western world: Sega brought Yakuza 0, shortly followed by Persona 5; Koei Tecmo brought Nioh, Bandai Namco brought Tales of Berseria; and Square Enix brought Nier: Automata. That opening quarter was a phenomenon, a perfectly-timed salvo of meaningful quality, and it brought (metaphorical) tears to the eyes of every old-head with nostalgia for the good old days. Very suddenly, Japanese big-budget console gaming was back, but that message only hit so hard because on top of all that goodness, Capcom also brought Resident Evil VII: Biohazard.

Bolstered by a brand-new, insanely impressive in-house game engine, appropriately titled the RE Engine (which stands for “REach for the Moon” because of course it does), RE7 left behind as much bloated series baggage as it could, instead leveraging the immense popularity of first-person indie horror games (and contemporary short-lived VR optimism) to sneak in that time-honoured Capcom lock-and-key level design on its way to breaking sales records all over the world. Every step on the game’s journey, from that sucker-punch title reveal to the last of many well-received DLC adventures, was met with a warm glow from critics and the public alike. The instant survival-horror classic represented a stunningly smart turnaround for Capcom on paper, but the reality of the ensuing years would prove to be even more impressive.

In short, at the time of writing, Resident Evil VII is one of Capcom’s ten all-time top-selling game releases, and the other nine have all launched in the years since. That’s right; after more than forty trips around the sun in the videogame business, one of the industry’s most influential companies does not have a single title from before 2017 in its all-time top ten. That’s unheard of. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything else like it. Almost every development house under the Capcom umbrella is producing its own well-balanced concoction of resonant gameplay appeal, and the result is what I like to call “The Capcom Streak”. Your mileage may vary, but personally I don’t believe these people have put out a bad game for eight years, and at an average of two games per year in this modern era of crazy-long dev cycles, that’s an incredibly impressive feat. No other major publisher is hitting those numbers in both quantity and quality, and that’s worthy of a quick breakdown if you ask me.

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30 Dec

Best of 2025: Top 15 Games

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2025, Games, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

That one really snuck up on us, huh?

Before September, I was ready to sing the praises of 2025’s evenly-paced major videogame release schedule like it had finally cracked some previously unseen cadence code. Sure, I was 90% sure the convenient rhythm was an accidental side effect of increasingly longer development schedules just about everywhere, but there was pretty much always an interesting game release (or three) just around the corner, and a lot of them were really good. Of course, I enjoyed that immensely.

Then everything changed. While 2023 made headlines in all relevant places for its perceived overall quality as a videogame release year, that one was largely filled with known quantities we had time to anticipate; the final quarter of 2025 was all about heat from surprise sources and/or surprise release dates. By the time we reached an unusually barren November (probably GTA VI‘s fault), there were more 2025 games with 80+ Opencritic scores and passionate fan followings than any regular person could conceivably play. And they were all so varied! Co-op experiences returned in a big way, the needlessly controversial “interactive story” umbrella had a vintage year, and I don’t think there’s ever been a better time for roguelike reception. What a year to be into this hobby.

Add on a brand-new Nintendo console with something to prove, even more big moves into the handheld PC market, and comfortably the best year for Xbox Game Pass ever (for videogame releases, definitely not pricing or PR); now there’s a recipe for a good time.

My criteria for game eligibility is at least five hours of play time, unless time is an irrelevant factor to understanding the experience (i.e. multiplayer games, or really short ones). That disqualifies the following games I had at least some interest in: ARC Raiders, Fast Fusion, Kingdom Come Deliverance II, The Drifter, Urban Myth Dissolution Center, Consume Me, LEGO Party, The Alters, Fantasy Life i, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, Sonic Racing CrossWorlds, Rift of the Necrodancer, Ninja Gaiden 4, No Sleep For Kaname Date, Digimon Story: Time Stranger, Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, Citizen Sleeper 2, and most unfortunately, Ghost of Yotei and Blue Prince.

If a game isn’t in the above paragraph or the list below, I either just didn’t like it enough, or you can find it my re-releases / expansions countdown. Even so, my draft Honourable Mentions roll is so large this year that I’ve decided to weave some of them into the main list wherever a nearly-there game seemed similar enough to one in the top 15 – anything to shorten the page even a little.

Parentheses indicate the version/versions of each game I played in 2025. Let’s go.

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VR BEST OF 2025 DISCLAIMER

This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. Nobody ever agrees with me 100%. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.

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15. Rematch (XSX/PC/PS5)

It doesn’t matter if it’s relatively bare-bones, seems derivative, or has its fair share of jank; Rematch feels incredible to play. It’s also the only game this year I bought on a second platform (without the luxury of cross-progression) and started from scratch again just so I could play with friends, and that in itself says all I need to say about how much of a hold this 3-5-a-side cartoon football simulator had on my thoughts, feelings and desires in the middle of 2025.

It even cost the surprisingly whimsical, delightfully tactile and often satisfying Drag X Drive a shout-out position on this list – and I really wanted to give that game its flowers here – because the competitive essences of the two games are so similar at the end of the day. DxD feels better to play in a tactile sense, and encourages a surprisingly wholesome online community, but a win in Rematch after a perfectly-executed team move with mates after saving a certain goal is like digital crack. So Slocap’s admirable “Rocket League with people” gets to, um, kick off this year’s incredibly strong list.

14. Pokemon Legends: Z-A (NS/NS2)

Just the second game in the unstoppable Pokemon juggernaut’s relatively new “Legends” series, design-wise Z-A moves about as far away from the trendsetting Pokemon Legends: Arceus as possible: that game was all untamed open wilds, minimal human interaction, de-emphasised battling and hyper-tuned catching mechanics; this one is both a celebration and indictment of urban sprawl within a single city, with colourful verbose characters around every turn and an almost hilariously insatiable attitude to Pokemon duels that puts any game in the traditional main series to shame.

The game is evidently super-proud of its experimental real-time battle system, but that isn’t what lifts it onto my list; rather, it’s the fulfilment of a decade’s worth of unresolved Pokemon X/Y foreshadowing by way of a genuinely endearing main cast that succeeds at feeling like an RPG party where X/Y failed, as well as a frequently hilarious localisation that turns random NPCs into memetic heroes. Oh, and the game actually runs properly, so evidently that wasn’t too much to ask.

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29 Dec

Best of 2025: Top 10 K-Pop Albums

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2025, Console, Games, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , .

Following a largely male-dominated 2024 double countdown, 2025 sees a return to our regularly scheduled programming: a predominantly female K-Pop mini-album top five, and a roughly even gender split on the full album side. The EPs are typically big on beats but otherwise nearly impossible to throw a thematic lasso around; as for the LPs, you could say this year’s commonality is successors: there are zero debuts involved, and I found at least something worth saying for each entry about how the artist’s previous work reflects on the newer effort.

Language restrictions are a bit looser for me when it comes to Korean albums than singles, but entire LPs with vanishingly small amount of Korean lyricism – or none at all – still introduce too many questions about western pop lines, so I don’t tend to include them. But I will shout out Kandis’ Playground and Yerin Baek’s Flash and Core, which are both great fun.

1-3 tracks = not eligible

4-7 tracks = mini album

8+ tracks = full album

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VR BEST OF 2025 DISCLAIMER

This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. Nobody ever agrees with me 100%. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.

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MINI-ALBUMS
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5. Rich Man – aespa

Another year of K-Pop, another SM Entertainment album way better than its missed-opportunity title track would seem to foreshadow. Like many of those examples, said title track is made a little better by its connection to the wide variety of B-sides that follow, although they are definitely still the real stars. In particular Count On Me, the song that kicks off the mini’s less spicy second half, is a smooth winner that’d fit into any vocals-forward playlist, and follow-up Angel #48 adds a garage beat to keep the silk moving. I am also a big fan of warbly first-change rap/chant vehicle Drift, however, because a whistle chorus is somehow still my biggest pop weakness after all these years. Makes that questionable treatment of the famous Cher quote go down just a tad easier.

4. Beat It Up – NCT Dream

Another busy year for the Dream lads saw multiple album releases hit the shelves and streamers, but while there’s nothing on Beat It Up that quite hits the skyward heights of the DREAM TEAM B-side from their Back To The Future album, I find the former to be a more consistent listen overall. The EP features a soft centre with crunchy bookends: the title up top and Tempo / Tricky at the end are all about brash beats, and Tempo in particular is a real rollicking head-bopper. Meanwhile Rush combines both sides of NCT Dream’s dual identity, sliding an airy dove-spawning title drop between bassy rap verses; Cold Coffee leans more on the euphoric production but gets there with an understated EDM buzz, and Butterflies serves up a reliable SM ballad – albeit in the middle of an EP rather than as a closer.

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28 Dec

Best of 2025: Top 10 Gaming Moments

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2025, Games, Lists.

Naturally some version of this warning happens every year, but in 2025 it’s more relevant than ever: an unusually high number of 2025’s very best games were defined by their ability to hide twists, cameos, stunning escalations of scale, and other important details from their players until just the right moment – usually deep into their respective stories. So I implore you to be very careful scrolling this list if you’re still waiting to play something released this year.

That said, time for another dose of highly-concentrated gaming goodness, as worthy of discussing as any other part of the interactive tapestry. The original plan for this year’s list was a bit different, but – agh, never mind, I’ll get to it.

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VR BEST OF 2025 DISCLAIMER

This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. Nobody ever agrees with me 100%. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.

SPOILERS FOLLOW; PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK.

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10. Le Super Tournoi de Jacinthe – Pokemon Legends Z-A

In 2025 I still don’t do a countdown list of the year’s best videogame characters, nor the best soundtracks or songs from a videogame. But if I did, this year’s editions would feature both Lady Jacinthe and the incredible electroswing battle track that accompanies her boss battle. The former is a delightfully vain thorn in the side of our hero from the moment she takes an interest in the time-honoured Pokemon protagonist power bump, and the lavish tournament she forces onto most of the story’s named cast is a blast – even when interrupted multiple times by more important story beats, to the great irritation of the ostentatious host. Eventually, the final match approaches – against Jacinthe, naturally – and then that tune hits. Suffice to say it’s worth sitting on that opening freeze frame for a good minute or two before you start launching your attacks.

9. Bar Fight – Dispatch

There are more pivotal and/or emotional moments throughout episodic pseudo-Telltale Games renaissance Dispatch, but catharsis and triumph simply do not hit harder than at the climax of Episode 5, when new studio AdHoc showcases just how impressively you can construct an action sequence when you don’t have to deal with that old abomination of a game engine. Time after time an apt directional button prompt will initiate a show-stopping match-cut linking a team-bonding taco session with a flashback to the brutal bar brawl hours earlier. But this satisfaction does not pay off just because of the stunning direction; it’s also a writing flex, giving the team of superpowered misfits at the heart of the game’s story a moment to get along – at long last – before the stakes really escalate in the final few episodes.

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26 Dec

Best of 2025: Top 5 Game Consoles

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2025, Console, Games, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , .

It hurts to admit, but it feels like this particular list’s days might be numbered.

It’s not that there isn’t plenty to discuss. There was always going to be a lot to say about the console market in 2025, as each of the three traditional big players threw its marketing focus behind at least one new piece of machinery. And yet it seems increasingly likely that one of those three will move out of the console market altogether before long, and with last-gen development support appearing more nebulous by the month, it’s perfectly possible that within two years I’ll only have two relevant console platforms to talk about.

Nonetheless, we’re still doing this, and any discussion about the videogame console market in 2025 simply has to address the gigantic elephant in the room: cost. Here in Australia, every major console you can buy is now more expensive than it was this time last year (except, if you want to be technical, for the PS5 Pro and all models of the original Switch). Two of the major brand subscriptions are also more expensive than this time last year, and while these costs are still dwarfed by the eye-watering sums in the PC market right now, the fact remains that current-gen console gaming costs more in real-money terms than it has in a long, long time. So these ecosystems need to make themselves worthwhile, and regardless of their popularity, the following is my take on which ones did that the best in 2025.

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VR BEST OF 2025 DISCLAIMER

This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. Nobody ever agrees with me 100%. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.

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5. Xbox One

LAST YEAR: 5th

So last year I said I’d probably never put the Xbox One on the main list again, but that was based on the PS4 showing much more relevance to casual players. In 2025 the PS4 got almost nothing new, while at the very, very least the Xbox One picked up some of the sprinkles from Microsoft’s attempt to justify its big Xbox Game Pass price increase. So it just hangs on as a result of my desperate attempt to keep this countdown at full top five status.

4. Nintendo Switch

LAST YEAR: 2nd

The original Nintendo Switch falls to its lowest position ever as far as this tiny list is concerned. This is mostly because Nintendo had something a little more pressing to focus on through 2025, but the Switch did get some pretty fabulous exclusives* (read: not on Playstation or Xbox consoles) this year, so the relatively strong performance of the other two major console platforms also plays a role.

The excellent Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition led the way as the best Nintendo-exclusive game without a bespoke Switch 2 version, but it was followed mighty closely – in both quality and release timing – by never-ending tactics/visual novel fever dream The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy. The earlier Donkey Kong Country Returns HD faced some critical heat for its nip-and-tuck choices, but the older brother Switch had its biggest moment in the final third of the year, when perfectly fine versions of Hades II, Pokemon Legends Z-A, and Metroid Prime 4: Beyond graced the library of the elder statesman. A few notable indie productions picked the Switch as their sole console platform, too, such as the charming While Waiting and the excellent Simogo Legacy Collection, and that all added up to a pretty decent year – just not quite with the same standalone shine as in recent times.

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