Entrails – The Tomb Awaits (Dark Descent)

Entrails - The Tomb Awaits

I’m becoming a slightly self conscious reviewer these days.

It’s just that, well, I’ve noticed some trends developing in my reviews.  Firstly, they’re becoming increasingly personal, and use the word ‘I’ a lot.

Secondly, they usually start with some great big history lesson about the bands that influenced the release in question and the history of that particular subgenre, or in some cases the whole frikking history of heavy music.

So it’s in this new spirit of self awareness that I approach my next review: The Tomb Awaits by Entrails.  And that kind of makes things difficult.  Because, let’s face it, Entrails are basically a rip off of one of my favourite bands of all time – Entombed.

A good friend of mine who goes by the name of Felix Threepaper (you may have read some of his work) recently asked me to name my top five favourite bands of all time.  This is, in itself, an interesting question.

Firstly because there’s nothing a bloke likes more than ranking things.  The whole fantasy sports phenomenon is a testament to this – it’s all about ranking the players you think will perform best in any given season or week, and it’s now a worldwide phenomenon.

Secondly because it’s such a personal question.  It’s purely subjective.  It’s not like ‘Top 5 Most Influential Bands’, or ‘Top 5 Best Guitarists’ or some other question which can be objectively discussed, argued and debated.  No, this is purely about personal taste.  Who are my favourite bands – not ranked according to their technical proficiency, live performances or anything else, just who do I most enjoy listening to?

The first three on the list pretty much picked themselves: Black Sabbath, Metallica and Slayer.  But the other two are slightly nichey, and not exactly household names: Helmet and, you guessed it, Entombed.

A quote from my highly recommended bible of Swedish Death Metal pretty much sums up my views of them: “During 1989-1994, Entombed was one of the best bands in the world”.

So what made Entombed so bloody great?  Well, for starters, so many bands have spent their lives searching for a new sound but never really found anything, but not Entombed.

The sound they made in that Stockholm studio out of their pissy little Peavey amp is now the stuff of legend, and went on to define a whole new genre. The whole planets-crashing-together thing.  The whole DOOM-in-mile-high-letters thing.  The whole turn-it-up-loud-and-feel-as-if-your-soul-is-being-pushed-through-a-meat-grinder thing.  The whole so-dense-it-makes-a-neutron-star-seem-like-a-delicate-soufflé thing.  It was a sound that saturated every frequency in your eardrum and made your innards shake.

If you want to know more about the setup and playing style that was required to get “that” sound I can recommend this (quite lengthy) tutorial clip.  I love the enthusiasm of this guy.

But it wasn’t just the sound.

Even in their earliest stuff, when they were still called Nihilist and were producing tinny sounding demos, there was an inherent groove that underlaid even their most vicious songs.  Sure there was plenty of that every-beat snare drum thrash, but pretty much every song had a section where they busted out into some massive, swinging riff.

And while Nicke Andersson wasn’t the fastest or most technically proficient drummer in comparison to other death metal drummers at the time, he hit the drums hard, particularly the kick drum, and injected the groove into the rhythms.  Some of the faster death drummers had to kiss the power and groove goodbye, because playing too fast takes away the space for a powerful kick drum.

OK, so that’s over 600 words and two clips now and I’ve hardly mentioned the album I’m actually reviewing.

It’s called The Tomb Awaits by Entrails, in case you’ve forgotten.  Entrails made my Top 5 List last year, and for good reason.  My eardrums hadn’t been piqued like that since Clandestine in 1991.

So it’s a quick turnaround from their previous album, but they were mostly old songs anyway so I guess they had a few more in the chamber.  They grabbed Dan Swanö from Bloodbath to do the production here, and he definitely makes it sound more modern.  More like… well, Bloodbath.

This means there’s a bit more sustain in the guitars, and it’s not quite so low and gritty as Tales From The Morgue, but that kick drum is still there in spades, and if anything it might even have a little more oomph to it.

There are some subtle variations from the Entombed theme from time to time.  For example, there are some Metallica-style harmonics in the leads.  And whereas reading Entombed lyrics made you feel as if you might have stumbled upon some lost pages of the Necronomicon, these lyrics are cartoonish and clichéd, like some long forgotten screenplay by Sam Raimi.

Let me quickly post you a song before I wrap things up.  This song is called Undead, and is about being trapped in a cemetery trying to escape a bunch of zombies who have begun digging themselves up from the grave.  Note the Metallica influence in the solos around the 1:50 mark.  The whole thing is just so unexpectedly catchy, and I think that’s a good thing.

So that’s it.  It’s as derivative as hell but makes no bones about it and does it well.  If you were a fan of that Swedish death metal sound then you’ll definitely dig this.  If you’re not then you are ignorant and you should go away immediately.

Category	Rating
Production:	9
Songwriting:	8
Creativity:	5
Overall:	8

Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Eidos Montreal (PS3)

One of these is a bittersweet yet zesty treat, the other is a tin of pineapple

Is technology a tool for emancipation or slavery?  Anyone who has tried to run iTunes on a PC knows the answer: both.  It giveth with one augmented, double-thumbed hand while the other reacheth around and stealeth your wallet.

DE:HR explores this theme in a cyberpunk future.  By 2027, technology has improved to the point where you can buy cool cybernetic body augmentations at retail outlets.  There are civilian augs, like cerebral implants that reduce the burning sensation when you read Herald Sun articles, and military augs, like blades that shoot out of your elbows, reverse Wolverine style.  The backhander is that augs make you a drug addict.  In assembling the wider world, Eidos Montreal have reached into the dystopian grab bag and pulled out some stalwarts: dwindling resources, wealth disparity, corporations being corporationy with private armies.  As with all good scifi, when we stare at it, it stares back with insights on present day issues.

What do you call it when someone fakes you out with a robotic arm? An aug psych

Although DE:HR’s themes are familiar, they are explored in some depth, typically Socratically, through dialogue with others.  The fiction is buttressed by solid art design and soundtrack. There is a strong black and gold theme running through most locations.  Though the colours are similar, the various locations have distinct local flavour as you globetrot from America to China and beyond.   The environments are arty enough to wow you, while being well-designed as game spaces so you know what can be interacted with.

East Meets West

The artiness extends to people’s clothes.  2027 has gone extreme retro — to the Renaissance — and ruffs are back in, big time.  The Mighty Boosh almost got it right.  The weak point of the game’s presentation is the character animations and voice acting, but I forgave this because for the most part the dialogue was above par.  There is too much “Me No Rikey” in the Chinese folks though.

Michael McCann’s soundtrack drips with futuristic melancholy, like ambient Vangelis with a better synth.  It’s the kind of music I would love my house to play to me every time I came home, if I had a talking house like in Watch This Space.

So, it’s got a solid scifi setting and nice art — how does this mofo play?

The pointy beard, so pointy pointy

You play as accidental cyborg Adam Jensen, an ex-cop who now works as a private security for Sarif Industries, a biotech company that develops augmentations.  Jensen gets fitted with the company’s entire catalogue after an incident about five minutes into the game so don’t think I’ve spoiled anything.  These augs form the basis of my fourth favourite RPG mechanic, the Rudimentary Upgrade System.

What do you call a bunch of cybernetics in a military parade?  Augie March 

There are four main aspects to play — combat, stealth, computer hacking and dialogue.  Augmentation upgrades will give you perks for these aspects, or they will improve your general exploration skills, like letting you jump higher, fall further or punch through walls.  This is as cool as it sounds.

Combat is cover shooting, with a side order of melee in the form of one-shot stealth takedowns.  Guns can be upgraded with mods and a fully modded weapon is significantly more effective than a vanilla one.  Enemy AI will do standard cover shooter stuff, pin you down and try to flank you, and there’s sufficient variety of goon types to keep things interesting.  You could play DE:HR entirely as a cover shooter and ignore stealth, but if that’s your bag, beware of Jensen’s low bullet-absorption capacity.

Stealth is where the game is mostly at, and it’s great to see the return of proper stealth mechanics.  It’s not a real stealth game unless you can drag bodies around.  The variety of stealthy things you can do gets you thinking creatively about how to deal with situations.

You will know the stealthing has its hooks in you when you find yourself reloading a save to get through a situation just right — not because you got killed but because you want to do it properly and without tripping the alarm, dammit — and we all love it when a plan comes together.

It’s not quite up to the platinum standard of Metal Gear Solid 4, but it’s a close second-best.  MGS4 takes the bickies (while you’re not looking of course) because it gives you more stealth tools.  DE:HR has other irons in the fire though.

Ohhhh OK Hazizi

The hacking minigame is based on capturing enemy nodes before the opposition detects you and captures yours.  There are optional bonus nodes that yield goodies, and it’s up to you to decide whether you’ll press your luck to go for them.  The layout of each node map can be designed differently, allowing for a chance to vary the difficulty and keep things interesting.  This is the best hacking minigame I’ve ever played.  It doesn’t get old by endgame and has ways to ramp up the difficulty without feeling cheap.  The game around you doesn’t stop while you hack — guards or security cameras can detect you, adding to the tension.

Dialogue is a mix of standard menu-based selections and picking the attitude of your response that you think will garner the best response, like in Alpha Protocol.  Persuading people can save you a lot of running around.  Not every situation can be solved through conversation, but it pops up in plot-crucial moments.  Often you will be required to make selections based on what you know about the person’s personality or about the situation at hand — it’s a little more nuanced than LA Noire’s “check for shifty eyes” reading of body language.  LA Noire did better face animations but the characters in DE:HR have more interesting things to say.

What do you call a diagram of a cybernetic eye?  An aug chart

“Choice and consequence” is an oft-used term in the Cave of Assessment.  That’s because they’re important, dammit! They are features that set video games apart from most other art forms.

So Much Choice!

While the storyline of DE:HR gives you a laughably superficial amount of choice, the four play styles give you steamy dollops of choice as to how you play through missions.  Most problems have multiple solutions.

You might have to get into a guy’s room to search it for something.  There could be two guards at the front door that you could take out, a vent that leads into it from another room, a back door with a hackable lock on it and someone down the street who knows a password to give to the guards to let you in.  While any one of these options is viable, if you’re an XP hound like me, you’ll go down the street, get the password, hack the back door, open the front door and knock out the guards, search the room, read all the emails on the guy’s PC, eat his food, move the fridge, then leave through the vent.

You can’t upgrade every aug, and you won’t be able to carry everything you pick up either, so you’ll have to choose what you want in your bag of tricks.  Fun weapons like rocket launchers are big — do you want to lug one all the way through a level just to pop two shots off at a boss an hour later?  Maybe you do, you magnificent bastard.

One gripe with the game was that there weren’t enough candy bars.  Candy bars restore depleted batteries, and batteries are needed to use the cooler augs, especially unarmed stealth takedowns.  Candy bars are relatively rare to find or buy compared to gun ammo, and many levels do not have shops.  Stealth play already involves hiding and waiting.  Eventually — about the time I found a silencer for my pistol — hanging out to recharge batteries became a wait too far.  I abandoned my no-kill intentions and started taking dudes out.  But that’s just me.  The game will not punish you for this, although you get more XP for stealthy, no-kill play than for instigating fatalities.

What do you call a bunch of cyborgs having sex? An augy

This game has boss fights.  They force you to be good at some form of armed combat.  Some folks have said the boss fights spoil the game, usually because they were playing as Noguns McHackysneak and suddenly they had to shoot someone.  Just because people who were playing DE:HR as a burglary simulator got a rude shock doesn’t mean the boss fights are bad.  They present a difficulty spike, but they are not unfair.  They require that you be familiar with certain game mechanics to progress, as boss fights should.  In keeping with the rest of the game, there are different ways to deal with each boss.  I honestly don’t see the problem.  The key is to know they are coming and be prepared.  Here’s a spoiler free tip: keep a couple of unspent upgrade points up your sleeve for when you meet the next boss, so you can buy your augs when you know what you need.  And save often.

If you ignore this game because of what you’ve heard about the boss fights, you’re turfing some healthy baby twins for the sake of a few drops of bathwater.

If you don't play Deus Ex: Human Revolution, these babies will cry

What do you … nah, I’m out

DE:HR is a triple threat — it’s got a well-realised game world, engaging storyline and flexible game mechanics that give you choice in how you play.  Most games are lucky to have one and a half of these elements.  It makes some jarring mistakes, but they’re not enough to ruin this outstanding game.

Well, maybe by a point.

Category	Rating
Game mechanics:	9
Atmosphere:	10
Addictiveness:	8
Overall:	9

- Felix

Free Torche!

Torche/Part Chimp - Tour 12"

As y’all know, we love our Torche on Three Paper Reviews.  And the only thing better than Torche is free Torche.

Check out their latest recordings – three covers of Guided By Voices songs – which they’ve contributed to a split EP with some lo-fi London doomsters called Part Chimp.  It’s a limited release to mark a tour happening now on the US east coast.

You can stream the whole damn thing here, and it’s well worth a listen, not just for the Torche songs – the Part Chimp stuff is great too.

And if you wanna get your hands on the vinyl you can order it here.  Not only will you get the awesome Yeti-vs-chimp-themed artwork in all its glory but all copies ordered off the web are signed by the artist Trevor Claxton.  Great stuff!

Hazizi

Mastodon – The Hunter (Reprise)

Mastodon - The Hunter

“Mastodon, some say you have the momentum of a runaway freight train – why are you so popular?”

I’ve never had the pleasure of interviewing these guys, but that’s the kind of Dorothy Dixer I’d probably serve up to kick off the interview.  Furthermore, I actually think it is a question worth exploring.  And, in the absence of having done the hard yards to secure an interview, it’s a question I’ll attempt to answer myself.

Modern metal is a dense and complex web of subgenres, but somehow Mastodon seem to be across an incredibly diverse assortment of strands.  OK, well I guess it’s time for a list:

• Given the clean, modern production values and technical precision in the drumming and guitar playing you might at first be forgiven for lumping Mastodon (especially early Mastodon) in with modern industrial thrash bands like Lamb Of God.

• The mathy progressions and rapidly changing time signatures and tempos call to mind the proggy experimentation of bands like Coroner or Meshuggah.

• They have the artistic tendencies and confidence of big arty bands like Tool.

• There are jarring vocals throughout (although less in later albums) and a doomy heaviness in some of the riffs that shows the influence of post-metal doomsters such as Isis, Pelican and Neurosis.  And yes, Scott Kelly makes his now traditional guest appearance on this album.

As the band has grown and matured, and – here’s the thing – especially on this album, they have brought in more and more influences from outside of metal.  Another list?  OK then!:

• The ooh-ahhh vocal harmonies employed by Josh Homme and Queens Of The Stone Age are evident at times throughout, especially on Dry Bone Valley – one of my favourites (take that Pitchfork!).

• The swampy dirge called Creature Lives could just as easily have been written by the Melvins.  By the way, that’s a compliment not a criticism.  From the freaky electronica of the intro to the doleful, marching main section, it’s a real standout.

• There’s a Torche influence at times too I reckon.  Blasteroid, for example, really reminded of one of those faster, rockier tracks off Meanderthal.

• Some songs have some real jazzy stuff in them.  Some of the bass lines get pretty damn jazzy, for example.  The song Octopus Has No Friends was apparently so named because it sounds like you’d need eight arms to play it.  There’s syncopation and even swing in the drumming too.

• The guitarist brings in a bit of a country banjo twang into some of his playing.  The guitar strings have always had a really steely ring to them which really lends itself to that fast picking style.

Here’s an interview on Consequence of Sound where bassist Troy Sanders talks about the wide range of influences on display in this album, including his love of both country AND western music.  Have a read if you like.

And while I’m linking to stuff, here’s a clip of them playing Curl of the Burl on Letterman.  Yep, Letterman.  I’m including it here not just because it’s so cool to see a band like this is blasting the heads off an unsuspecting studio audience, but also because it will give you idea of how they share the vocals between the band, with the smoother-larynxed bassist taking the chorus, and the vocal contributions of the drummer allowing for some nice three-way harmonies.

My favourite track is Stargasm.  It’s got that same space and the crushing crescendos we saw in Sleeping Giant on 2006’s Blood Mountain.  But every review I’ve read nominates a different song as their favourite.  I get the feeling it will be one of those albums where you gradually develop new favourites as you come to notice some of the intricacies of the less-instantly-catchy tracks.

I won’t bore you with any more track by track analysis – you can have fun doing this yourself when you buy it (if you haven’t already).

But I will say that there is so much variety from track to track that each song is memorable in its own way.  There are still chops galore, but it’s never gratuitous or overdone, and each part of every song fits neatly together.  Where they might have gone through some intricate transition within one of their long songs on their previous albums, here they just end the song and start another.

I know I’ve been gushing a little, but dammit I can’t help it.  It’s just so refreshing that a band has taken all these great influences, including so many of the ones you’re likely to read about on this blog (i.e. my favourites), and applied their considerable artistry as well as all of the modern music production technology and expertise they could muster to create this set of awesome metal songs.

It’s frikking sweet.

Category	Rating
Production:	9
Songwriting:	10
Creativity:	10
Overall:	10

- Hazizi

Actually, you can go home again

Fallout: New Vegas DLC roundup – Honest Hearts and Old World Blues (PS3)

DLC. Is it a cynical cash-grabbing exercise, or a welcome opportunity to revisit a loved game? There’s examples of both out there, but it works for RPGs when the DLC can offer a separate, chunky questline and/or act as a laboratory to explore some different game ideas.

I’ve been impressed with the DLC for both the recent Fallout games and extra content for New Vegas has been coming out in a steady drip. I’ve already reviewed the first DLC, Dead Money, here. Since then we’ve had another two, Honest Hearts and Old World Blues so I’ll give you a quick rundown of those mofos.

Before we get into specifics, I’m happy that Obsidian seems to be ditching the timed exclusivity deal whereby Microsoft gets first dibs on the DLC. I hate timed exclusivity with a passion, not least because I made the executive decision that the budget for my Bunker of Experience will not stretch to another console. Before I get flooded by literally thousands of comments accusing me of fanboyism, let me explain. I already have more games than I can play, and I find it difficult enough to solve the condundrum of which game to play at any given time — more precisely framed as “I should really play something other than Civ” — without having another system to contend with.

And the Xbox sucks a big fat one.

Honest Hearts

Ahhhhhh...

This one takes you to Zion Canyon, based on the real-life Zion National Park in Utah. The usual Fallout DLC rules apply — no companions can come with you, though in this case you can take your stuff, minus about 100 pounds of kit.

The scenery is stunning. There’s a lot of reds in the palette. There’s also a goodly amount of foliage — apparently this part of the world wasn’t hit by nukes. Navigating the landscape is tricky. Rock climbing has never been Fallout’s strongest point and it can be difficult finding a way through the windy paths and cliffs. I suspect this was a deliberate design choice. The stream that runs through the valley of the canyon is radiation-free, which Hardcore Mode players should appreciate.  The game tended to chug when I was in the open and there were more than, say, 4 other critters about. This happens to me a lot in New Vegas and it gives me the shizens.

The story mostly concerns a conflict between the various tribes that have taken up in the canyon. Fallout games have always had a bit of a Western feel but this one has it in spades — the tribes are obviously meant to be American Indians, with their dress style, Yoda-like speech and rock art, and there’s some religious folks living with the tribes who are basically Mormons. You will also get to meet the infamous Burned Man that you may have heard about.

The main questline is standard Fallout fare. Along the way you’ll have to decide which faction to side with and there are multiple endings. You’ll also learn more of Caesar’s past, given that he used to roll with the Burned Man back in the day. Aside from the main quest, there are some hidden stories told through my 8th-favourite narrative device, the old “discover fragments of a diary” trick. If you don’t care about the extra story or characters (why are you playing a Fallout game again?) you could just kill everyone as soon as you meet them, skipping 70% of the quests and clearing out the canyon. It’s heartening that Obsidian caters to the nihilists out there.

Honest Hearts is an outdoors-y adventure that rewards most the players who’ve boosted their Survival skill. There’s heaps of plants to pick and a bunch of new recipes are unlocked as soon as you arrive, including gecko hide armor and energy cells. As with Dead Money, simply installing this DLC lifts the level cap by 5 and 6 new perks come with it too. None of the new perks suited my heavy-handed brawler, Punchy McGee, but there’s some pickings there for those freaks who’ve invested in Survival, as well as some enemy-specific attack bonuses.

The other loot strongly favours characters with a high Guns skill. There’s a shiteload of pistols and machineguns using .45 ammo. For those of us who like to get up close and personal, a surprisingly large number of tribals wield shishkebabs, those awesome flaming swords made from lawnmower blades and motorcycle gas tanks. Alas, there’s still no sign of a schematic to build your own. I stocked up big time and must’ve had about 25 on me when I left the Canyon.

A lot of the cooler gear is tucked away inside hard-to-find caves. Intrepid explorers will find a unique set of NCR Ranger armor (the kind that the guy on the cover is wearing) that is not faction-specific, meaning you can wear it anywhere without getting any ag. There’s also a unique laser pistol that paralyses enemies, about the only morsel for energy weapons fans.

Apart from the tribals, most other enemies are of the animal kingdom. Yao Guais make a fearsome return and there’s a new breed of Gecko. Given the firepower that the tribals pack and the toughness of the critters, I wouldn’t recommend entering the Canyon at under level 10.

All up, there up to 8 hours’ worth of extra stuff here if you don’t want to rush things. Unlike Dead Money, Honest Hearts doesn’t experiment with any new mechanics. It just provides a solid side story, a new area to play in and some OK loot. It’s worthy, but not outstanding.

Category	Rating
Game mechanics:	7
Atmosphere:	8
Addictiveness:	6
Overall	7

Old World Blues

The blue lighting of science!

For this one, Obsidian turned pushed the “wacky” slider to the top of the board and really ran with Fallout’s aesthetic theme of “the future as imagined in the 1950s”. Those who play Fallout expecting a realistic post-apocalyptic simulator will be disappointed, but while they sulk in their home-made bunkers peeing into a jug, the rest of us can have a larf. Old World Blues is a hat-tip to the naive sci-fi of schlocky 1950s movies with exclamation points in the title. It is thus appropriate that you enter it from a drive-in theatre.

The setting is the Big MT, a research centre which was a testing ground for cutting edge technologies before the bombs dropped. The tone is set from the start: you discover that your brain, heart and spine are missing and then you meet some scientists who are brains in a jar with robot appendages. It’s Wizard of Oz meets Futurama.

The main quest, to retrieve your missing organs, is the premise to explore the Big MT, which is a network of separate facilities dedicated to various areas of research. Some of the facilities are essentially challenge rooms that add some puzzling and stealthing into the mix. There’s plenty of goodies to discover here, and energy weapons fans will at last find some love in the loot stakes. Punchy McGee was well catered for with a Proton axe and the Saturnite fist which, when superheated, can punch a lobotomite’s head clean off and set him on fire as an example to others.

The Big MT is charged with character. A dark whimsy pervades it. It starts at home; you are given quarters containing various appliances which, when activated, all have their own personalities, from flirtatious light switches to my personal favourite, the homicidal toaster.

Other characters in the Big MT, such as the brain-in-a-jar scientists, are also well-drawn and funny. The whimsy even extends to the items you can find, including a machine gun with a dog’s brain and little ears that prick up when enemies are near. As you explore the facilities, you will come across vignettes that should raise a smile, if not a laugh (loud or not). Particularly moving is the village where the brain-in-a-jar scientists lived, before they were brains in a jar. If you have spoken to them and got a sense of their personalities before you visit, there’s some poignant humour in the layout of their houses. The soundtrack is pretty smooth, too — a few jazz numbers have been added, much appreciated because the limited playlist of New Vegas was gettin to be a drag, man.

The appliances at your quarters are not just fun to talk to. You can upgrade them with chips found around the Big MT and most of them turn junk items into useful ingredients — as if you needed any more reason to take everything you find. There’s quite an array of services on offer: weapons can be modded, cups and mugs can be turned into empty syringes and scrap electronics, pencils into scrap metal. There’s an Auto-Doc that not only heals and de-toxes you but also sells various implants which are as good as perks for the benefits they give. All up, it’s a handy home base, so it’s a good thing they let you come back to the Big MT after the questline is done.

I wouldn’t recommend doing this before level 15-20 as the enemies are tough. The robo-scorpions in particular can be tricky, especially when you are swarmed by 5 or more, which will happen. There’s also the lobotomites, who shoot pretty well for people with limited brain function, and then there’s the reanimated skeletons in trauma suits. You’ll know them when you see them.

If you choose to explore outside the main questline, you can discover details about other New Vegas characters, most notably Father Elijah and Christine from Dead Money. There’s also some foreshadowing of the character you’ll meet in the next DLC, Lonesome Road. There’s well over 10 hours here.

This is the strongest piece of DLC yet for Fallout: New Vegas. Dead Money was more experimental with new mechanics and Honest Hearts had a more coherent story, but Old World Blues trumps them both with its personality. I don’t expect good scripts from games, so when one comes along, I am almost doubly impressed. This DLC also has the phattest lootz. I lapped it up and was eager to explore every corner of the weird-scientist world. The only problem is that it frequently crashed on me. Man, am I sick of saying that about Obsidian games.

Category	Rating
Game mechanics:	9
Atmosphere:	9
Addictiveness:	9
Overall:	9

- Felix

Quick Heads Up

Hello to YOU our loyal reader (and I deliberately use the singular on this occasion).

Just wanted to let you know that things are about to EXPLODE on this blog, so keep your eyes peeled in coming days and weeks.

For starters, Mastodon’s new album is out, and that always gets me a little frisky. You know you’ll get the DEFINITIVE review here.

Here’s the first film clip off the new album, with a real Mighty Boosh feel to it. The film clip, not the song. The song has a real Mastodon feel to it.  I particularly like the way it KICKS ARSE.

And Metallica released something with Lou Reed that their fans are sure to hate, which always makes me laugh, and makes me want to try extra hard to like it.  Hell man, it’s LOU FRIKKING REED.  Oh and Metallica.  Loutallica.

Here’s a track off that one too.  It’s art, man, what can I say.

As always, Felix, the true workhorse of this blog, has been gaming his fingers to the bone.  I’ve got a great new piece from him ready to go (tomorrow!), and there will be a stack more gaming going on as the big releases come out in the lead up to Christmas.

So strap yourself in for the ride of your life.  Or, alternatively, check back every now and then in a slightly detached and indifferent fashion.  It’s up to you really.

- Hazizi

P.S. Don’t worry, the overuse of capitals in this article will surely be a passing phase.

Can’t help falling in love: Felix Threepaper reviews Dungeon Siege III (PS3)

Dirty Harry once said “A man’s got to know his limitations”.  That was back in 1973, when Harry used to hang up his .44 at the end of a hard day’s flouting of police regulations and unwind with a monster session of Lemonade Stand.

Hot and sunny... that's lemon-squeezin weather!

As with most things Dirty Harry said, his words are even truer when taken out of context and applied to videogames.  Take Dungeon Siege III — it sets its sights reasonably low, but keeps it all in the bowl.  This is different from L.A. Noire, which aims high, but ends up pissing in its own mouth.

Dungeon Siege III is the result of an unlikely alliance between JRPG publishing juggernaut Square Enix and the niche, but my kinda guys Obsidian.  It’s like Hamish and Andy going on tour with Steve Hughes.  DSIII is an action-RPG, Diablo-style, with some dialogue choices thrown in.

The game’s setting is fantasy with an early steampunk twist.  Guns, cannons and robots coexist with swords, magic and gnomes.  Like aioli with fries, the presence of renaissance-era technology adds some extra flavour to a familiar dish.

Your choice of characters to play also has the “with a twist” vibe.  There’s four, starting with your typical RPG trio: melee fighter, magic-user and ranged attacker.  The fourth character is a fire elemental who mixes area effect attacks with melee and strong healing abilities.  Also, the ranged attacker uses guns instead of bows.  After being an archer in Dragon Age 2, I went for the gunslinger, who also dual-wields a pistol and shotgun for close-up attacks.

One of the other characters can fight alongside you and revive you when you get croaked.  This buddy can be controlled by a human or the AI.  I am very fussy about who is allowed into the Bunker of Experience and onto the Couch of Play, therefore my buddy was AI-controlled.  The AI made a good sidekick — it healed me when necessary and provided assistance during fights without upstaging me.

The story is forgettable … something something something JEYNE KASSINDER BAD something something … thankfully all the cutscenes and dialogue are brief.  I haven’t played the previous two Dungeon Sieges, so neither know nor care about continuity of lore.

The environments are pretty too — there’s forests and caves and swamps and mines.  As I typed that list I realised how generic it appears.  It’s not amazingly original, but once again, it just does the standards well, like Michael Bublé.  The colour palette is varied instead of being brown and browner.  Are we finally seeing the re emergence of colour in HD games, or is it just that I have not played a shooter for a while?

The thing that really lifts DSIII above its rivals sitting on the action-RPG shelves is the action.

Action-RPGs on the PS3 are rare.  Sacred 2 and DeathSpank are recent examples.  Action RPGs run the risk of becoming button-mashers, where you spend 87.4% of your time spamming one attack, regardless of circumstance or enemy type, pausing only to replace the Square button on your controller and put ointment on the callous on your right thumb.  Sacred 2 and DeathSpank are recent examples.  Some people will still find a button-masher fun if it’s pretty enough.  It can be relaxing if you don’t think too hard about the formulaic and repetitive nature of it, like watching an episode of Masterchef.

There's something creepy about the guy on the right... just sayin'

Like the Masterchef judges, DSIII tries to avoid mash, mostly by being a little more action and a little less RPG.  Standard attacks become underpowered in the mid to late game, even as your weapons get better, so it is necessary to build up your “focus” meter with timed blocks and successful attacks to execute power attacks.  Essentially you have to do the basics well to earn the room-clearing power attacks.  Other special ability attacks have a cooldown, so they cannot be solely relied upon when the game swarms you with enemies, as it often will.  DeathSpank tried a similar system, but the blocking mechanic was too wonky and it was too easy to stock up on healing items and scoff them as needed.  Here is another nice touch of DSIII — there are no healing potions.  Instead, downed enemies drop health.  This brings defence into the game and means you have to learn how to fight well to progress.

Various combat levels and boss fights have a puzzle element to them, e.g. you have to flip switches, destroy structures or hit weak spots on big enemies.  This will be familiar territory for action gamers, but may be a rude shock for stat-obsessed RPGers who just like to press a button and watch something die with numbers coming out of its head.

The game is kept appropriately challenging throughout.  Critters’ toughness and number ramp up in proportion to your stats and abilities.  You can’t wander off, do heaps of side quests and grind your character up to be overpowered by the end.  It’s not to say the game is brutally hard, but you have to fight intelligently to survive.

The linearity of DSIII also prevents you from maxing out all of your abilities, so you have to think about your build and adapt your playing style to suit.  If you’re going to max out your defensive abilities, learn how to block properly and time your attacks while you chip away at enemies’ health.  I went the “glass cannon” route and opted to maximise my offensive capabilities and critical hit chance, while ignoring defensive buffs.  It was a challenging way to play — I could dish out punishment, but couldn’t take much of it.  That’s how I noticed how good the AI is at reviving me.

Aside from the combat, there’s a rudimentary dialogue system, a few choices to make along the way that can mildly branch the story and a fledgling companion approval mechanic, where a companion will give you a boon if they like you — a baby brother to the Dragon Age system.

Loot is of the randomly-generated variety and it is doled out generously.  Different combinations of loot can make a major difference to your stats.  Based on what trinkets I was wearing, I could become a critical hit maestro, or a tank with the health of an elephant and the attack power of a gnat.  I had the sneaking feeling that my AI partner was getting better stuff than me in the late game, so I sold it all.

I played through DSIII to the end, enjoying it more than I felt I should have.  When a game does that, it’s doing something right.  It’s relatively short at 16 or so hours, but that feels right for what it offers.

Dungeon Siege III is a game that knows its limitations.  Like the drummer from the White Stripes, it doesn’t do much, but what it does do, it does well.  The combat has just enough complexity to avoid being a button masher and just enough challenge to avoid late-game boredom.  It’s gaming comfort food — you may not remember it in a year, but you’ll eat it all up when it’s put in front of you.

Category	Rating
Game mechanics:	8
Atmosphere:	7
Addictiveness:	9
Overall:	8

- Felix

L.A. Noire – Rockstar/Team Bondi (PS3)

L.A. Noire is a good example of why videogames shouldn’t try to be movies.  It’s like trying to make a platinum whoopee cushion – expensive, difficult and ultimately pointless.

Why should games try to be movies?  Movies don’t try to be architecture. Paintings don’t try to be books.  Actually, maybe games should try to be architecture, because both are concerned with experiencing a space.

Rockstar’s MO is essentially movie envy.  I know local outfit Team Bondi did the heavy lifting in developing L.A. Noire, but it has Rockstar’s fingerprints all over it: choose a genre that’s popular in movies, make cutscenes using similar themes, characters, even dialogue from leading films of that genre and sprinkle in a mixed bag of game mechanics.  The aim is to create a “look” consistent with the films and make you feel as if you’re in one.

I’d better get more specific to L.A. Noire.  It draws inspiration from noir fiction and the hard-boiled detective genre.  It’s set in 1940s Los Angeles.  You start the game as Cole Phelps, a rookie cop who’s back from the war.  The game is divided into episodic cases.  In each case, you will search for clues at a crime scene, interview witnesses and suspects to judge whether they are telling the truth and have some chases and shootouts.

Team Bondi’s rendition of 1940s L.A. looks amazing.  The clothes, the hats, the cars and the buildings look just like I remember them.  They got the colours right too – easy to forget when so much noir was in black and white.  This L.A. is not really a sandbox; more precisely, it is a sandbox with only a couple of toys in it.  You can collect rare model cars and answer random dispatch calls to engage in a bit of brainless side-action and earn intuition points for investigations.  You can only enter buildings with a gold doorknob – and these knobs are only placed on venues that are relevant to your given case.  You can’t even pull your gun in public.  It makes sense.  As a cop, you shouldn’t be trespassing or going on random sprees of mayhem.

I don’t mind that L.A. Noire doesn’t have side activities.  Clearly, Team Bondi was not going for an open world buffet of minigames and distractions, but instead a story-driven degustation.  The problem is that the story they serve up is one of the game’s weakest ingredients.  We’ll get to that later.

While I’m still talking positives, the face capture technology is amazing.  Apparently they filmed the actors from approximately 200 angles and used that to render facial expressions, mouth movement and body language really accurately.  As a result, when you talk to characters it actually looks like they are saying the words.  The uncanny valley just got a little shallower.  Regarding the casting, you can play your own minigame called “Spot the actor from Mad Men”, but there’s no trophy for it.

As to how the game plays, you work on one case at a time.  Each will typically start with a briefing and a crime scene to investigate.  When you get to the scene, there will be people to talk to and an area to explore for clues.  Within this area you can pick things up and examine them.  Some things are irrelevant and some will provide clues.  There is nice use of sound – a little piano tinkle – to indicate when you are near something that may be a clue, and another little refrain sounds when you have found all the clues in an area.  These sonic touches were a neat way to avoid pixel-hunting frustration.  There is another frustration – a matchbook is relevant in one of the first cases and never again, so you’ll end up picking every subsequent irrelevant damn matchbook for the rest of the game.

As you gather clues, you also gather questions to ask people in interviews.  Interviews are where the face capture technology comes in.  Interviewees will give a response to a question and you have to choose what you think of their response: truth, doubt or lie.  You are supposed to examine their facial expressions and body language to assist your decision.  If you think they’re lying, you have to confront them with a clue that disproves their lie.  If you think they’re telling the truth, you hit “truth” and move on to the next question and if you think they’re lying but you don’t have the clue to back it up, you hit “doubt”.  After you make your response, you find out instantly whether or not you picked correctly, however if you got it wrong you will not be told what the right response was.

This is the most fascinating part of the game.  It motivates you to scour a scene for every possible clue so you walk into an interview fully armed with information.  There is no checkpointing within cases, so you can’t just go back and retry a wrong answer, you have to redo the case from the start.  You can spend your intuition points to eliminate one option for a 50/50, or to phone a friend (being the internet and its aggregation of the most popular response).  I played this during the Great PSN Outage of 2011 so I couldn’t use the latter option.

Early in the game, it was absorbing.  I sat transfixed for minutes at a time, watching the well-captured animation.  I asked Mrs Threepaper to join in and use her intuition.  If we decided that the person looked dodgy, then it was “doubt” or “lie”.  Did I have evidence to contradict them?  There’s a transcript of the interview to check back on what’s been said.  Then I’d check my notebook to see if any clues contradicted the words.

After a few interviews, flaws emerged.  The script is often confusing as to what you’re actually putting to the person, or what they actually say in response.  More glaringly, there is only ever one correct clue to match a suspected lie and the logic connecting the two is often reminiscent of a sadistic 90s adventure game.  In one case, my clues included a list of guys my suspect was bribing and a ledger of bribe payments, yet only one of those counted as evidence of bribery.

Eventually interviews felt like less of a brain teaser and more of a lucky dip.  As such, there is no difficulty curve.  Questions and body language don’t become harder to assess – the whole system remains disappointingly arbitrary.

Cole’s partners, who are so helpful in other parts of the game, go strangely missing during interviews and leave you to play good cop/bad cop all by yourself, which apart from anything else makes Cole look like a lunatic.  One minute he’s gently asking a 13 year old rape victim to describe what happened; the next he’s screaming at her to co-operate.  It reminded me of this bloke, except not as erudite:

I initially pooh-poohed Cole’s violent mood swings as an unrealistic depiction of human behaviour.  Then I heard about the working environment at Team Bondi during its tortuous 7-year development cycle (detailed here) and the penny dropped.  I guess there is a lot of Team Bondi boss, Brendan McNamara, in the game.

Good cop

Bad cop

What’s further disappointing is that success in the “truth/doubt/lie” game doesn’t matter – most cases are resolved by an action set-piece anyway.  When a game doesn’t impose different consequences for your choices, choice becomes meaningless and you don’t bother caring.  Once this veil was lifted, it shifted my attitude toward the game from intrigued to irritated.  It’s a shame because there is potential in the truth/doubt/lie system.

Aside from the investigating and interviewing, the rest of the game is typical action fare that you would have seen in GTAIV: cover based shooting, car chases, foot chases.  As the game wears on, it stops keeping the investigations fresh and instead seeks to fill you up with action and story, which bloats the game and makes the back half a chore.

The story itself is an assortment of bits and bobs from the Noir oeuvre, most notably Chinatown.  If you’ve delved into Noir, you will recognise the influences.  A character even says “Forget it, Jack …”.  About the only thing missing was a Maltese falcon.  I guess Team Bondi had to show their work.

The magpie’s nest of a story isn’t so bad – you need something to string together the cases together.  What rankles is the cackhanded way it is told.  At almost every point, they stuff up in the telling of it.  It’s like the story was written by Donald Kaufman.

The next two paragraphs are a (mostly) spoiler-free whinge fest about these shortcomings.

Most of the stuff ups come from confusion as to narrative perspective – through whose eyes are we seeing the story?  The game opens with some “mean streets” narration, which inexplicably disappears after a few cases.  The cases themselves each start with a little cutscene, in some of which you are given vital clues about the perp that Cole should not know.  You can pick up newspapers to get cutscenes that show plot details about matters that Cole couldn’t know about (and which you cannot raise when you meet the characters involved) and yet there are key plot points involving Cole that are so coyly alluded to that I was not sure if they had occurred at all.

By far the clumsiest bit is when you find film footage of a meeting at which the attendees hatch a conspiracy.  The footage is of people plotting some secret evil shit, yet it seems to be shot from four different camera angles and edited together.  You come across it by stumbling into a room with the film already set up on a projector.  So these master villains hired cameramen to film them bragging about an evil plot, which has to remain secret to work, then later they all got together and watched how the film turned out, then they walked out of the room and left the film behind.  Riiight.

Imagine if the Mafia kept an Excel spreadsheet titled “Whacksregister.xls” with columns listing the names, addresses and dental records of each victim, alongside the same details for the goon who whacked him, and then they emailed it to each other every Friday to ensure that the register was kept up to date.  OK, you can stop imagining now.

The cackhandedness is jarring for its own sake but especially because it clashes with the investigative part of the game.  That part is all about what you know vs what they say.  Why muddy the waters by giving the player extra information that Phelps cannot use?  It might be a subtle comment on how police procedure can prejudice an outcome, but I suspect it is more a case of Team Bondi chucking in a whole bunch of stuff for the story without resolving it against the game mechanics.  We should not know that the wrong guy is being sent down for a crime before Phelps does.

I am resigned to bad game stories and relegate their importance to the back seat compared to other elements of a game.  The problem is that L.A. Noire doesn’t – it puts the story in the driver’s seat, whereupon the story cranks Mix FM at full blast, toots the horn and crashes into a tree.  Maybe you won’t object to it as much, but you will have to appreciate it a lot more than I did in order to enjoy the game to the end.

Grading L.A. Noire is difficult.  Each criterion has a stellar element pushing the score up and a crappy one dragging it down.  Take atmosphere – the city, sound and face capture technology are stunning, but the story and dialogue are often woeful.  Then take game mechanics – the truth/doubt/lie system is a great idea on paper, but its execution has glaring flaws.  Shooting and driving are simply average.  As for addictiveness, the game feels exciting to begin with, but the second half drags because it stops presenting new ideas during investigations.  If I’d quit this game half way through, I would have graded it higher, which is why the “Finish before you Assess” rule is so important.  These things must be judged in their entirety.

Team Bondi built a fantastic world but didn’t provide enough interesting things to do in it.  Maybe DLC will have some more cool cases, but who cares?  I’m assessing the merits of the game as released, and we shouldn’t be paying full game price just to get a platform to buy further bits of game later.

Category	Rating
Game mechanics:	8
Atmosphere:	6
Addictiveness:	5
Overall:	6

- Felix

Crowbar – Sever the Wicked Hand (eOne Music)

Crowbar - Sever the Wicked Hand

I’ve never seen an epidemiological study linking alcoholism to different professions, but if there was one I would imagine ‘doom metal singer’ would take out the #1 spot by a mile.  All the nihilistic angst, tortured screams and existential themes suggest the need for some serious self medication.

It turns out this was true of Crowbar’s Kirk Windstein, who has faced his demons in the time since their last album, 2005’s Lifesblood for the Downtrodden.  This interview has Kirk talking about some of the shit he’s been through in the intervening years, and the headspace he was in when he made this new record:

As he says in the interview, this is a positive record.  You might find it hard to believe that a band who have written songs such as Existence is Punishment, I Have Failed and Through a Wall of Tears, and whose guitar sounds like it has bubbled up from the depths of the earth through a mile thick swamp of molasses would be capable of making a positive record, but it’s true.

Don’t get me wrong, this is still a heavy album, and that signature guitar sound is still here, saturating every available frequency and overwhelming every eardrum it touches.  There are a few more up tempo songs than previous records, and the influence of the work he’s done with Down in recent years shines through, with just a little bit more groove than usual.

But it’s the lyrics where you’ll really notice the difference.  Check some of these out:

• “Never let it bring you down, stay strong ‘til the bitter end”;

• “This darkness fades away, the light begins to stay”;

• “Hands of death letting me go, I’m reinventing the man that you all thought was gone”;

• “I’m gonna pull through!”

OK, it’s not quite Walking on Sunshine, but it speaks of a new maturity, and a willingness to throw off the veil of self loathing that has shrouded Crowbar’s previous work.

When I first got my hands on this CD and saw that the first song was called Isolation, I was worried we might be in for a bit of Mighty Boosh style introspection:

But thirty seconds into the album comes the first of many killer riffs strewn throughout this album like gold pieces and gems across the floor of a dragon’s lair.

Big statement time: Kirk Windstein is the best exponent of the heavy metal riff since Tony Iommi.

He has a way of coming up with a killer riff, stretching it out for an extra bar or two, adding a little flourish, then turning it back on itself somehow so that it becomes this monstrous, twisted thing.  It’s not just the riffs themselves that make this a great album, but the way he weaves them together seamlessly, and the ability to match the metre of the lyrics with the riffs so that they complement each other perfectly.

There is no filler on this album – not a single wasted song.  And the production, handled by Kirk himself, is faultless – as clean and heavy as Terry Date’s work with Crowbar’s old mates Pantera, which became synonymous with southern US metal.

So for all of these reasons – riffs, songwriting, consistency and sound – I’m doing something I don’t do very often and giving this a big fat ’10’.

But there’s something more than that here too.  This album has shown me that ‘being metal’ isn’t about how much you hate yourself and the world, how much booze you drink, how many drugs you take, how tough you are or how long your hair is.  Metal is about the music, and life is too short to waste on all that macho bullshit.

Category	Rating
Production:	10
Songwriting:	10
Creativity:	8
Overall:	10

- Hazizi

PS. Here’s a song from the album – enjoy!

Fallout: New Vegas – Felix Threepaper reviews Dead Money DLC (PS3)

Nnnnnerrrrrrds!

You don’t need Google maps to know that Gameria is one of the most populated planets in the nerdosphere.  Orbiting Gameria is a self-hating moon called RPG-1.  For over 3 years, the citizens of RPG-1 have been embroiled in a turgid flamewar over the extremely important philosophical issue of whether the classic PC Fallout games of the late 90′s are better than the recent Fallout games done by Bethesda and Obsidian.  On my last visit to RPG-1 (and it will be my last), I made precisely zero new friends because I said I like all of them.  There’s something bemusing about an obsessive gamer attempting to demean you because of the games you like.  It’s like a guy with one leg making fun of someone with a lisp.  It recalls to mind Jesus’ riff on motes and beams.

All this is a way of saying Fallout: New Vegas is one of my favourite games of last year.  I’d already finished it once with a sniper build and was making my way through again in Hardcore Mode with my unarmed/melee specialist, Punchy McGee, when Dead Money dropped.  It lifts the level cap to 35 and on that basis alone I give it 3 points.

Dead Money is a closed box — you can’t take any of your stuff or companions to Sierra Madre with you and you can’t leave until it’s all done.  It’s a separate area with its own story. The new area is the Sierra Madre casino, a desert resort with the slogan “Begin Again” with a fabled vault of goodies.  The story revolves around infiltrating the vault.  Before you get to the casino, you have to get your heist crew together, which is your cue to explore the precincts of the villa to find the new companions.

The virtue of a closed box is that the developers can introduce new rules without breaking the main game.  The new rules here are a toxic cloud that slowly drains your health while you are outdoors, explosive collars a la Battle Royale and scarcity of healing items, weapons and ammo.  These tweaks make you tread more carefully as you poke around.

The slave collars are a big part of this newfound care-treading. You get fitted with a slave collar that explodes your head if you stay close to radios for too long.  An imminent headsplosion is heralded by a series of quickening beeps.  When you hear the beeps, you have a few seconds either to get out of the radio’s radius, or find it and destroy it.  The villa also is littered with leg-chomping bear traps, which will punish you if you try to simply sprint past radios.  The tension between wanting to push forward and needing to be cautious made me pay more attention to my surroundings and made exploration more fun as a result — simply getting from A to B without major harm was an achievement in itself.  Oh, and there’s no fast travel in the Sierra Madre.

If you believe that New Vegas’ Hardcore Mode doesn’t provide an authentic sense of the danger and survivalist urgency that scavenging through a post-apocalyptic Wasteland would involve, you would enjoy the extra harshitude of Dead Money.  It would be interesting to try the toxic cloud and item scarcity in the main game, perhaps as Hardcore Mode features that could be toggled on or off.

Once you get out of that cloud and into the casino, Dead Money introduces some basic stealth with the introduction of indestructible hologram guards who follow fixed patrol paths and must be avoided to pass through areas.  It ain’t Metal Gear Solid, but it knows its limitations and the environments that require stealth are well-designed for it.  This stealthy cameo is another example of how robust and flexible the Fallout mechanics are.

The self-contained plot is as flimsy as videogame plots usually are, but overall the story is well-buttressed by the interesting new characters and the setting itself.  There was a Great Gatsby feel to the backstory of the Sierra Madre and the new companions have a similar poignancy to them.  I’m not spoiling anything by saying that you will get to meet Brother Elijah, whom you will recognise if you’ve played the main game to any extent.

All up, Dead Money gave me about 10 more hours of Fallout, experimented with some switch-ups to the playing style and contained some features that I would like to see incorporated into the main game.  That’s how you do DLC, folks.

Category	Rating
Game mechanics:	9
Atmosphere:	7
Addictiveness:	8
Overall:	8

- Felix