2021 has ended and I’m back with yet another Top 10 list for the year. I don’t really have any pithy comments or things I want to say about this year. I’m a tad bit sick and dreading working over New Year’s, so I’m just going to keep the intro short this year. The one thing I will mention is I somehow ended up with nearly half a list of songs sung entirely in English, which was not my intention...
Here we are at the end of yet another year of Japanese music. I normally go into some detail about the year as a whole or my process of putting this list together, but those feel a bit trite at this point and I don’t really have much to say. I’ll just say here are my Top 10 Japanese songs of 2021 and I hope you enjoy them! Feel free to comment or share anything you liked from the year too! 10....
2020 has concluded (finally…) and it’s time to take a look at its best Korean songs. This year’s list came together with surprising ease, despite how many times I thought over the last twelve months “man, there aren’t really any amazing bangers for this year yet.” Nearly every song on the list was on my tentative playlist within a day or two after hearing it. When it came time to refine and ord...
Another year of Japanese music has concluded! My list for this year took a weird journey. I’ve been adding stuff to a tentative playlist all year in order to keep up with things I liked and have an easy way to listen to them again and again. This list looked very different before December. As I started the refinement process, I ended up throwing out a good chunk of stuff I thought was a lock an...
Another year, another Top 10! While I know that very few people care about these lists, particularly the Korean ones, I still enjoy taking the time to reflect on the past year of music and determine which songs I felt the strongest about. It gives those songs more importance to me in the future and makes returning to them even years down the line very nostalgic. 2019 was another one of those ye...
2019 was a pretty damn good year for Japanese music. It started strong and just kept going with solid hit after solid hit from artists both new and old. Even just a few months in, there were so many great songs I was worried I’d have a hard time putting my list together in December. While there were some difficulties, mainly in nailing down the bottom few songs, this year’s list was actually mu...
2018 was not a bad year for Japanese music. There was a steady flow of consistently solid tracks for pretty much the entire year, and I added more songs this year to my giant repository of noteworthy music than any year before it. At the same time, however, fewer songs made a great impact on me in 2018. I had a hard time putting together this list, not because I had too many songs to choose fro...
For whatever reason, 2018 felt like the flattest year in Korean music since I’ve started regularly listening to it back in 2013. With the dissolution of groups like 2NE1 and Sistar last year and the lack of new releases from favorites like f(x) and Brown Eyed Girls, combined with a very sluggish dripfeed of actual bangers throughout the year and my overall disinterest in a lot of the bigger rel...
While many people know Dontnod today because of the widely-loved Life is Strange, few recall the company’s first game, Remember Me. Releasing almost 5 years ago to the day, June 3rd of 2013, Remember Me was an admittedly flawed action game that received mostly average reviews due to the flat characters and predictable story and was promptly forgotten by the overall gaming consciousness. However...
At this point, most of us are familiar with online storefronts like Steam or Humble Bundle. I’m willing to bet that far fewer are familiar with Itch.io. Any developer can sell their product on Itch.io and choose what portion of their profits they wish to pay to the site, even zero if they like. They also have very few rules and allow pretty much anything to be sold on the site. It’s a great pla...
With this 2017 Top 10 list, I’ve now done these lists for five years in a row. Man, that is a long time. I’ve had a distant affection for JPOP for a long time, but I really started my deep dive into the genre in 2013. After being pulled into the world of KPOP via the thread here on Giant Bomb, I decided to finally go all in on JPOP as well. Ever since then, I’ve spent a stupid amount of time ea...
2017 marks the fifth year in a row I’ve done these lists. Boy, how the time flies. I first got into KPOP in 2013 thanks to Giant Bomb’s own KPOP thread , which exposed me to tons of exciting new artists and opened up a whole new world of music for me. Ever since then, I’ve spent a stupid amount of time each year listening to what the genre has to offer and always like to end the year with a sum...
It’s that time again: time for my top 10 Japanese songs of the year! 2016 was a sluggish year for JPOP, with multiple stretches of thin releases. For awhile, I was worried I wouldn’t even be able to put together 10 songs worth talking about at the end of the year. The new releases did pick up, thankfully, and some of my favorite artists also put out some great new material this year. I think th...
2016 is over, so what better time to talk about my top 10 Korean songs of the year? KPOP in 2016 was notably consistent, with a inexorable string of above-average releases that came for months on end. As a result, I listened to SO MUCH KPOP this year. This made it all too easy to pick 10 songs for my end-of year list. Putting them in order was shockingly simple too, everything nicely sliding in...
2015 is over, so it’s time to talk about my favorite Korean songs of the year! While these lists don’t get a lot of attention each year, I still have a great deal of fun remembering the songs that I heard, tracking down my favorites, and figuring out just why they stuck with me; it is seriously the most rewarding work I do all year. There have been some fantastic trends this year: songs willing...
I’m back again to share my top 10 Japanese songs of the year! While interest in my past lists has never been anything special, I still enjoy going back through a year’s worth of music and remembering what it contained. It’s been an interesting year, with some exciting new trends and creative artists I can’t wait to hear more of. My list is a bit more diverse than last year’s as a result, featur...
The Sand Plague is vicious, cutting huge swaths through the village's population in just a few days. If you’re a fan of horror games, you’ve probably heard the name Pathologic brought up at least once or twice. Like many of the genre’s more obscure releases (Rule of Rose, Haunting Ground, etc.), this title has something of a cult following. Those who had the patience to deal with the irregular...
You can flee, use items, and dash through combat, but your hero fights on his own by simply running into foes. Half-Minute Hero is now one of my favorite twists on a game genre. If you’ve never played or even heard of the game, let me give you the basic idea. You play as a typical JRPG hero who only has 30 seconds in any given level to reach the boss and defeat him. As such, everything about th...
Meet Garrett, the star of the show. Maybe he's better in the previous games but I can't stand him here. I try to write reviews of most of the games I’ve played and post them here on Giant Bomb. While it’s likely that few people will ever read them, I still enjoy the act of compiling my thoughts on a game and drawing conclusions about why I did or didn’t like it. If I can help even one person to...
I played a lot of games in 2014. My intent was to make a dent in my massive backlog, tackling game after game in hopes of bringing the list down to a more manageable size. As a result, I finished over 80 games (most of them in the first half of the year, even) and dabbled in nearly twice that. While I wrote reviews for some of these completed games, I didn’t have the time to say my piece on all...
In the month of October, I decided to play a bunch of horror games: what better way to celebrate the spookiest month of the year, after all? My mix included both games I’ve finished previously and a sizable number of games I’ve never played before. Since I got the chance to experience so many new games, I figured I would put together this blog detailing my thoughts on each to give other people...
The new "pop-up" style for cutscenes--likely cheaper and easier to render than the other ones. I’m here yet again to talk about Drakengard 3--is anyone tired of it yet? All humor aside, it’s a game I think has been tragically overlooked by many, even with its rough edges, and I can’t stop thinking about it for a variety of reasons. The most recent reason? Its DLC, which I bought a few months ag...
Zero, the "hero" of the game. NOTE: I will be talking extensively about the very end of Drakengard 3. I won’t get into too many of the greater story details, but the final sequence will be discussed at length. If you want to be surprised by it (and it can be quite surprising), you may not want to read any further. Also, be wary of the images used on this post, as I have included a few from this...
Lightning Returns is a recent game that credits its English voice cast. Japanese games are some of my favorites, time and time again. Many of them feature kooky characters, creative storylines, and clunky yet interesting gameplay mechanics. This year alone has brought Lightning Returns and Drakengard 3, two games I enjoyed immensely for their unique worlds and bold experimentation within their...
This is something I'm trying, a journal from the viewpoint of my character during her explorations in Final Fantasy XIV. If reception seems to be poor, I won't bother to do another. Note that I took a few creative liberties here and there with what actually happens in-game and what my character experiences. *** Hi! I'm Mirabelle! Hello to whoever may be reading this! I’ve decided to keep a jour...
An example of the game's full-body scanner NOTE: I originally wrote this for my own site, so it's probably a little more broad than necessary for a gaming site like this one. Recently, I’ve been playing a decent amount of Papers, Please (3-ish hours, according to Steam). If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a game where you sit at a border checkpoint and must check entrants’ documents for a variety...
(Warning: long post ahead) Yes, I am back for the third installment of this feature. Most of you who were following this (all three of you) probably figured I had given up on this or forgotten about it. Actually, it was a combination of things. Schoolwork starting to pile up. Other games taking my attention, like XCOM and Mists of Pandaria. And yes, a crippling fear every time I even looked at...
It’s been a week and I’ve been practicing. Thought I’d outline the training process I went through and what my goals were. I started with Challenge Mode. My intent was to see how far I could get with Yukiko, my chosen character. I was able to complete 22 of her challenges with relative ease, a few tricky ones taking me some extra tries. Some of the remaining challenges seem doable but didn’t se...
I have this intense fear of playing fighting games online. It’s an odd fear to have, especially since I’m fine playing things like shooters or PvP in MMOs against other players. With a fighting game, I usually don’t make it past the “Searching for players” menu before I quit out in a nervous fit. Something about a game that I don’t feel competent at makes it impossible for me to jump online aga...
Alan Wake. Issac Clarke. Nathan Drake. What do these three characters have in common? They are ordinary guys that are thrust into crazy situations in their games, crazy situations that they just happen to luck through time and time again. They aren’t the only ones; dozens of video game characters, plenty of which are portrayed as average people who are thrown into a crazy predicament, people wh...
Today, I want to talk about a particular game. This game is something I appreciated for its artistic and gameplay merits when I first played it and more recently have come to appreciate for the amazing themes that run throughout its length. The game I am talking about is Shadow of the Colossus, Team Ico’s second game for the Playstation 2 released in 2005. I don’t want to discuss the gameplay,...
As you have probably heard on numerous gaming sites today, Nintendo plans to drop its Nintendo 3DS price from $249.99 to $169.99, a whopping 80 dollars, on the very close date of August 12. Additionally, early adopters of 3DS will receive a whopping 20 games (10 NES classics and 10 GBA games), half of which (the GBA games) supposedly won't be sold at a later date to others (I'm calling bull on...
Today, on GameSetWatch, an indie game called GlitchHiker was discussed. In this game, each death of the player character introduces a glitch into the game world. As the player dies more and more, the world becomes filled with these obstacles. An unheard of idea for a game, it actually gets harder as you try again and again. Instead of rewarding the player for their death with knowledge of what...
Everyone plays video games for different reasons. Some play to escape the reality of the world. Some play for money, whether it be as a professional gamer or as a journalist. Most, however, play games simply because they are fun. Unlike a movie or a book, by playing a game, a person is able to fully step into a world completely different from our own, by being an active participant as a charact...
I have several S-Ranks but have never bothered to try doing it on Playstation 3. The trophies always seemed way less interesting to me so I tended to simply play the game and stop when I finished. Today, I achieved my first Platinum Trophy with Infamous. Overall, it wasn't too bad, only having a few annoying ones like the stunts and high fall kills that made me grind some missions over and over...
I just finished Dragon Age Awakening a few days ago and had a really good time with it. Continuing the story of my Warden (who I had just finished the main game with, my second playthrough) was really neat and I feel that the story was interesting overall. Of course, for people who had their Warden die at the end of Dragon Age: Origins, it must have been irritating having the game retcon your e...
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