ExtraLife

Manson is still villain, but is he able?

Not so long ago, current galaxy, a new Marilyn Manson album came out. Not much was known about it during the recording process, except that it will be THE BEST EVER ™ and will mark Manson’s return to form. 

Born Villain sounded like a concept album. With all the references to Shakespeare present in the Born Villain trailer, one could only assume that this album will be a lyrical masterpiece. Manson cited Fleurs Du Mal and Macbeth as influences. What could go wrong?

Well, a lot, actually. Album has no tangible concept, unless the listener wants to far-fetch a lot of things. And you want to do that, since conceptual albums were what they did best. Fortunately, Born Villain is not riddled with depressing love songs, but they are still present and don’t go well with the album’s supposed theme. Maybe I’m wrong and the album has no theme, but interviews from this era really sound like he’s proud of this  ”I became a born villain” concept, so I have no idea what to think. Lyrical high points are “Overneath the Path of Misery” and “Children of Cain”. I guess. I mean, it’s no Shakespeare or Holy Wood era Manson. But they’re okay. Ish. They fail miserably when compared to any of the band’s work up to (and including) The Golden Age of Grotesque, though.

Musically, it’s not bad. It’s no Holy Wood or Mechanical Animals or etc…, but it has its moments and just enough catchy parts to make you come back a couple of times. Vocals, however,  are horrendous at times, on my first listening I had the urge to skip some songs and the only thing you can do is let them grow on you (like a tumor) or immediately convince yourself that they’re great. I can appreciate the moments like “I have to look up just to see hell” had, where the screaming\moaning\wailing at the beginning really added to the atmosphere of the song, but on Born Villain whole verses and\or choruses sound like that. Luckily for Manson, that’s the only sound he can still produce live, so great for him!

All that being said, I enjoy Born Villain more than I’d like to admit. But I’m not in denial - if some random band came up with this album, I wouldn’t give it a second listen (or maybe even a whole first). This album works for me mostly because it’s Marilyn Manson, and I’m a fan boy. He can do better. They can do better. There is more than enough musical proof out there.

Final rating:

6/10 (mostly out of respect, or what is left of it)

It will tear your soul apart

The new Hellraiser movie was released a week or so ago. Although I’m a huge Hellraiser fan, I must admit I wasn’t even aware it was in the making so it took me by surprise.

At first I thought this was the remake, but no. Even though some parts of the story are an obvious rip off (you could say homage, but I’ll go with rip off) of the first Hellraiser movie, this is the ninth installment and a sequel.

Let me start by naming all the good things in this movie - it’s only 75 minutes long (short?). And that’s about it.

There’s a lot more going on on the negative side, though. Firstly, actors. One can’t shake off the feeling that any scene could probably convincingly derail into porn without losing anything in the credibility department. It looks and sounds fake, and the script doesn’t help. Admittedly, Hellraiser scripts were never Shakesfear quality material, but at least there were some memorable quotes and one liners that stood the test of time. Revelations has none of those.

The biggest disappointment in this movie is - THERE IS NO DOUG BRADLEY. He rejected the role of Pinhead. We got Stephan Smith Collins instead. One thing this guy sure did succeed in doing is proving that it takes more than makeup to convincingly play Pinhead. After eight movies with Doug Bradley, it’s hard to separate the character from the actor and this movie really suffers for it. I’m aware that it’s hard to be creative with the role because fans expect Pinhead, not Pinhead 2.0 and the character is pretty much set in stone by now. There is nothing else Stephan could do to make this work but try his best to imitate Doug. But he didn’t even try. Or perhaps he did, but he’s just that bad of an actor? There’s nothing intimidating in his bland performance and I couldn’t help but cringe\laugh each time he opened his mouth.

If this was the remake I would probably be much more okay with the “reinvention” of Pinhead (not a bad reinvention like this, though), but since this movie is in the same timeline with the other eight he just looks out of place and character.

“Hello,my friends. I want to put on record that the flick out there using the word Hellraiser IS NO FUCKIN’ CHILD OF MINE!” “I have NOTHING to do with the fuckin’ thing. If they claim its from the mind of Clive Barker,it’s a lie. It’s not even from my butt-hole.” - Clive Barker reviews Revelations via Twitter

The plot is dumb. I won’t spoil anything else, just that it’s dumb and dumber. Some of the scenes are from a POV of a handheld camera which seems to be all the rage in horrors these days. There’s nothing scarier than a dark, shaky, blurry scene with some yelling in the background.

After the movie was finally over I visited IMDB.com to find out why does this desecration of all that is unholy even exist. Basically, they needed to put out a Hellraiser movie before the end of this year so that they don’t lose the rights to the franchise. Which explains a lot quality wise. This movie is just another case of greedy people cashing in more money on the classics. I’m glad I didn’t buy this.

And the fun doesn’t end there - the reason that the future of the remake is still uncertain is because the makers want to make it TEEN FRIENDLY so they’re looking for a suitable script (the one Clive Barker approved was scrapped, apparently). What the hell, Weinsteins? A PG-13 Hellraiser? Will Pinhead sparkle in the sunlight? This has catastrophe written all over it.

Having read that, I am not surprised that Clive Barker and Doug Bradley don’t want to be involved with Hellraiser movies anymore. Because

WHAT THE HELL, WEINSTEINS?????

Duke Nukem Forever review

I was probably in the minority, although not the only one, who thought that actually releasing DNF after such a long development cycle was a bad idea. The game can’t be awesome (as it should be), I thought to myself, after all those engine changes and postponements, no matter what kind of brilliant ideas Gearbox wanted to bring into the mix (and they brought very few, it seems).

And then it finally came out. The gaming community held its breath. Duke is here. It took FOREVER, but he’s here. However, the first battalion of reviews wasn’t really positive and I wasn’t surprised. But since I never trust reviews, I had also hoped. Not sure for what exactly, but hope was there, teasing me to give Duke a try.

I have just played through the game and… well, the game sucked. Let’s be honest, the game itself is NOT THAT BAD. But that’s all. Almost every aspect of the game can be described with NOT THAT BAD.

Level Design

Levels are NOT THAT BAD. The developers avoided the whole FPS “generic factory and/or warehouse” look so levels do shine from time to time. The dam level (SPOILER: there is a dam level) actually looks pretty inspired and the mission built around it is pretty exciting. But for the most part, levels are just there for you to run through them, in one linear way, with little or no available sidetracks for you to explore. Textures sometimes look a bit low-res, but I’m not really big on graphics so I didn’t care. As long as I can differentiate the enemies from the background, I’m fine. But I can’t ignore the linear fashion in which the levels are designed. I know they went for the old-school design, but they did it wrong. Duke 3D had much better levels.

Sound and Music

Sounds and music are NOT THAT BAD. Both heavily aim for the nostalgia factor, so there are a lot of references to the good old Duke 3D. The Duke theme can be heard in elevators, Duke’s casino and many more places. In the end the theme gets overused to the point where you think that’s all this game has going on - nostalgia. And you’re right.

Characters

One of the bigger selling points of Duke 3D was the main character - Arnold macho type with a healthy, even somewhat sexist, sense of humor. I can still hear quotes and jokes from the first game and laugh. They were good. They were fresh and inspired. The new Duke, however… well, he sounds like an idiot. The only good things he says are actually ripped off from Duke 3D, the rest is just sad. I don’t find quotes like “More equipment means more ass kicking” very funny or adrenaline-rushy. They sound like poor filler material. The game is much more sexist than the first one, but not funnier. It’s counterproductive. Fails to deliver. I guess it could be worse, but I cannot say that it’s NOT THAT BAD, since it is. The game occasionally gives the impression that it’s painfully aware of where it belongs (there is one instance in the game where the president calls Duke “a relic from the past”, which is exactly what this game is). That also reminded me of one more thing why I thought Duke sounds like an idiot - there is a lot more talking in this game, characters actually communicate and talk among themselves or to you. Duke fails to say anything meaningful, he ends up sounding like a random punchline delivery service, if there is such a thing. In the first game, all the talking he did was mostly to himself, so it worked and it wasn’t so obvious he’s an empty minded squid.

The enemies are also pretty unimaginative and clearly just shadows of the ones in the first game. Perhaps you’ll remember how obvious it was that the pig aliens were actually dressed as cops? Not in this game, it’s not. The graphics are blurry as shit (a lot of post processing effects going on, probably to hide the shitty overall quality) and you can’t see shit. A lot of shit in one sentence, I know.

Gameplay and interactivity

If the character was one huge selling point of the original, interactivity was the other. At that time, there were some much better looking games on the horizon (Quake 1, for example, with the full 3d engine), but Duke 3D gave us interactivity. Almost everything in the game was destructable or interactive. You could interact with pinball machines, pool tables, chicks, sing… the list is pretty impressive. It was one of the first games to bring such a strong immersion with the game world. Duke Nukem Forever, on the other hand, brings NOTHING NEW, but rather a bucketful of old. I can see why a game from 1996. narrowed interactivity down to “walk to an object, press “use”, something funny happens”, but we’re in 2011. now and Duke still operates that way. It’s not impressive anymore. I don’t want to see scripted events, I want to interact. Red Faction allows us to destroy the entire level, Crysis gives us a realistic, almost sandboxy levels, Half Life/Portal gave us interesting puzzles, a strong story and great characters. Duke gives us a chance to occasionally play a poorly executed game of pinball, pick up a rat and squish it (sooo not funny), pick up shit from the toilet (oh yes, literal toilet humor) and listen to his sexist drivel or childish insults aimed at other games. IT’S THAT BAD.

Even though they were going for the old school FPS feel, you can only carry two weapons at a time. I know, right? The weapons list isn’t really that big anyway, and it offers almost nothing new compared to the original. Shrink ray is here, freeze ray is here. The mighty foot, unfortunately, is not. It’s been replaced by fists. The foot does appear, but as a scripted event when you look down at a shrunk enemy. You can carry pipe bombs and a couple of mines, some boosts (beer and steroids) and that’s pretty much it. The health bar was replaced with an ego bar, which is clever, you might think. When you get shot, your ego goes down. But why would Duke’s ego drop when he’s been underwater for too long? Makes no fucking sense.

Oh yes, and there’s driving in the game, but it’s annoying for the most part. There are games where you think “FUCK YEAH, DRIVING”. This is not one of those.

So, the final rating is… 4 out of 10. I would have probably rated it much better if this wasn’t a Duke game. But at the same time, I would have probably rated it much worse if this wasn’t a Duke game, since nostalgia factor is the best thing about it.