Posts Tagged ‘ten’

23 Dec

Best of 2023: Top 10 Game Re-Releases & Expansions

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2023, Games, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , .

That’s right – 2008’s loudest naysayers were not heeded, and their worst nightmares have come to fruition. Here we stand after a year so positively crammed with quality videogame re-releases and downloadable content expansions that we can gloss over them no longer: they are getting their very own page this year. Much like the K-Pop albums countdown, said page will be separated into two top fives…

…is what I would have said, if the sheer strength of the DLC this year hadn’t forced my hand long after I decided to draft this page, so now it’s a top 4 and a top 6? A bit messier, yes, but hey, a lot of this stuff rivals full games released this year; it had to be done.

If you notice a particularly conspicuous major absence from the re-release section, it’s worth mentioning that only the first five out of the seven categories from this article are eligible for consideration here: “reimaginings” and reboots have to fight it out with everyone else on the main list. Parentheses indicate the platform where I played each entry.

Of course this all means that the rather flexible “Special Awards” list that stood in this slot since 2018 is taking a hiatus; but for the record I would’ve probably given Best Third Party Publisher to Capcom (Resident Evil 4, Street Fighter 6, Exoprimal, Ghost Trick, Megaman Battle Network Legacy Collection), Best Indie Publisher to Team17 (Dredge, Headbangers, Blasphemous 2, Moving Out 2), and Best Videogame Adaptation to HBO’s The Last of Us – although that last category was unusually competitive this year.

All sorted? Let’s kick on with this.

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VR BEST OF 2023 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 agree with me 100%, go buy a lottery ticket. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.

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RE-RELEASES
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4. System Shock (PC)

One of the coolest stylistic game remakes I’ve ever seen, the 2023 System Shock project takes a pixelated first-person PC classic and completely rebuilds the world using low-res 3D “voxels”, ensuring a stunning neon colour palette that runs smooth as butter even on low-power portable PC systems. Drastically modernising the gameplay was not necessarily on the top of the priority list for developers Nightdive Studios, so meticulous menu management and item balancing is still the order of the day, but combat feels nice and punchy while the unsettling weirdness that eventually inspired the brilliance of Bioshock is fully preserved in all its skeevy sci-fi glory. It really sucks that Steam cloud saves still aren’t working properly for the game at the time of writing, though.

3. Advance Wars 1+2 Re-Boot Camp (NS)

One of the most unlikely revivals in Nintendo’s catalogue may already be dead again thanks to an entire year’s delay brought about by real-world events, but if this fantastic package is the only word we hear from the Advance Wars series for the next decade, I’ll have to begrudgingly admit I’m OK with that. Veteran indie outfit Wayforward has absolutely nailed the most crucial parts of the Advance Wars experience, enlivening a controversial toy-like art style with countless animation touches (Kanbei’s CO Power animation, anyone?) and tweaking the enemy AI just enough to balance challenge and nostalgia. Most importantly, this might be the best approach to music in a videogame remake I have ever played, and I’m not just saying that because The Consouls did Sensei’s Theme. Of course I do fervently hope this is not the end, and it now has to be the WF team who are trusted with the next step in this series’ mythical return.

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22 Dec

Best of 2023: Top 5 Disappointments

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2023, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , .

For the first time since 2017, the hub of negativity that traditionally kicks off this site’s annual look back is condensed to five entries. That’s almost entirely thanks to a brand-new list that goes live tomorrow and needs the space, but the kinds of disappointing news and trends that tend to make the cut are also kinda easy to categorise in bunches this year – for the most part. And that means we can also get it out of the way quickly to focus on the good stuff.

As has been the case for many years now, this is a petty personal list first and foremost: it does not tend to cover anything from the (depressingly long and ever-present) list of examples of people treating other people without basic human dignity within the movie or games industries. If I couldn’t use this page to complain about first-world problems, the list wouldn’t exist and we’d just be focusing on positives the whole way down. That said, time to get some things off my chest.

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VR BEST OF 2023 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 agree with me 100%, go buy a lottery ticket. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.

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5. Curse of the 7s

As plenty of writers were eager to repeat over the course of 2023, it was a bad year to be a publically accepted “7/10” videogame. Before you dismiss that statement as always true anyway and scroll on, remember a 7/10 videogame is not a bad game: it just usually appeals less to players not usually invested in the genre than an 8 or 9 might. Virtually every year my top games list includes a couple of examples where critical consensus and I do not meet, and those paragraphs are often my favourite to write.

But oh boy, this was definitely not the year to be one of those games.

When your competition for people’s free time is the latest Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, Diablo or Zelda, any perceived flaw strong enough to knock you below 75-80 on Meta/Opencritic will always hurt more. In the case of Exoprimal, one of my most anticipated games of the year, that flaw was the lack of any sort of party matchmaking (a blow that would’ve landed the game its own spot on this list any other year). For The Last Case of Benedict Fox, it was a cluttered UI and just a few too many frame drops on the Xbox Series S. For Atomic Heart, an overly chatty sidekick and a failure to capitalise on a strong opening. For Immortals of Aveum – an otherwise impressive Unreal Engine 5 visual showcase with super-slick production – it was a script too eager to ape the modern Marvel movie formula. In the latter case, as well as many others no doubt, the result was the slashing of a talented and promising development team, and when poor release timing is to blame it just feels so cruel.

4. Nintendo’s Wild Patent Spree

Though it never goes down well and usually happens as stealthily as possible, major videogame companies looking to stave off competition by patenting in-game mechanics is nothing new; famous examples include the Nemesis system from Warner Bros’ Middle Earth duology and Namco’s long-standing exclusive ability to run minigames on loading screens. But Nintendo’s 2023 patent application streak for mechanics within Tears of the Kingdom raised more than a few eyebrows when it came to light that the company wanted to own (or take payment for) things as banal as riding a moving object without physically interacting with it, or a fast travel preview on a loading screen.

From one tiny angle this makes sense: you can imagine games like Immortals: Fenix Rising and Genshin Impact scaring the Kyoto bigwigs with some of their direct inspiration from Breath of the Wild. But, like, come on man. A gaming world without a company as big as Nintendo doing its own quirky thing would be unbearably dull (especially with the current sedate state of Sony), but that doesn’t mean the folks at the Big N should own every innovation they come up with – let alone ones they do not. That’s hardly the way to a better industry, and honestly this kind of attitude makes me worry that the current Nintendo upper management might not believe they can continue to conjure up more weird innovation in the future.

This is meant to be a trend-focused post, so while we’re talking about Nintendo-adjacent disappointments:

  • The mass disqualifications at the Pokemon World Championships thanks to eleventh-hour changes to how team-building rules are enforced didn’t make anyone involved look good at all;
  • Though expected, forewarned and unfortunately kind of inevitable, the definitive closure of the 3DS and Wii U eShops back in March was a grim reminder of the limitations of digital storefronts – and Nintendo’s own distaste for letting people play their old games on new platforms.
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29 Aug

Ten More 2023 Movies Summarised in Ten Words Each

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

Here we are already – much slower than last year but still far too quickly. It’s been an eventful middle third of the year for film: a pair of megaton Hollywood strikes with wide-reaching (and justified) implications, no less than three big-name blockbusters releasing as “Part Ones” like it’s the early 2010s all over again, the official end of the ill-fated DCEU, and of course the irresistible juggernaut that was Barbenheimer. The news cycle has been juicy, and the movies haven’t been half-bad either. Most of them, anyway.

Here are ten quick takes:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3

“I lost count of the number of times I cried.”

Fast X

“It’s getting harder to enjoy these unironically, but Momoa carries.”

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14 Apr

Ten 2023 Movies Summarised in Ten Words Each

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

And so we arrive at the first movie milestone within a year that couldn’t possibly live up to the cinematic majesty of 2022… could it?

Nah, it couldn’t. But maybe?

Though 2023 perhaps opened with a bit of a stutter after the dust settled from the customary late-Australian Oscar buzz period, by mid-April we are in the thick of a release schedule that has already delivered surprises and quality in equal measure. I know I’ve missed one or two word-of-mouth gems so far and you can be sure I will catch up on them by year’s end, but here’s my first batch of ten (you could argue it’s technically nine) new-release films for 2023:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre

“Thinner plot than Ritchie’s best, but riotously fun character banter.”

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

“Destined to be called “not that bad” in five years.”

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31 Dec

Best of 2022: Top 10 Movies

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2022, Lists, Movies. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

This has been the year’s final countdown on Vagrant Rant for a decade now, but it’s usually a relative breeze to put together after the competitive stress of the album and videogame lists – which in fairness do tend to require more time investment. But it also rarely feels like the biggest list of the year, despite its prime slot.

And yet here we are. Not since 2014 has my top ten movies ranking been this ridiculously stacked; I probably wouldn’t hesitate to throw the entire thing at last year’s list and watch it displace the majority of 2021 like an Archimedes dream. Three films that provided mentions on both the characters and scenes lists this year don’t even make the overall top ten here. The Black Phone, Elvis and After Yang don’t even make the honorable mentions. I tried to fit them. I don’t know what else to say; it really was so much fun to watch movies in cinemas this year, and that did not seem likely for the majority of this decade thus far.

I finished 2022 with 41 new-release movies in the can – yes, including Morbius – and because I doubt I’ll ever get up to a number that high again, we’re going for a full deck of ten (still un-ordered) honorable mentions to close out the year – hey, that’s still only covering under 50% of what I watched so it doesn’t feel gratuitous, right?

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VR BEST OF 2022 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. To agree with me 100% is as likely as avoiding MCU fatigue. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.

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10. The Batman

For the first time in ten years, the best superhero movie of the year came from DC. Anything is possible, folks; especially when a movie looks and sounds this good. Sure, this is a Batman story with eyebrow-raising things to say about Bruce Wayne, his allies and his enemies; and the vast majority of the new classic character interpretations justify themselves. But this isn’t just a comic book – it’s a movie, and I mean, just look at it. You could probably just overlay the red-and-black film logo over the entire film and it would barely look out of place; shadows and blood-red highlights define a stunning vision for Gotham City courtesy of Planet of the Apes trilogy director Matt Reeves. That main score is also evocative and weirdly catchy, and it’s bolstered by the best use of a Nirvana song since Weird Al gargled marbles.

9. The Stranger

This was surely Netflix’s best-ever year for exclusive new films (I’d love to comb through properly and confirm that though), and The Stranger is a compelling start to that argument. Based loosely on a gut-churning true story, this tale of an undercover cop trying to make friends with a slippery drifter suspected of cold murder is rendered scarily relatable by Joel Edgerton’s anxious two-sided performance. Sean Harris is even better as the mark in question, and the cinematography makes the isolating open plains of Western Australia feel as bleak as the claustrophobic interior shots rife with unsettling buzzing. The Stranger is definitely more about the journey than the destination, but what a journey.

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30 Dec

Best of 2022: Top 15 Games

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2022, Games, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

What a weird year for those of us who follow videogames.

The flow of the annual release schedule remains a frustrating thing to predict year-to-year, but it took on an extra-strange shape in 2022: as far as the wider triple-A scene was concerned, virtually all the big game action was localised to the first and last quarters of the year. That meant enough of a relative chasm in the middle to allow me to complete a massive-scale catch-up project I never thought I’d have the time to do, but it also meant an unusually dense December full of release dates that didn’t blink for once. So it’s no surprise that, with a couple of big-name exceptions, this GOTY countdown is defined by the only two consistent sources of quality game releases all year: prestige indies and the Nintendo Switch.

Single-player games don’t qualify unless I played them for over five hours or finished them, which this year eliminates *deep breath* Sonic Frontiers, The Callisto Protocol, Tinykin, Harvestella, Soul Hackers 2, Live A Live, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, AI: nirvanA Initiative, Card Shark, The DioField Chronicle, Metal: Hellsinger, and Evil West from contention, even though any of those games could have genuinely challenged for a place on the list had I got to play more of them – and I’m probably forgetting quite a few others. Extra-special shout-out to Chained Echoes, High on Life and Sports Story, which arrived at the eleventh hour and rocketed up in hype after I had already started the year-end writing process in earnest and had absolutely no hope of playing them.

Parentheses indicate the platform (or platforms – cross-save is truly a wild concept) where I played each game.

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VR BEST OF 2022 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. To agree with me 100% is as likely as avoiding MCU fatigue. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.

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15. Stray (PS5)

2022 was a year positively teeming with quality indie games, and they ran the gamut of genres and presentation styles. Only one of them was really trying to follow the triple-A game design formula. It was the cat game. The game where you play as a literal cat. In a way, that kinda made it this year’s Kena: Bridge of Spirits: a Sony exclusive with a wide linear level design structure, evolving stakes, tempting PSN trophy design and great use of the Dualsense controller; it is thankfully much easier than Kena though. Stray also has an excellent soundtrack, goes to some pretty wild places in terms of its oddly endearing AI supporting cast, and doesn’t outstay its welcome. Good stuff to kick us off.

14. Triangle Strategy (NS)

Triangle Strategy can perhaps consider itself one of the unluckier victims of 2022’s release schedule quirks, hitting in the middle of arguably Square Enix’s worst PR month in years when it already had enough to deal with regarding its terrible name and warped fandom expectations. Hindsight is 20/20, but it’s tempting to imagine an alternative situation where it let, say, the Tactics Ogre Reborn remaster go first to allow it’s story-first tacical gameplay approach room to breathe around JRPG July or something. But contextual frustrations aside, this game is a treat, fusing a meaty Game of Thrones-infused narrative epic with stunning artwork and rewarding, character-driven progression to add intimate significance to on-field strategic moves and major off-field democratic choices alike. Speaking of which…

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28 Dec

Best of 2022: Top 10 Movie Scenes

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2022, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , .

This has to be my favourite edition of this list ever.

So many great 2022 movies, so many great scenes, not enough space. There’s no slot for that haunting Riddler scene that opens The Batman, for example, or the water bottle backstory from Bullet Train. Zoe Saldana nailed two completely different all-too-short sequences in two wildly different movies this year, and I couldn’t find room for either of them here. I’d also normally have space to have fun with ludicrous moments like that crab dance from the third Fantastic Beasts movie – which is played completely straight – or that cooked out-of-body tiny cave meet-up from the beginning of The Northman – or that final shot from The Menu. But alas, only ten slots on this one. Here are the movie moments that fill them:

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VR BEST OF 2022 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. To agree with me 100% is as likely as avoiding MCU fatigue. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.

MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

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10. Sea Showdown – Avatar: The Way of Water

The trademark James Cameron Action Finale is present and accounted for in his spectacular 2022 Avatar sequel, and how. A few prior action beats go off spectacularly in 3D and 48 frames per second – starting with a stunning train derailment and moving through countless gorgeous water-borne shenanigans – but the climactic battle on open water is somehow greater than the sum of its technically-impressive parts, largely thanks to an ocean of earlier ensemble character work with and an armada of Chekhov’s gunfire ignited surgically by a master of the craft.

9. Field Operation – Ambulance

The constant complication conga faced by the desperate criminal characters at the centre of Ambulance’s white-knuckle ride-along would probably make for a pretty decent black comedy if the film was shot differently – but that hypothetical version probably wouldn’t include this visceral scene. I’d wager only medical professionals would find the exaggerated luck and Hollywood-accurate medical terms at the heart of this impromptu video-call surgery funny in any way. For the rest of us, it’s just a nail-shredding tension tornado not for the squeamish.

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27 Dec

Best of 2022: Top 10 Gaming Moments

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2022, Games, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , .

As long as there are new games, there are moments within those games that will come to define the year in which they first appeared. Future mentions of that year will hurtle these immortalised blends of digital art and human experience to the forefront of the mind like tiny, delicious morsels of nostalgic goodness, transporting the player back to a crystallised slice of time when experiencing this medium felt truly worthwhile.

Actually, that may just be me.

Here are my top ten favourite moments I had with videogames in 2022. Big ol’ spoilers ahead, particularly for a fair few story endings.

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VR BEST OF 2022 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. To agree with me 100% is as likely as avoiding MCU fatigue. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.

MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

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10. Exiled – Pokemon Legends: Arceus

Raise your hand if you thought the cel-shaded Pokemon spin-off about rounding up historical versions of fan-favourite creatures in steam-powered Pokeballs was capable of an affecting story moment putting you in the shoes of a shunned outcast after an entire town turns on you during a crisis, forcing you to perform a silent walk of shame as everyone judges you for something that isn’t your fault. Yeah, I’m not raising my hand either.

9. Mammoth – Horizon: Forbidden West

Even more than the first game, Horizon: Forbidden West is built on interlocking systems; we’re not talking obscene Breath of the Wild physics shenanigans here, but we are dealing with a richer suite of combat options that builds on Zero Dawn‘s greatest strength to cook up a veritable buffet of viable attack angles in most situations. After throwing you into a handful of scenarios designed to tease out some of these options, the game’s first encounter with a resting, fully decked-out robotic mammoth (or at least the first one I found) is an absolute peach. I almost beat it once with the head-on approach, then after reloading the save tried a completely different combination of weapons, weak points and environmental hazards to chip away and take it down. It’s a sensational spectacle, especially once you factor in all the gorgeous particle effects and the electronic/symphonic hybrid battle music – which goes hard.

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26 Dec

Best of 2022: Top 10 Movie Characters

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2022, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , .

If you’ve visited this site at all during 2022, thank you! You might have picked up the vague impression that a lot of movies worth seeing came out this year, and you’d be right. However, sometimes a sea of well-made films can limit the potential for standout characters to emerge; traditionally this is a list that tends to revel in larger-than-life caricatures thrust into the memory because their surrounding movies aren’t the greatest. It’s also historically rather fond of side characters that aren’t necessarily all that important to narrative momentum, often allowing them to have more fun.

That’s how you know 2022 was a truly special year for cinema: not only did I thoroughly enjoy every one of the ten movies that birthed these characters, but the vast majority of them are essential parts of their films’ stories – a couple are even the main protagonist. Needless to say I quite enjoyed writing this one.

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VR BEST OF 2022 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. To agree with me 100% is as likely as avoiding MCU fatigue. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.

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10. Danny – Ambulance

Jake Gyllenhaal must be so much fun to cast in movies these days. The drama / thriller veteran has built up such a varied portfolio of roles that if you go blind into a JG film, you’re probably just as likely to see him play a relatable underdog as a despicable psychopath. And that makes him absolutely perfect for Danny in Michael Bay’s Ambulance. His first scene sets him up brilliantly with characteristics of both archetypes and from then on he becomes the cast’s true wildcard, holding emotional dynamite in his capable hands as the tension ratchets up consistently around him, threatening to set off explosions. And boy, do we get explosions.

9. Namor – Wakanda Forever

Even more than its ambitious predecessor, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is an ensemble piece; and while the best performance in the movie surely belongs to Angela Bassett as Queen Ramonda, the most memorable character presence comes from a new addition. The long-awaited MCU debut of Namor the Sub-Mariner – here reinvented as a villainous immortal Mesoamerican warrior worshipped by the alternate name Kukulkan – simmers with a vengeful anger tempered by intimidating patience thanks to a physically imposing turn from Tenoch Huerta. Best believe his zippy airborne action sequences and the destruction they cause are something to behold, too.

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25 Dec

Best of 2022: Top 15 K-Pop Singles

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2022, K-Pop, Lists, Music. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , .

As far as this site is concerned, 2022 has essentially been about looking back over the last decade of entertainment media; that is, of course, purely a coincidence based on my decision to start a blog at the beginning of 2012. But for some reason, more than any other year-end countdown list this year, this particular one really seems to want to match the nostalgic mood. Whether it’s the sound, the visuals, or shockingly the acts themselves, increasingly large swathes of K-Pop are starting to sound like they did ten years ago, and I for one am thrilled. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of stuff on this page unbeholden to the past; but if you’ve ever called yourself a lapsed casual K-Pop fan, this list might just be worth your ears (and good pair of headphones, and probably your removal of automatic captions, but that’s up to you).

A shout-out to the community of the Diggy’s Dungeon K-Pop podcast for their knowledge and recommendations, and as always a quick disclaimer that I base this very personal ranking on the music first and foremost (well entirely, really – most of these music videos were completely new to me this week).

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VR BEST OF 2022 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. To agree with me 100% is as likely as avoiding MCU fatigue. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.

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15. Forever 1 – Girls’ Generation

Welcome back SNSD!

Way, way down on the list of things I didn’t know I wanted to hear in 2022 – because I genuinely didn’t think it was possible – was the return of a full (well, as full as possible after all that 2014 business) Girls’ Generation line-up. But not only did they somehow make it happen, they put out the best track in the history of the eight-member edition. Packed with cheesy touches like that cavernous stadium clap effect on the chorus, and utterly unafraid to overfill your headphones with a wall of sound, the chorus line still manages to soar over it all, and the Into the New World reference in the background of the bridge? Stop, please. I’m not afraid to admit I got real emotional the first time I heard this one.

14. Alone – Highlight

The former B2ST boys brought back the bass in 2022 – and not much else – but that minimalist sound just works wonders on the ever-confident Alone, which extracts maximum value from a single slap line, a bit of cheeky distortion and the mature charm of the group’s four remaining vocal veterans. It’s a clean dose of throwback K-Pop listening, and that’s before you even lay eyes on the gloriously 2010-style video. Dance-in-a-box, ambiguous collapsing scenery, neon lights and expensive car all present and accounted for, thank you.

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