The first paragraph contains gross. You were warned.

I just saw the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen on children’s programming. It was this frightening dancing puppet that was a dead ringer for the infamous Brian Peppers, just with popsicle stick arms. Chills me to the bone. After a little research, I fould a picture of the monster. A bit small, but you get the idea.

In other news, went to a hockey game last night. Kickass game, the Moose raped the Peoria Rivermen 6 to 1, and there were some fantastic goals; the first in particular. But there was one thing bugging me the whole time: Peoria. Sound familiar? And to top that off, their logo resembles Stan from American Dad. It left me pondering if by chance Seth McFarlane was the owner of the team. Also, at one point there was a “wave” going around for like 3 minutes, and I lost three precious minutes of hockey because it was so damned entrancing. Did I mention that the box seats at the MTS Centre are ultra-posh?

The best part of the game, however, was during the last two minutes. Seriously, 1:06 left on the clock and a brawl breaks out. At first it’s just the standard two guys throwing down, but then a couple more guys start throwing punches, and finally a third pair starts trying to beat each other’s face in. It was magical. Anyone who says hockey is boring needs to go to a Moose game. I’ve never been disappointed, and that’s even without the beer. (Seriously, it’s too goddamned expensive.)

The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction

Back in the early days of the site, way way back when it was still the Page of Death, I wrote an article about a videogame. That game was Hulk. It was a game based on a movie. In an odd twist of fate, the roles of the two were reversed from the norm, and the movie sucked while the game was actually really good. Movie-based games are good only once in a blue moon, and very rarely does one that turned out well happen to feature one of my favourite comic book heroes.

It’s not necessarily public knowledge that I idolize the Hulk. While I fawn over other, slightly more popular, comic heroes like Spider-Man, Batman, the X-Men and Superman just like everyone else, if I could choose to be one – even just to masquerade as one – it would easily be the Hulk (minus the mental issues of course). Why? For one, he’s got the whole 90%-of-total-mass-is-muscle thing going on, not to mention the super-high tolerance to damage and the ability to leap entire city blocks in a single bound. Oh, and he’s green. Bright, limey, Kermit the Frog green. Sure, most superheroes are dressed to stand out pretty well, but riddle me this; which would your eye catch first: a dude in red and blue tights, or a gigantic green monster? Hell, most people would imagine that I got bored of my Hulk Hands not a month after I got them, but in reality, I still put ’em on every once in a while and strut around roaring and pretending I’m the Hulk.

While my Hulk fandom isn’t entirely unrelated to this article, it’s not what I’m here to talk about today. As I was saying before, I reviewed a Hulk videogame some time ago, and the review of the new one is long past overdue.

When I first heard about this new Hulk game, I was simply sitting back reading my latest issue of Nintendo Power. They had a short paragraph about it and what kind of game it would be and whatnot. I was more or less apathetic. Then I heard some more about it. Turns out the game was going to feature the same type of gameplay as Spider-Man 2. I loved Spider-Man 2! (Still unsure why I never bought it…) Maybe this game was gong to be pretty cool after all! Stories of gigantic bosses and destroying entire environments were beginning to circulate, and it didn’t take long for me to get swept up in the hype. It was going to be the holy grail of videogames, and I was going to get this game no matter what.

The months passed, and every time I saw a new tidbit of news about what they were calling The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, I would immediately shift focus onto it and read it over twice, because I was tired of waiting for it. Fast-forward to the ninth of September. I now have the game. Unfortunately, I’m required to attend a day-long garage sale at my aunt’s house. Fark-a-doodle-doo. Fast-forward a little more to that evening. After what seemed like an eternity of waiting, I could finally harness the full power of the Hulk and bring down an entire city. Just incase you don’t want to read any further, here’s the short version: The game didn’t let me down. Normally when there’s a lot of hype and the game isn’t made by Nintendo, there’s at least a little letdown. None of that here. It’s by no means a perfect game, but all the pros more than make up for the cons.

You’re going to stay for the whole thing? Well, better strap yourself in. It’s going to be a long ride, so maybe go get some chips or popcorn first. You know, something you can snack on while you sit and read. Don’t forget the soda. When you finish this sentence it’ll be too late.

It’s now too late.

The story of Hulk: Ultimate Destruction starts well before the game starts. In fact, we jump in pretty much in the middle of a heated conflict. It seems that the Hulk’s alter ego, Dr. Bruce Banner, has been working on a device that will cure him of his affliction. That affliction, of course, is his turning into the Hulk whenever someone pisses him off. But just before he’s able to complete this magical device, his secluded cabin is ambushed by the army, which is headed by this total nutjob Emil Blonsky, who apparently has some vendetta against Banner. The Hulk manages to escape the attack, but the device is left in the rubble and zaps Blonsky good. From this come the three main objectives of the game: sort out Banner’s mental issues, collect parts for a new machine, and beat the crap out of Blonsky.

My rendition is a bit on the less-detailed side, but consider it a gesture of goodwill that I’m not going to spoil it all for you. But it’s not like it’s that great a story anyway. You’ll probably be able to guess most of the “twists” if you’ve read your share of Hulk comics. You could probably even guess who the final boss is with the information I’ve given. It’s not like the last game where the Leader just came out of nowhere at the end. Actually, I forgot to actually follow the story in the last game. I was having too much fun smashing people and stuff.

Aaanyhow, the game starts out pretty simple. With a training mission. And after that, it gets to the game, which is still pretty simple. You’re the Hulk. You can go around smashing stuff and having a grand old time, or you can try to complete missions to further the story. Sound familiar? The only real difference is that you can’t drive cars. But later on in the game, you’ll find a good enough replacement for that. The one thing that I noticed is that not all buildings are destructible. Sure, there’s the odd one every couple blocks, but I’ve wailed at buildings for well over a minute straight, and nothing but a huge series of holes. Maybe I’m missing something, or I’m doing something wrong, but I was promised fully destructible environments, not just one building here and there. That’s pretty much the only thing wrong with the game, and it could simply be caused by my idiocy.

Everything else is cool. You’re given three options of things to do when playing. I already explained that you can just run rampant through the city or you can take on the missions. So what’s the third? If the real missions aren’t your cup of tea and (God forbid) you’re bored with just causing mayhem, there are plenty of side-missions available as well. Some of them are challenges that you’d expect like races and demolition contests, but some are just plain nutty. One of my favourites puts you out in the badlands, drops a line of cars in front of you, and places a goalpost some 100 yards away. Any guesses? That’s right, a car punting challenge. There are also some other really neat challenges, like “Gamma Golf” and one where you see how far you can smack a soldier into the ocean. The issue is that you’re ranked on all the side-missions, and getting the high-scores can be really, really hard. If you don’t mind bronze, then it’s no big. But me, I’m obsessed with getting all golds. So it’s driving me crazy that they require you to be really damn good. (I’m only respectably good, for reference.)

The regular missions can also be a pain in the ass every once in a while. Most of them are doable after a couple tries, but some are just downright infuriating. In most other games, I’d just give up and go home (or cry myself to sleep if I were already home), but for some reason I’ve never just given up with this game, no matter how frustrating the task. And when you pull through on one of these difficult missions, the sense of accomplishment you get is just about the greatest thing ever. Be warned though, that the hard missions aren’t necessarily saved for the end. No, some of the missions right at the beginning of the game can be pretty tricky if you haven’t yet got the hang of controlling the Hulk. Mind you, that this is also just my experience on the normal difficulty mode (Easy? Who plays easy?). I’m not touching the hard game with a ten-foot pole. At least not until I actually finish the game. To clarify, I’m stuck on the last boss. What can I say? I’m not good with time limits. If it was just a fight to the death, I’d have won weeks ago. But thus is not the case.

While I’m on the topic, the bosses in this game are, well, not exactly up to the hype. Don’t get me wrong, some are gigantic, but they’re not the bosses I’d hoped to see. Previews promised that I’d be squaring off against the Devil Hulk at one point, and that was an awesome battle (he spends a good amount of time trying to eat you), and Hulk fans should be more than aware by now that the Abomination makes an appearance, but that’s about it. Sure, there’s Mercy, but other than those three, the bosses are mostly all just big Hulkbuster robots. The last game had some real sweet boss fights against a cornucopia of villains including Madman, Ravage, Flux, the Leader and Half-life. What do we get here? A big ol’ pile of robots and only a handful of real bosses? Boring. What makes it even more insulting is that they’re all easy except for the last one. Oh well, at least it’s still fun to beat the tar out of ’em.

By now you’re probably wondering a little more about what it’s like to just galavant around town and bust stuff up. Well, it’s exactly that. Of course, like most games of this nature, there is a threat meter, and you will face some opposition once it gets high enough. Near the beginning of the game it’s just cops and helicopters that will take the fight to you, but as you progress further on in the story, the opposing forces will get meaner and bigger. By the very end, you’ll be hurling tanks to try to keep giant mechs off your ass if you fill that threat meter. It’s all very fun, but since the threat meter seems to have frequent mood swings and will sometimes fill very fast and other times very slowly, you might end up facing one battalion after another or try to bring out the authorities to no avail.

While you’re traipsing around town like a bulldozer on steroids, you’ll notice that you earn these things called smash points. They are used in this thing called the Buy Menu. You can trade your smash points here for things called new moves. OK, I’ll cut the crap. There are like a bajillion moves to buy in the game, and each time you complete a chapter (beat a boss) you’ll unlock another set. Some are just run-of-the-mill things like running punches or punt kicks, some are there to help you get around faster like air dashes, and some are not actually moves, but rather life meter upgrades.

Another big category for moves are super moves. Attacks that will kill pretty much anything in a ten-yard radius of the Hulk (I may be off. I’m terrible at measurements). There is a catch though. You can only use super moves in two instances. The first is called Critical Mass. When you’re full on health and pick up a health blob, your HUD will grow a second health bar (insane!), which represents your CM energy. Getting hit will diminish it, and so will using super moves. you can upgrade it good though, and gain enough CM energy to use three supers without dropping out of CM. It’s great against weaker enemies, but you’ll rarely get the opportunity against enemies who are either really strong or in huge groups. Bosses also like to keep you just out of Critical Mass. That’s where your other option comes in, the Adrenaline Rush. Any guesses? Wrong! when your health is just about to run out, Hulk will go nuts and be able to pull off super moves, but he’ll also be one or two hits away from death. Fortunately, the Hulk’s regenerative powers will heal him up good if you can keep him from dying. To make it even better, the time Hulk needs to get out of the critical state is about the same it takes to execute a super move, so you’ve got a pretty good ace-in-the-hole.

Lastly, I have to mention the selling point for the game for me: weaponization. The Hulk can pluck pretty much anything reasonably-sized out of the scenery an wield it as a weapon. this is cool, but it gets better. After buying certain moves, you can get Hulk to mangle different objects into new types of weapons. For example, cars can be ripped in half and turned into the fearsome Steel Fists. Trucks, on the other hand, can be flattened and turned into shields that can be thrown as a boomerang, and further increasing their use, you can even learn to use these makeshift shields as a kind of urban surfboard. It’s astounding how many options they give you when it comes to offense, and being able to turn your surroundings (and enemies) into weapons is just icing on the cake.

So then, the game’s obviously pretty damned sweet as far as playing it goes, but how is it to look at? You know, there is a lot of talk about graphics being important again with the new line of consoles on the horizon, but do they really need to get any better? The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction doesn’t have the prettiest graphics that you’ve seen, but they’re way more than good enough to get the job done. The main characters (eg: Hulk, mechs, helicopters, bosses) all look great, and the environments are decent enough, but the FMV cutscenes are more or less just a step up from ReBoot. Like most FMV things, the characters seem stiff and unnatural. It’s something I’ve come to expect since it happens so often, so I don’t really care, I just thought I’d mention it. The only thing I have a problem with is that the time of day is constant. There’s normally no night/day change, it only occurs at the turn of a chapter. Again, no big, but it’s something I thought should be said.

Aurally, the game does a mixed job. Sound effects are excellent. They even did a “making of” featurette exclusively for how they did some of the sound effects. It’s nothing special, but they’re all there and sound like you’d imagine they would. As far as music goes however, the game really lacks. I know there is music in the game, I just don’t remember hearing any of it. The best I can do is say that the menu theme gets annoying quick. As for any in-game music, if it was there, it was so forgettable that I didn’t even notice it in the first place. On the upside however, this is good because I can put on a CD and not feel bad about missing out on great music. It’s always a struggle for me to find a game to play when I’m listening to a CD, because music is a huge part of most games for me, and I just can’t stand to mute something like Metroid Prime or Tales of Symphonia no matter how much I might like whatever I’m listening to.

The controls for the game are pretty solid for the bajillions of moves you can pull off with them, but I do have a bit of an issue. The camera isn’t entirely friendly to the player, and while it doesn’t cause trouble so much on the “seeing things” front, it does mess up movement sometimes. It’s usually only while running up buildings on an angle that it’ll give you trouble, but sometimes it’ll just crap out on you in the heat of battle and leave you to rely on the targeting system alone.

There are plenty of extra stuffed into the game if you care enough to root them all out. There are multiple “making of” movies, an in-game cinema viewer, and art galleries upon art galleries. Unlocking them requires you to hunt down big green coins hidden throughout the city and badlands. There are only 60 in all, so it’s not like it’ll take forever. Some are pretty slyly hidden inside buildings, and those are generally the only ones you can knock down. Doing this will also unlock cheats for you to enter and use at you leisure. On that note, the first cheat you get is possibly the coolest cheat ever: Hulk scores a pair of Canada shorts! After a little research, surely enough, Radical Entertainment is a Canadian company. Further research reveals that they were behind Mario’s Time Machine for the NES, and that they’re making a Scarface game.

And that pretty much wraps up everything I have to say. Obviously, I’m not going to give the game anything less than an A. It isn’t perfect, so I’m gonna hold off on the plus for now, but should I ever find a way to tear down every building in the game, rest assured I’ll come back and kick it up a notch. I’d hate to be anyone who can’t find some kind of entertainment value in this game. It’s got pretty much everything you need from adventuring to brawling to zany mini-games to treasure hunting. If you enjoy the GTA series and not Ultimate Destruction, then the only thing you enjoy about those games is the cussing and shooting, and you’re a terrible person. As I said, nobody who plays video games even casually should have trouble losing themselves in this game for hours on end. There may be more productive ways to spend your time, but I dare you to find me something productive that’s this much fun.

Note: (it’s obvious, but for the sake of good jounalism) all pics stolen from IGN.com

The Ryanland Horror

So I just watched “The Amityville Horror”. Not a great movie, but it had some disturbing imagery, so I’m satisfied. The ghosts and the basement scene towards the end gave off a really strong Silent Hill vibe, and that’s actually a movie I really want to see. I don’t like the Silent Hill games for gameplay value so much as the atmosphere and storytelling, which is different for me, because usually I don’t give two shits about the story and whatnot. With that in mind, I believe that it could make the move to the big screen faily well. But anyway, onto the main point of the post.

I’ll admit it, “scary” movies (excluding slashers) do strike some irrational fear into my heart. I don’t have any idea why, but I always have trouble with darkness and sleeping after a horror flick, no matter how cheezy/stupid/boring it is. You may think less of me for this, but that’s the way it’s always been. I’m trying to overcome it (I’m typing this in the dark), but the fear is always there. The wierd thing is, I’ve never been scared by a videogame, even if they contain essentially the same things as the movies that send chills down my spine. I mean, SH4 should scare the living daylights out of me, cause it’s filled with ghosts and horrid imagery (To be fair, there is a single room in the game that I refuse to enter, because it does creep the hell out of me), but no such fear. Even the first Silent Hill should be horrifying even though its graphical prowess is limited, but again, nothing.

I do have a sort of conclusion though. See, in the games, I’m always in control, and I’m able to defeat, overcome or escape anything that threatens me. Thusly, my brain interperets that if anything like that were to come at me, I should be able to defeat it as I did in the game, even though it may have involved some crazy voodoo magic which I don’t happen to possess. The movies however, do not put me in control, and as such I’ve never tackled those forces even indirectly. It’s always someone else doing the dirty work, and more often than not, the movie ends with the evil still intact, ready to get revenge on whoever may still be alive or plotting for its next victim. Since the antagonist is rarely vanquished in the movies, I subconsciously think that there would be no hope to escape such a menace, should it happen to be real. I know that nothing like this can actually happen, but unfortunately, that little voice in the back of my head wants to believe it could, so it ends up poisoning my entire psyche in the end. It may be hard to comprehend what I’m trying to get across, since you’re not privy to my thoughts, but I’ve explained it to the best of my ability. Hell, you’d probably go out of you mind if you had to decipher all my thoughts.

But anyway, that’s just something I needed to get out into the open. I even feel a little more comfortable now that I’ve got it off my chest. As a reward for reading this drivel, I’ll tell you a secret. The article will be up later today. I kinda slacked off today, but it’s almost done. If you didn’t read the whole spiel, then shame shame double shame on you for cheating and skipping to the last paragraph to see if there was any article news there. Also, this week’s comic is going to be hilarious. At least, that’s what we think.

Oh be joyful, ’cause that shit spreads

The newest “feature” of the site is up and ready to go now. I’ve been itching to do this since like December of last year. It’s about time I finally got to it. Speaking of which, I promised an article for the weekend, didn’t I? Shit, better get to work on that now…

But before I get back to that, I picked up Matthew Good’s In A Coma “anthology” and my God, it is the most amazing thing ever. The new songs rock, the classics were well-picked and the acoustic songs are absolutely beautiful. And I haven’t even thought about the included DVD yet. Best of all, it was only $30. For two discs (17 and 19 tracks respectively) and a DVD crammed with goodies, that’s an excellent price. To top it all off, Matt Good is gonna be playing a bar show here on the 25th and 26th. I really want to go, so I need a posse or a girlfriend ASAP.

Is it hot in here….

If you’ve got an account on my forums, can I ask you a small favour? Would you try logging in? I’m not asking for board activity, it’s just that I was trying to log in and it won’t let me. Says I need an activation key, and when they sent me the key, it doesn’t work. So yeah, give it a shot. Pretty please? With sugar on top?

UPDATE (7:40PM) – I managed to log in, and wiped the whole place. Now, the Forums of Death are the Torrential Coozy Forums. I decided that we need a message board for Coozy for Hire, and thus I’ve relaunched it under a guise of being the official forums for both sites. And also, I mentioned a new pseudo-article to be up near the end of September a while back. While it’s pretty late, that’ll be ready to go tomorrow.

HIM – Dark Light

When I heard about the new HIM album back in July or whenever it was announced, I was marginally excited. Being the fan of HIM that I am, I probably should have been more excited, but all it got from me was a lackluster “Wooh” and a light air-punch. You know what I mean. If not, diagram. What can I say? I like drawing diagrams.

Fortunately, as time passed and live versions of a couple new songs from the album became available to download, my excitement rose exponentially. The two songs, “Vampire Heart” and “Killing Loneliness” were awesome. Though “Killing Loneliness” was cut short due to bass troubles, I listened to the songs many, many times. My Last.fm page might have you believe differently, but trust me, those songs were played almost too many times between when I got them and when the CD came out. And that’s pretty much where we are now. Dark Light was released on September 27, and now that I’ve had a week (and about 40 plays) to let it sink in, I think I’m ready to give it a great big review. Of course the review won’t really be that big, it is a mini-review after all.

We last heard from HIM when they released their greatest hits CD, entitled And Love Said No. Featuring two original songs and 15 other great songs, it’s been my favourite up until now (though most fans would disagree and say Love Metal is the best), but Dark Light has come and made me question that preference. There’s something wrong with that sentence, but I just can’t point it out.

All you really need to know is that Dark Light rocks. I’ll go as far as to say it’s got a bit more pop influence than what HIM’s exhibited up until now, but that’s not at all saying that they’ve changed. There’s no selling out here, we’re still talking full metal assault on your eardrums, it’s just that most of the songs seem more upbeat and whatnot than usual. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing either.

The album kicks off with “Vampire Heart”, and while it’s a great song all around, the album version is slightly less kickass than the live version. A little shake-up, but it was expected. Then we get what they’re touting as their new single, “Rip Out the Wings of a Butterfly”, or just “Wings of a Butterfly” for short. This is where that pop thing I mentioned factors in. It’s a great song, but I do have a complaint. See, the song is almost entirely chorus. There are only two verses, and they’re very short. Normally no big, but it makes the song seem kind of short and half-assed. That aside, it’s awesome. Awesome in its most aural form. After that comes along my new favourite song “Under the Rose”. While a couple other bands have songs with remarkably similar titles (read: exact same), this is not another cover. It’s got the catchiest chorus I’ve heard is some time, a really sweet guitar solo, and the rest of the song isn’t bad either. Plus it gives me an excuse to use a flower as my MSN Messenger avatar. Don’t make any assumptions. The last of the fearsome foursome that headline this album is “Killing Loneliness”. This one I actually prefer to the live version. Can’t think of anything else to say about it.

Now, it’s kind of weird, but as far as I care to say, the title track is the weakest on the disc. It’s not that “Dark Light” is a bad song, it just doesn’t stack up so well to the four kickass songs that preceded it. “Behind the Crimson Door” is average enough, and is more or less forgettable. Mind you, that even though I say that – and I’ll probably say it again before the review is done – none of the songs on the CD are bad. They’re all pretty good, some just don’t stand out as much as others. “The Face of God” is another one I really like. It’s got a really subdued maraca (I think?) part during the first half of the chorus that always catches my ear, even though you’d normally have to listen for it specifically to even notice it. “Drunk on Shadows”, unfortunately, failed to make me care much for it.

At first, I was apathetic towards the second-to-last track, “Play Dead”, but one day it just kind of popped into my head and after really listening to it, I’ve come to truly appreciate it. I’ve always liked slower songs, and “Play Dead” is great in every respect. Also, there’s some really beautiful piano work towards the end, which is always a good thing. The last song is another slower one (well, maybe not that slow), a popular way to end a CD. But aside from the correct placement, “The Nightside of Eden” is another weak song. Forget what I said about “Dark Light” being the weakest, this one just doesn’t strike me as good enough. I just don’t really like it that much.

I’m having a really tough time deciding just where I should rank Dark Light against the rest of HIM’s work. On one hand, most of the CD just plain kicks your ass, but there are a few songs that are barely worth mentioning. Very similar to the debut album Greatest Lovesongs Vol. 666. Though I didn’t like the good songs on that one nearly as much as I do the ones on the newest offering. I suppose that with the aid of “Under the Rose” and “Play Dead”, I’ll have to put this one at the top of the chart.

No matter how it stacks up to it’s brethren, Dark Light is easily a keeper. If you like HIM or just rock, metal, whatever, there’s a good chance that you’ll enjoy it. It’s more than worth your $16. The front sleeve (Inside the case. It comes in an actual sleeve.) art is pretty snazzy too, so that’s a plus. A plus that makes no difference in musical worth, but it’s still a plus. Go out and buy it. All those underlines and quotation marks don’t look so good on such a large font. Website.

The Good Stuff:
  • “Under the Rose”
  • Sweet cover art
  • Maracas. Barely noticeable maracas, but maracas nonetheless.
  • Beautiful piano on “Play Dead”
    		•
    The Bad Stuff:
  • Not as good as past releases
  • A little short
  • “The Nightside of Eden” is totally forgettable
    		•

    Band of the Month – October 2005

    First I’d like to note that the offers on both the Super Mario Bros. Super Show and Bots Master theme songs have expired. If you really want to download those songs, youse-a gonna hafta find ’em youseselves. It’s sad, I know, but the dumping of excess weight saved me over 1.5MBs. Hooray!

    On to the task at hand, this month’s “band” is the Canadian rocker Matthew Good. Anyone out of the loop might be inclined to ask “But isn’t it Matthew Good Band?” Then I would point out that “No.” True, there was a band, but that was ages ago. Sometime in between 2001 and 2003 (I can’t remember for sure, and I’m not going to look it up), the band broke up and Matt went out on his own. Word on the street is the breakup was caused by Matt’s assholic personality, and who’s to say differently. If you want to try to figure it out, the picture on the sidebar leads to his blog, and you can read into that if you really care. If not, you can keep reading this. It’s not like there’s anything better out there. Trust me, there isn’t.

    It all started back in 1995, when the MGB released their first album, entitled Last of the Ghetto Astronauts. This was before I listened to them, so I’ve never heard this one, even though I’ve bought mostly every other MGB/Matt Good CD. The other one I don’t own was a half-assed attempt released two years later, featuring only five songs, two of them coming from the previous disc. Raygun may only have five songs, but they generally charge the normal CD fee of $15 for it, and I’m not shelling out $15 for five songs. Some places even bump it up to around $20. “Generation X-Wing” is a pretty damn good song, though. Almost makes it worth it.

    My personal experience starts with Underdogs, which was released the same year as Raygun. I think the first MGB song I ever liked was the incredibly slow “Apparitions”. I still really like the song, but there are better ones out there. Other greats on the CD inclued “Everything is Automatic” and “Indestructible.” The next CD, Beautiful Midnight, was easily the peak of MGB’s success, being home to at least four hit singles. “Hello Time Bomb”, “Strange Days”, “Load Me Up” and “The Future is X-Rated” are all great, but don’t think that that’s all the album has to offer. “Giant” is a first-rate and somewhat touching song, and “Jenni’s Song” mixes a great chorus with a tune that I know is from another song. Or at least very similar. This is a great CD to start with if you’re just getting into MGB. My personal favourite of the MGB releases is their last, The Audio of Being. This one sounds different from the previous ones, or it does to me anyway. The sound gets a lot more serious and while I don’t stretch as far as to call it emo, some might apply that tag here. There are plently of good rock songs here, but the overall mood seems to be of a slower pace and has a more mature tone to it. Eventually, “Anti-Pop” hit the big time with some radio/TV play, but I think that’s all the mainstream world really saw of this album.

    And that was when they split. Would this cause a big change in the music? No. Not really. As far as the music tells you, Matt was pulling all the strings, at least towards the end. There’s very little differenece between the Matthew Good Band and the Matthew Good solo act, so fans could breathe a sigh of relief. His first solo release, Avalanche, is fantastic and provides a great split between the moodier sound of The Audio of Being and the more rock-oriented previous CDs. Something for everyone here, and it even brought Matt back into the mainstream with the singles “Weapon” and “In A World Called Catastrophe”, the latter which had something of a thematic video (at least I think it was that song), presenting you with footage of the war on Iraq. While I generally look down upon political music (another story altogether), the song itself doesn’t explicitly touch on the subject, so I can deal with it.

    The most recent album, White Light Rock & Roll Review is just as good, if not better than its predecessor. In fact, I often confuse some of the tracks between the two. More radio hits here, I’ve heard both “Alert Status Red” and “It’s Been a While Since I Was Your Man” get plenty of play on the local rock station. I personally like the uber-simplified “Put Out Your Lights” and hard-rocking “North American For Lofe”, but hey, if I chose what they played on the radio, I’d be the king of mainstream. And yes, I meant for that sentence to go nowhere. The cool note is that this is the only MGB/Matt Good CD (that I’ve listened to/can remember) that totes a hidden track. “Hopeless” is an excellent song that’s almost country, but I love it, and am very disappointed that it doesn’t show up on the upcoming greatest hits CD.

    And speaking of that, In A Coma (October 11th, if you’re interested) will be released in not one, but two versions. The first is your regular greatest hits package with a couple new songs tacked on for fun. The second, though, is just mind-blowing. Not only is it two discs long, but the second disc is full of acoustic classics and rare songs. To top that all off, it also includes a DVD packed with videos, commentary, a documentary and all sort of other superfluous junk. As you may have guessed, I totally coozied when I heard about this one. It’s probably gonna cost a pretty penny though, and I’m not really looking forward to that part of the transaction. Other things I should mention include two EPs, Loser Anthems and Lo-Fi B-Sides, the latter of which was given a limited release, with only 500 copies produced. Too bad none of those copies made it into my grubby hands. The former also has some limited availability jargon associated with it, but I don’t feel like retyping my finds.

    And so another Band of the Month segment comes to an end. Seriously, if you like Matthew Good and are thinking of picking up a CD, go with either Beautiful Midnight or one of his solo CDs. Of course, the impending release of the In A Coma anthology looms on the horizon, so you could always wait for that. There’s not much else to say, except for that tomorrow I’ll be putting up a new mini-review, somewhat related to today’s post, and I’m not gonna be making a post specifically to draw attention to it tomorrow. I’ll be too busy, because Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow and MegaMan Zero 4 released yesterday, and Future Shop or EB should have them by tomorrow.

    The mind of a killer

    Last night, I watched one of the coolest movies I’ve seen in a while: The Cell. The basic plot is that this psychotherapist (played by Jennifer Lopez) goes into the mind of a serial killer and tries to figure out where he’s got his latest victim hidden. Anyhow, I started watching because I flipped by the channel and I saw Vince Vaughn, and figured that I haven’t seen a bad movie with him in it yet so why not. A while in, it occured to me just how similar this movie is to one of my favourite PS2 games, Silent Hill 4: The Room. Honestly, if you’ve played the game and understood the whole story, you would just be blown away by when you watch The Cell and see just how many things they have in common. Or vicey versa, whatever. They’re not entirely the same, but you’d be hard pressed to not see similarities between the two. The point is, if the guys who wrote SH4 said they weren’t at all influenced by this movie, I wouldn’t believe them for a second. My advice is to play SH4 and watch The Cell. Awesome game, awesome movie. It’s just like how the original Silent Hill had a lot in common with Jacob’s Ladder (which are also awesome, by the way). That is all.