Billed as a first person shooter RPG, Borderlands focuses on collecting loot over story. There a lot of superficial similarity with the recent Fallout games: large open world to explore, quest-based goals and a little bit of humor thrown in. But the world of Borderlands is barren and devoid of interesting people and stories. You just get your quest marker and then go and shoot everything in your path. All the while you are hoping the next gun that is dropped will be slightly better than the one you are holding.
The game’s saving grace is its emphasis on co-operative online multi-player game-play. I played through the whole game with a partner’s help. It may have felt more like an enjoyable pastime rather than a challenging game, but as long as chat was on it was pretty fun just grinding through the cell-shaded levels with a friend. We have already moved on the Borderlands 2 (which is a much better game).
This feels like it must be outtakes or extras from Jackson. “G7” and “Teetering” are the best tracks on the EP. Some really great cover photography of the band’s custom aluminum guitars.
This probably is Tar’s best record. It’s a wall of loud, lumbering guitars and driving bass lines. This is pretty much what every Illinois-based hard rock indie band aspired to sound like back in 1992. This contains some of their most memorable tracks: “Short Trades,” “Walking the King” and especially “Viaduct Removal.”
This CD actually compiles Tar’s first two releases: Handsome and Roundhouse. While I like many of tunes on this CD, it’s my least favorite of their releases. Tar never strays too far from the formula so, if you haven’t heard much Tar, this will be pretty indistinguishable from later records. For me this record lacks the droney, bass-heavy sound defined their best records so it tends to get played less.
Over the past few years I have had a love/hate relationship with The Walking Dead T.V. show. Unlike most of the trash in the zombie sub-genre being released these days, the pilot episode was simply one of the best zombie stories ever filmed. However, as the series progressed, it has sunk in quality where at times it just feels like a bad soap opera filled with characters who make the most unrealistic and stupid decisions. The fact that there is a zombie apocalypse going on has little or no bearing on the plot most of the time (you can just replace “zombies” with “earthquake” or another major disaster and you would have the same show).
The video game adaptation is different because now you can make the stupid decisions! Rather than a standard point and click adventure, Telltale has created a system that is essentially a Choose Your Own Adventure audio/visual experience’like Dragon’s Lair except your choices actually effect how the story progresses. Most of these choices occur in dialogue interactions as a timer ticks down waiting for you to pick your line. Choose to be a rational human being or a dick, it’s all up to you.
If I may go on a bit of a tangent here, I’ve noticed that most end of the world stories assume people would all just become horrible to each other and betray their fellow survivors just to gain a modest advantage. I really doubt this is how things would unfold. I think 99.9% percent of people are good and humans would be resourceful enough to team up and rebuild. My anecdotal experience with neighbors helping each other with snow shoveling this morning is what I am going on, so that that with whatever grain of salt you want.
Anyhow, back to the game: There are points where your choice is between rescuing character A or character B and those are the moments that supposedly can really change the story. I went back and replayed the first episode picking different options and the changes aren’t that huge. The key plot points remain the same. In theory, this should make for an awful game, but The Walking Dead is saved by its engaging story which avoids most of the melodrama of the television show. Because I was the one making the crucial choices, I was even more invested in the characters than I could ever be if I was passively watching the show. Maybe not a great “game” per se, but definitely a great piece interactive fiction.
This is the better of the two Supercollider CDs. The sound is much bigger and they had gotten much more skilled at crafting atmospheric loops of guitar sounds and electronics. They still exist in their own little musical niche and I find myself going back to their music more than most of the bands that I loved during the early nineties because of this uniqueness. Supercollider is a band that more people need to hear. Just watch out for what you find out there because there have since been about half a dozen other bands that have named themselves “Supercollider” (it’s called Google people!).
Supercollider is my favorite band from the nineties that no one seems to know about. I found about them after reading a short interview in Flipside (Nov. 1991) where they were described by their use of sequencers and guitar. I was intrigued and bought their CD, Dual, not knowing exactly what to expect. I slowly fell in love with it and eventually got my hands on this, their first CD.
I had never heard any band that quite sounded like them before or since. They make heavy use of looped samples of guitar noises, sparse drums and Joy Division-esque vocals on top. Despite the electronic underpinnings, they are very much a guitar band and much more atmospheric than say the thump-thump of an industrial band from around the same time. The minimalism (this is much more sparse than Dual) and repetition might grate on some people’s ears but I get lost in the music every time I listen to this CD.
When this record arrived, you could sense the downward trajectory of this band. Not that this is a bad record—Here’s to Shutting Up continues with the more interesting arrangements of its predecessor—it’s just that Superchunk kinda lost that spark that made them fun to listen to. Maturity’s a bitch. I think I own all the Superchunk records I need, and, even though they have since released much-loved albums, that’s it for me.
Mostly more of the same from Superchunk but with a lot more non-rock instrumentation like strings and woodwinds thrown in here and there. They haven’t gone full Sgt. Peppers, but it’s a nice change of pace. Oh, and finally a decent cover.
Clocking in at 31 gigabytes of disk space needed, Max Payne 3 is a monster of a game. I would have bought it at launch, but my old computer just would not be able to run it. The Max Payne series has been one of my favorites for a long time. I love the cheesy noir narration, gritty environments and, of course, the insane slow motion gun battles. The third installment retains all of these elements and gives the game a beautiful audio-visual overhaul. Most notably, the comic panel storytelling device has been replaced with your standard in-game cut scenes. Lots and lots of cut scenes that, at times, interrupt the flow of the game play. You just want to burst through that door guns blazing but then you’re forced to watch Max slowly creep his way into cover while explaining that the room was “full of goons.” I guess I didn’t mind the kill-to-cut-scene ratio too much but it could get pretty annoying if I ever go back and play again.
The real reason you play this game is to experience the incredible Bullet Time™ gun battles (So, apparently Bullet Time™ is a trade mark of Warner Bros. Studios?). You can really pull of some amazing kills where you are flying backwards down a staircase, shards of glass exploding all around you, blasting away goon after goon then haphazardly landing on your back only to finish-off the rest lying prone in a pile of ruins. It’s a great game with a good story (although not as interesting character development-wise as Max Payne 2). Max is as cranky as ever and he looks a bit like Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs.
