The Wii has two areas in which it excels: family friendly games and pseudo-lightgun shooters (meaning, you point the Wiimote at the screen like a gun, but you are really just moving a mouse pointer and not really aiming your controller at targets). House of the Dead: Overkill is about as far away from a family friendly game as you can get. The game is non-stop blood, gore, incest and cussing. You know… “mature themes.” Fortunately, the depravity is backed up with some great on-rails shooting and pitch perfect grindhouse inspired art direction and humor. If you are going to play this, make sure to invest in a Wii Zapper or similar gun accessory for the Wiimote or risk some serious wrist pain.
Any Nomeansno record is going to get compared with their masterpiece, Wrong. No, they’ll never match the perfection of that record, but Sex Mad comes close. This CD has some of their best songs: “Body Bag,” “Dad,” “Self Pity” to name a few. Where it falls short is in some of the longer, repetitive tracks and the fact that there is just a general lack of cohesiveness from song to song.
The importance of this record cannot be understated, however, I do think the quality of the music might be slightly overrated. It may just be that so many of these songs have been played to death on radio, TV and everywhere that I stopped caring about them. As much as the Rolling Stone editors pushed the idea, Kurt Cobain was no John Lennon. However, I didn’t immediately eject the disk when it looped back to track 1 in my car this afternoon, so I must like it more than I think.
This is quite possibly the most retarded band ever. They are like a friendlier version of GG Allin or, at their best, the musical equivalent of restroom stall graffiti. Most of their music is comprised of blunt, single entendres (Love in your Mouth and Hot Muff). It’s dirty, vile, misogynstic and completely hilarious. If you get this on CD it comes with a second disc containing a single, 70 minute track of Nig-Heist live featuring some of the best audience baiting since Fear in Decline of the Western Civilization.
This CD is a nice mix of electronics, processed guitars and throbbing dub-reggae style bass lines. There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking here—plenty of standard drum and bass tropes—but, I find myself going back and listening to this album a lot. The guitar and bass keep it from the looped-sample boredom of pure laptop music but, at the same time, it never comes close to being a rock album.
This CD compiles two solo albums from Colin Newman. Singing Fish is mostly just Newman noodling around with keyboards. The style is reminiscent of the synth work on 154 and A-Z, but the songs are more atmospheric and don’t really go anywhere. Not To is better and more in line with Newman’s work with Wire. Perhaps it’s the absence of Mike Thorne as producer/keyboardist, but somehow this record doesn’t quite match the brilliance or the quirkiness of A-Z.
If they cut this film off at about 15 minutes it would have been a near-perfect short film. Unfortunately, once the main story begins with the launch of the balloon house, everything gets bland and predictable. Although, admittedly, it was fun to make inappropriate pedophilia jokes while watching the old man/boy scout hijinks.
GTA: Chinatown Wars on the DS was my first Grand Theft Auto game and it remains one of the best games on that platform. When Vice City went on sale on Steam I decided I had to try out a proper 3-D GTA game on the PC.
Reviewers always seem to note the violence and mature themes as the selling point of this franchise, but really what makes it so great is that it fulfills a video gaming fantasy that I imagine most Atari aged gamers had as kids: being able to get off the race course and just drive wherever you wanted in a game. The closest I came to this as a kid was driving off the road in Intellivision’s Auto Racing looking for shortcuts. That didn’t really satisfy the way GTA does. Vice City lets you go just about anywhere your road rage fantasies want to take you. The game incentivizes crazy driving via the strategic placement of ramps throughout the city and awarding bonuses for extreme stunts. Add to this tons of eighties radio hits blasting in the background and you have enough for a fun game.
But the game isn’t just about driving. There is a simple story which evolves as you complete a series of missions. The plot is not great, but it was enough to keep me interested and, even if the story was dumb, there was plenty of variation in the types of challenges (from delivering pizzas to flying a seaplane) to make me want to complete everything. However, when the game makes you get away from driving and into combat it gets a bit wonky. The controls are pretty terrible on the PC and half the time I found myself failing because of bad hit box detection or some other frustrating glitch. I really, really wished you could just quicksave anywhere in the game.
Technical problems aside, this was a great game and I get what the hype has been about all these years. In fact, I just bought GTA IV on sale this morning and will be back to the mayhem soon!
After creating three of the greatest records of the early punk years, Wire fractured into various solo projects. As far as I am concerned, A-Z is Wire’s fourth record. It feels like the natural next step after 154. A-Z is filled with more synthesizers and song structures are more abstract and weird. The end result is simply mesmerizing.
New Order always has at least one great track on each of their records (“Regret” in this case). They fill the rest of the CD with some forgettable and boring songs. Stick with greatest hits compilations from this band and ignore everything else.
