Sir Trent Reznor and the Nails that are Nine Inches in Length

I attended Friday's showing of Sir Trent Reznor and his sound apparatus. It was my understanding that he would be producing songs using nails of just under ten inches in length, but instead my senses were assailed by a show consisting of every sort of sound and light spectacle! It was truly a daunting experience.

Sir Reznor must be a mesmerist, for I found myself unable to control the motion of my head, which rocked forward and back in time with his music in a most singular fashion. At times, I was even impelled to "throw the goat," as they say, and "rock out" with little thought to personal embarassment.

It was a most fantastic show, with highlights being "March of the Pigs," "Terrible Lie," "Closer," and "1,000,000." Unfortunately, I was unfamiliar with the songs from the "Year Zero" album, as I did not yet own a copy. I have remedied that now, and I am working to familiarize myself with the songs on that album.

Stop the presses! Sockbaby four!

Sockbaby Four.

http://www.sockbaby.com/

Now that I've seen it, I can only say: Sockbaby is back.

Shall We Throw the Goat Once More, Chaps?

Ah yes, I have again entered the local music-selling boutique for the purpose of acquiring an electronically recorded disc of sufficiently metallic properties. With the intrepid help of a friend of mine and her sister, I was able to choose not only a new recording for my project, but find several additional albums worthy of note and mention in this log.

Without any further ado, allow me to present the winner: Lair of the Minotaur's "War Metal Battle Master."

It has proven especially difficult to decide on a single track title as being the best on this album, so please allow me to share instead the entire track list, with my comments:

Horde of Undead Vengeance (Generally agreed to be superior to regular vengeance in nearly every way)
War Metal Battle Master (With the word "metal" in the title right there, in case any would dare say this album is not metal)
When the Ice Giants Slayed All (Think of a boring anecdote you have had to listen to many times. Would it not be improved if it began thusly?)
Slaughter the Bestial Legion (About time, I say. They've been in need of a good slaughter for a while now.)
Black Viper Barbarian Clan (Cut at the last moment from Diablo II, they now finally have their time in the sun.)
Assassins of the Cursed Mist (I can only assume that the assassins come from the cursed mist, and are not attempting to assassinate the cursed mist itself, as that would be somewhat less metal.)
Doomtrooper (George Lucas's favorite track.)
Hades Unleashed (A solid, simple track title to end on)

The music itself combines throaty, growled vocals in somewhat staccato delivery with more screeched, though still somewhat throaty, parts. The guitars and drums are suitably metal, and the album as a whole solidly embraces its genre.

The cover is simplicity itself, focusing on a horned helmet so firmly rooted in the swords-and-sorcery fantasy genre that you can almost see its stat bonuses.

If any doubt remains in your mind that the band members have played their fair share of Dungeons and Dragons, please see this video. I must warn you that the video is unsafe for work in more ways than one.

This does not conclude my report. As you recall, there are several more albums that deserve mention! Let us begin, then, with "Effortless Regurgitation...", by Regurgitate.

That image should give you something to work with if you intend to attempt the activity named in this album's title.

This album, it turns out, is the band's previous album "Effortless Regurgitation of Bright Red Blood," with additional tracks.

Beyond the cover, what earned this album its place in this list was its truly inventive and gut-churning song titles. To those of you with delicate constitutions, I must recommend skipping this list and going straight to the next review.

The best (or possibly worst) song titles were:
Torsion of the Testicle
Worm Eaten Rectum
Purulent Discharge From the Urethra
Cloudy, Grayish Vomitus
Bulging Vaginal Septum
Phrenetic Chainsaw Slaughter of a Crippled Infant
Forced Abortion Through the Rectum
You can see the full track listing here.

My problems with this album are twofold. First of all, it seems to have completely abandoned the fun that comes with metal. Metal is supposed to make a good soundtrack for dragon-slaying, rather than simply being an overuse of a doubtless very embarrassed thesaurus. Secondly, I previewed some of the songs at the store, and they seem to have taken the idea of "Effortless Regurgitation" as a business model, as every song I listened to sounded exactly the same, with a slightly different lead-in.

Moving on, then, we come to "Of Beatings & the Silence In Between" by Chthonian.

Not much more to be said for this album, though. The title is brilliant, and there are some decent track names, especially "Weep Human, Weep," they do not show any real inventiveness.

Also, "Larvae, Nymph, Decay" is a good, though somewhat head-scratching, title for another song.

Unfortunately, the cover is far too classy to qualify.

Moving right along, then.

Here we have "Pro Patria Finlandia" by Impaled Nazarene. A good, play-it-safe name for a black metal band, with a confusing, potentially jingoistic title for the album.

The winning song title here was, without a doubt, "Goat Sodomy." In fact, looking at their other albums, we noticed that they had something of a goat theme going on. We chuckled a bit over this, but as I was working on this article I saw that the blog "Lugar de Obscuridad" lists goats as one of the band's lyrical themes.

So it's not just us, then.

Again, like Chthonian, the cover was just too classy to win. To paraphrase Ramgar from the sadly defunct web comic Chainmail Bikini, "This ain't no fine art workshop!"

So we move on once more to another band, Dead Raven Choir. Well, that's about all I have to say for them. There is a band called Dead Raven Choir. I am filled with awe and jealousy, having never been able to come up with a band name that awesome when playing Rock Band.

So we move on to Cattle Decapitation, with their album Homovore, featuring the song "Colostomy Jigsaw Puzzle." I challenge you to say that out loud without laughing.

Of course, this band seems to have once again gone the route of "create truly revolting pictures and titles" rather than "create something one can headbang to while playing D&D," so it really doesn't fit into the category of metal that I prefer.

That said, one of their albums is called "Humanure."

Its cover has to be seen to be believed.

Well, it essentially looks exactly as one would expect the cover to an album entitled "Humanure" would look. Needless to say, it is unsafe for work.

Maybe you are wondering what I would consider a good dragon-slaying, dice-rolling, head-banging cover to look like.

I give you: "Thrash Metal," by Blood Tsunami.

This was a very strong contender for the final purchase. I think the cover's similarity to one of the previous winners might have cost it the game, though.

That said, "Thrash Metal" does have "I Pledge Agrievance." Heh. The others aren't great, though "Dragon Pie" deserves a mention. It has the word "Dragon," after all, but the word "Pie" makes me think of little old aunties. I cannot imagine a group of wizards, warriors, and thieves celebrating their epic victory by cooking up a lovely dragon pie. Dragon burgers, sure. Dragon jerkey, wonderful. But dragon pie? Not so much.

Let's end strong. I give you Nomans Land and their album "Raven Flight."

I would be hard-pressed to find a better cover to an album. Also, the title "Raven Flight" is brilliant, and the band name, while hard to make out in that font, isn't bad, though I'm forced to wonder why they chose to break it up the way they did.

The song titles are all good and solid, like "To the Far Lands," "Mjolnir" and "Dragon's Grin." Unfortunately, there is no single song title that raises itself above the "good and solid" into the ranks of "quite inventive" or "definitely metal." After all, if I had a dollar for every time "Mjolnir" appeared in a metal song, well, I could probably buy many, many more of these albums.

So there you have it, my latest foray into the world of metallurgical electrogrammaphonic recordings. What do you think? Shall we throw the goat once more?

Cinematic Trailers of War-!

Yesterday I discovered that there are new cinematic trailers available for the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion and for Warhammer Online. Most of you are probably already aware that the trailer to Warhammer: Mark of Chaos is my favorite video game cinematic of all time, but this new Warhammer Online video comes close. In fact, if you haven't seen these yet, I would recommend watching the World of Warcraft one first, just because the Warhammer one is so far superior that the Warcraft video, though impressive in its own right, will seem boring in comparison.

While we're here, I thought I would run through some of my other favorite video game cinematics:

You already know it's coming, so let's start with the Amerigo video from Starcraft.
On the topic of Starcraft, my other favorite video from the game was the intro video to Brood war.

Warcraft 3 also had some excellent cinematics, most notably the human ending and orc ending.

Diablo's cinematics were never as good, somehow, but this one from Diablo 2, featuring a fight between the Wanderer and Tyrael, is okay.

The opening cinematics to the original Dawn of War and the upcoming sequel are both very impressive.

And the opening cinemat of what would have been Starcraft: Ghost wasn't bad, either.

I'm sure we've all already seen the trailer to Starcraft 2, but have you seen this meeting between Raynor and Zeratul? (Not a true cinematic, but still cool)

I realize that all of these are either for Warhammer games or Blizzard products. What can I say? They do seem to have the best cinematics.

Labels!

I've gone through my blog and added labels, so if you'd like to read posts of a certain nature, you can do so.

"Ruminations" are my thoughts on things, and they are usually the most Steampunk-themed posts.

"Trivia and minutiae" are shorter posts, usually links.

"Ideal steampunk movie" posts deal with my dream cast for a truly great Steampunk movie.

"Moving pictures and sound" posts deal with television shows and movies.

"Meme watch" posts watch memes.

"Bound tomes" deal with books.

"Personal" posts are self-explanatory.

"Computational engine-based entertainment" posts are about video games.

"Shared storytelling involving assumed personas" is the category for RPGs.

And now the real dilemma: what to label this post?

Painkiller

The first thing I have to say about this game is: where have you been all my life?

Or, more precisely: why hasn't anyone told me to buy this game yet?

One thing I've been meaning to blog about here is what you might call the "FPS Pistol Syndrome." This is the annoying tendency of games to start you off with crappy, boring weapons, supposedly to make you appreciate and enjoy the big, fun weapons more. Even when you do get the big weapons, ammo for them is scarce, so you're stuck using the crappy weapons most of the time anyway.

Of course, the game I'm referring to is the grandaddy of the genre, DOOM, which forced you to start the game with the nearly-worthless pistol that takes several shots to kill even the most basic enemy. It takes ages to get the famous BFG 9000 which, though fun to use, eats through the rare plasma ammo like a fat kid with a jar of caviar. And what happens when you run out of plasma ammo? It's back to the good ol' shotgun and minigun.

The question I have is: why? The point of playing a video game is to have fun. Wouldn't the game designers want to maximize the amount of fun their players are having? If you ask me, forcing a player to run around with the pistol is like forcing Sonic to spend half the game walking, or making you go through boot camp before deploying to Normandy.

In Painkiller, your starting weapon is awesome. I can only describe it affectionately as the "spinny killy blade," as this is exactly what it is. Essentially, you dice your enemies to pieces with a madly spinning weapon. Its alternate fire shoots the blades from the gun, allowing you to either do impact damage when it hits enemies or, if you hit a structure, you can create a lazer beam between the blade and yourself to hurt enemies that cross it.

And that's just the starting weapon! The second weapon you get is a fairly standard shotgun (though it's still very satisfying to blow apart monsters at close range, and it can freeze enemies). The third weapon is the famous stake gun. If you've heard of Painkiller, you've heard of this weapon. I played the demo first, and the experience of nailing a crawling enemy to the floor through the head was what sold me on the game.

So far, most of the enemies can be killed with one shot from the stake gun, a close-range blast or two mid-range blasts from the shotgun, or a split-second meeting with Mr. Choppy.

I haven't gotten very far into the game, so I've only seen the first few levels. I imagine it probably gets somewhat tedious after a while. Nevertheless, I must tip my hat to the game designers who really went out of their way to make the game fun to play.

I should also mention that the weapons in this game are delightfully Steampunk. It's fun to watch the moving parts of the weapons... when you're not employing those weapons on the twisted minions of darkness, that is.

(Side note: Steam told me that I'd be buying Painkiller: Gold Edition, but when I installed it, said Painkiller: Black Edition. From what I understand, the Black Edition comes with extra DRM. I understand this can be a deal breaker for some people, so you have been warned.)

Taking the day off from work

It feels strange, but I'm at home, somewhat groggy and flu-like. I used to never stay home from school, so it feels somehow like a loss to stay home from work. That said, it's been sort of looming over me for a while now, like I've been sort of sick but not sick enough to take the day off. Then today I decided that I had nothing scheduled for the day and I felt pretty lousy, so I was just going to rest.

Sorry for not blogging much lately. I've got some ideas, I just need to write them up. We'll see where that goes.

Cheers!