Welcome, dear reader! If you’re a fan of the Legend of Zelda series, you are in the right place.
Over the next 30 days on Vagrant Rant, leading up to the October 5th Australian physical release of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker HD on Wii U (it will probably show October 4th on WordPress), you will see fifteen Zelda-themed countdowns. Not all of them are top tens; some are top fives and some top fifteens, but overall there will be 150 listed Zelda, er, things on this site by the release of that gorgeous-looking game.
I’m going to try to make this as comprehensive as possible, so some of these lists might seem a little odd. Honorable mentions are in no particular order. Also, I’m pulling 90% of my images from one excellent site, zeldawiki.org, which sometimes goes down. So if images don’t appear when you view a countdown, that is the most likely explanation as to why.
Before I begin, however, I just want to point out just what Zelda games I have actually played and finished, along with what systems they are available on in non-emulated form, so you know what kind of things won’t be showing up on any of the countdowns:
Because I’m not a game designer, I will act like everything in this article is super easy to do.
Modern videogames do a lot of things right. The so-called AAA blockbuster games are more cinematically engaging than ever before and despite the at times stagnant annualised releases of mega franchises, there are new and exciting things to be found within big releases all the time. And of course the indie game development scene continues to serve up some real gems.
However, all types of games to this day are guilty of not including some simple practical features that surely must count as rudimentary by now. In my book including these miniscule but super-convenient features makes your game just that little bit better, no matter what, even if their presence won’t fix any major problems with game design. What’s more, they require little to no creativity to execute. I’ve noticed enough of these regular and baffling omissions to write up a decent-sized list. It’s certainly a subjective list but I’m sure I speak for a lot of people on some of these in particular. And sure, there are some modern games that nail all of these bread-and-butter inclusions (or at least all the ones they can), but I still find it more than a little weird just how rare these games are.
I’ll admit that some of these entries may be harder to execute in practice than they are on paper, but from where I stand it’s hard to see how they could be any more difficult to implement than any other aspect of making a game. Also, about half of these things are specific to a certain console. .
1. Include an hour counter.
Really, this is the feature that inspired me to write this list. It is the one basic thing that I see most frequently left out of games these days and surely one of the absolute easiest things to fix. Being able to tell just how long you have played a game helps you judge its worth and makes conversations about said game involve a lot less guesswork. This is especially handy for RPGs, which tend to involve a great deal of time sinking, but a counter really should be included in every kind of game, because really, where’s the downside? The likes of the Pokemon franchise have been doing this for decades but the best recent example of great usage I can think of is Tales of Graces f, which not only has an overall time counter at your fingertips whenever you bring up the menu, but boasts a second counter right underneath the first to gauge the length of individual play sessions. Top form, Namco Bandai.
Also known as Local Co-op Month, or The Best Acronym I Could Think Of For August.
The last month of our Australian winter, which starts tomorrow, is rarely the domain of many exciting videogame launches. It’s traditionally the last moment of quiet before the likes of FIFA begin to ring in the year’s most gigantic holiday releases. However, if you happen to be a fan of getting a bunch of mates round for some good old fashioned couch co-operative sessions on your favourite gaming system, you have plenty of reasons to be excited for this August. There are more local friendship-destroyers launching in 2013’s eighth month than you can shake a pair of controllers at, which comes as quite a lovely lump sum following the relative drought of such titles throughout the first half of the year. I’ve listed the promising eight I know of in this very article.
This probably isn’t even all of them; I wouldn’t be surprised if I missed a Steam game or two. Continue reading →
Another year, another round-up, another desperate relationship with sleep.
What an exciting Electronic Entertainment Expo. If you ask me the 2013 major publishing conferences were the most interesting, surprising and, in at least one case, outright brutal I have seen for a long, long time. Wow.
Just as I did last year, I’ve broken down and ranked each conference from least to most impressive in my own opinion. Of course each company just showed so very many games that I cannot possibly hope to remember them all, so please keep that in mind. I will say that even though last year I placed Ubisoft on top of the list, this year’s EA conference (which is ranked lowest here) would have given that purple French showcase a real run for its money. 2013 was just that good for E3 conferences.
Every one of these days is going to offer so very, very much.
About a year ago I sung the praises of the month of June right here on Vagrant Rant, mentioning a handful of promising entertainment media releases releasing that month that made it a truly exciting time to be a fan of movies and videogames. Well, quite frankly, the 2013 edition of June smashes the 2012 version on promise alone. My word, look at just ten of the things that will be available to us this month (in chronological order): Continue reading →
Today marks the long awaited Korean debut solo release from CL, leader of mega-successful K-Pop group 2NE1 and the self-proclaimed “baddest female of Seoul city”. It’s kind of a big deal in K-Pop circles and so to celebrate, here’s a little something on Korean female idol rappers.
If you’ve ever had a taste of K-Pop music lasting longer than an hour or so, you’d have a pretty good idea of the genre’s attitude to hip-hop music. Hip-hop influences run through just about every bit of dance choreography you’ll see today, but there’s more to it than that. It pervades the image of nearly every group in some form, whether male or female. For example, outside of Girls’ Generation (coincidentally the most popular K-Pop group around these days), pretty much every girl group now packs an obligatory “rapper”. That’s regardless of whether said rapper actually has any background rapping, or whether their “raps” consist of anything more than talking in a slightly modified voice over a beat.
While this can result in some cringeworthy sounds, it also gives some rappers who do know what they’re doing a platform to the kind of recognition they just wouldn’t get on the underground scene. Because of K-Pop’s corporation-driven, highly standardised nature, which breeds the kind of male-female parity that only such unapologetic profit-chasing can produce, what we’re left with is a situation where, by association, female rappers receive just as much attention, if not more, than their male counterparts. I certainly can’t think of any other country where this is the case, at least not off the top of my head. And sure, idol group rapping is naturally going to be tamer than the underground stuff, but that doesn’t mean it can’t sound awesome (It certainly doesn’t hurt that the natural flow of the Korean language lends itself well to a good rapper).
So ignoring the likes of Tasha, a hugely respected Korean solo R&B/hip hop artist who is pretty incredible at what she does, as well as just about every other actual full-blown hip hop artist in Korea, I’m going to focus here on rappers that come from idol groups. What follows is my admittedly limited opinion on the seven best Korean female rappers going around in K-Pop groups at the moment:
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7. Lime – HELLOVENUS
Despite debuting last year as part of one of the girliest groups K-Pop fans have seen in a while, Kim Hye-Lim or “Lime” has some pretty impressive rapping talents. Not only can she belt out a tune with the best of them but she can also switch up rap styles, pulling off either speed or flow-based rhymes when the situation calls for it. Fans are still waiting for a HELLOVENUS release that actually shows off these skills in earnest, because for now they don’t really fit the group’s image, but no K-Pop group stays to one concept for too long…
I am quite fond of Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics’ latest effort, the rebooted Tomb Raider (You can read about just how fond of it I am in my review here). While playing through the game I came across quite a few memorable moments worth mentioning and thought they deserved their own post. If you haven’t played the game yet, I recommend that instead of reading this, you go and play it right now.
Here are two more lists for you to disagree with at your leisure.
So just over a year ago year I got all excited about the pile of new movies and games that were coming out in 2012 and posted a pair of top ten lists to order my anticipation. As it turned out, I didn’t even end up watching some of the movies on the list and an embarrassing amount of the games I wrote about didn’t even come out in 2012. Here’s hoping I’ll be a little more accurate with this year’s equivalent.
For the sake of neatness, I’ll only count movies/games that are coming out after the month of March has run its course.
MOVIES
10. jOBS (Teaser)
I’m curious, OK? I don’t actually think Ashton Kutcher is the worst guy in the world and, even if his turn as the late great Steve Jobs sucks, this movie is still going to be talked about quite a bit and I want in on that conversation.
9. World War Z (Trailer)
Zombie movies can be great, they can be decent, or they can be so bad they’re good. In my lifetime I have never come across one that is just bad, and so I will happily watch the eerie World War Z when it hits.
8. The Great Gatsby (Trailer)
Baz Luhramann’s latest pulls out so many Moulin Rouge stops in its trailers that it kinda demands to be watched on style factor alone. Which I suppose is Luhrmann’s deal in the first place. Leo DiCaprio and Michelle Williams sweeten the deal.
7. Pacific Rim (Trailer)
On face value I can’t really believe that this movie is actually happening. It looks like Battleship meets Real Steel, and while the latter movie was surprisingly decent, the former, well, it kinda sucked. Everything changes, of course, when you realise that Guillermo del Toro is directing. Colour me hyped.
6. Despicable Me 2 (Teaser)
If there was ever a non-Disney, non-Dreamworks animated feature that surprised me enough for me to rate it among my favourite animated movies of all time, it’s the hilarious and heartfelt Despicable Me from Illumination Entertainment. Now a sequel is well on the way and while it will struggle to top the first one, you can bet I’ll be at the cinemas in week one to make that call for myself.
This is it, the last day of 2012 (in Australian time at least – stupid WordPress date numbering system). It has been a pretty awesome year for me personally and a pretty important factor has been the support my first ever blogging attempt has received, both from my friends and from people I’ve never met before, through Facebook, Twitter, the WordPress community and beyond. I am truly grateful to you all. 78 posts in 12 months! Woooo!
If you missed any of my top ten top tens of 2012, here are some conveniently arranged links for you! -◊-◊-◊-◊-
Somehow we arrive at the end of ten days of top ten lists, one hundred “things” in all. This is the last one; the ten absolute best movies I have seen this year. It was a fantastic year for the big screen, as while there were plenty of indie efforts worth writing home about, many of the blockbusters really stepped up their game in a big way. The unexpected, record-smashing success of one film in particular may have altered the way big studios think about their intellectual properties and release schedules for good.
I don’t profess to having seen all the movies that came out in 2012; heck, I didn’t even see all the movies I wanted to see in 2012. But I did see more than enough of them to make this list a tough one to put together. One thing I noticed about the list after I had finally decided on an order is how weird it looks to see so many movies on it that came out in the first two months of the year; that was so long ago it almost feels like they didn’t release this year at all. The odd thing about living in Australia is that we usually only get movies released late in any given year Stateside early in the next one, which means the majority of movie websites on the internet would have already discussed some of these big screen gems 12 months ago. But I’ll take what I’m given and I was given a lot of good movies in 2012.
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VR BEST OF 2012 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. If you actually agree with me 100%, that’s scary. You have been warned, fanboys. -◊-◊-◊-◊-
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10. Hugo
The golden world of Hugo won much attention during last year’s award season for its brilliantly understated use of 3D (look how far we’ve come in 12 months – where is the talk of 3D now?), but that isn’t what made it stand out. Hugo is a heartfelt story appropriate for all ages and its affection for Hollywood’s early history is palpable, particularly in the second half of the story. The sentiment never comes off as cheesy, which could easily have been the case, and the whole film is all the more remarkable given it was directed by gangster film veteran Martin Scorcese.
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