therhinestonehawk

THIS REVIEW IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY: merton / @mertonesque WANT ME TO REVIEW AN ALBUM, DISCOGRAPHY OR GAME? CLICK HERE TO KNOW MORE!    THE ARTIST     When I first started collecting japanese CDs, at the start of every month I'd use my previous month's salary buying at least 1 japanese CD on the brazilian website Mercado Livre. That was how I'd discover some of my all time favourites such as Okamura Takako, and even if I didn't end up buying a CD, I built up knowledge of famous and semi-obscure artists of showa era Japan. One time, I only had money for one CD, and I had to pick between two I found: Shizuka Kudo's Harvest , and Yumi Matsutoya's Dawn Purple . Yumi Matsutoya albums tend to have pretty striking cover arts and Dawn Purple was no different. Before buying the CDs I'd usually listen to at least one or two songs from it on youtube, which is what I did to both of these. Kudo's ' Akiko ' captured my heart, and so did Matsutoya's ' Ha...

the myth of the franchise installment hated by fans at release and over time considered an "underrated gem" plagues the final fantasy franchise maybe more than any other in the videogame space. VIII, IX, XII, XIV and even XV have in the years since their release received general acclaim or revaluation whereas once they were either considered weird, uninteresting, or maybe even bad. i suppose the most obvious case of this would be XIII. the same thing happened to Sonic Unleashed, and Sonic Adventure, and is actually happening to Sonic '06. the thing about XIII is that the amount of hate and contempt it got at release was way above what it deserved while nowadays the majority of the fanbase think it's actually a great game (or at least have softened up about it). i'm writing this with the presumption that you already know what was complained about (i write my reviews for the kind of nerd i am) so i won't waste time with that. instead, i'll have to explain wh...

  tonight i found out that loss is relative. when my uncle died, everyone around me cried and the mood was dense, but all i could think about were my own insecurities. i wasn't close to him, but i knew him all my life. i let out a couple of tears at his funeral but that was about it. i don't think about him. it didn't affect me. it's strange to me, but also natural, that tonight i feel grief for someone i never knew. i was a huge fan of daniel johnston as a 13 year old, when he died, i felt sad. when tohru okada died, i felt shaken. when sakamoto and takahashi died, i felt sorry. when i found out sayuri died, my brain refused to believe it. i went on to do other things, had a meal, talked to my friend, while that information was waiting for me to pick it up from the ground. when i did, i looked into it, and i'm confident in saying that a part of me died. i'm not the biggest fan of sayuri you'll meet, i didn't even know much about her to begin with, but ...

I: Intro videogames are the most subjective medium out there. they are also the most objective medium out there. a game can be easily identified as bad or badly made, but this same badly made game can be someone's favorite game because of its bad aspects. this is all fine and good, and everyone knows this already (at least i assume), but if games are objective and quantifiable, then there is such thing as a perfect videogame. yume nikki is NOT that. the one review that changed the way i write reviews forever is  tim roger's review of Cave Story , in which he spends the entire readtime circumventing around the subject at hand because Cave Story is so perfect that it doesn't need any reviewing. do i agree with that? yes. very much. however, even though cave story is a perfect videogame, i don't think it is quite THE perfect game. in this essay, i posit that the perfect game is at the tip of our tongues, but we are not quite there yet. yume nikki is a dream exploration wa...