14 year old me heard this and never looked back. Nothing else needs to be said, it’s Harvest.

Harvest!

Blood-soaked dirt as far as you can see, the wind whistling through the local saloon. A vengeful sheriff contemplates bending his own laws to wrong those who wronged him, just one from an entire culture of people carving out their lives in the grey area between right and wrong. If this all sounds appealing to you, congratulations; you’re probably a card-carrying American – or maybe Sergio Leone – for when it comes to over-romanticizing bloody, lawless eras of history, we Americans have no equal.

You probably had the same reaction I did when you heard this game talked about or saw reviews on these beloved intertubes: “What did Babo do to anger NYHC band Madball and what are they invading with? I hope they demonstrate their style.”

I then realized that no, this isn’t about a hardcore band. It’s about those strange toys from our collective childhood. For those of you who don’t remember the late 80s, color yourself lucky. Essentially, nothing was produced unless it could be turned into a childhood toy juggernaut. If you couldn’t make a morning cartoon, sell action figures, put it on a placemat or, more importantly, use it to part parents from their money, it just wasn’t going to get made.

The smoke in this saloon hung high around our heads like thick clouds, giving us the illusion that we were all giants. In a way, we are. I see it in the eyes of every so called god fearing citizen I pass in each dust choked town I rumble through. They romanticize what I do, every bloody, bullet riddled second of it. It could be worse, I suppose, at least I’m a lawman, bringing some justice to these tumbleweed infected jungles. I could be one of those awful, no good, evil sons of bitches who prowl the untamed deserts trying to strip it of everything good and decent, everything this country stands for. Those glorified criminals, worshiped by every poor farmers son from the ocean to the Mississippi.

Graf Orlock is one of the few grind bands I actually like, although I have found myself liking the genre more and more lately, must be because of how angsty I am. Anyway, Graf Orlock is essentially one long movie quote. Or what KillWhitneyDead would be if they cut everything out but the blast drums and the movie samples. Yeah, another gimmick band I like, I’m sure you are surprised.

Downloadable content, or DLC to the acronym lovers, is one of the great dividers in the video game community. Some believe that companies providing updates and addons for already published games in exchange for a, usually low, fee is just a logical extension of the ever evolving video game business model. They see a world where games gain significant replay value due to companies continually developing mods and expansion pacts for the title; and of course those companies should be compensated. Others believe that DLC is a crushing meteor sent from the outer reaches of space to destroy the hobby and allow video game companies to present unfinished games and simply charge for whatever they couldn’t put in in time. They see a world where you are presented with a stripped down husk of a game and need to invest even more beyond your original purchase in order to simply play the game that should have been shipped to begin with; a world where you are a hostage negotiator, and the game developers have a gun to your innocent content and are threatening to blow its brains out across the room unless you cough up some ransom.

So, the new From Monument to Masses CD is one of the best things I’ve heard in a good long time. I couldn’t find any songs from it on youtube so I figured I would post one of my favorites from one of their past releases. For those who aren’t “in the know”, From Monument to Masses is one of the last bands that show you everything that is good in post-rock. It is like the arrangement of an Explosions in the Sky song meets the political overtones of a Godspeed! song.

And the Top Albums of 08 list is still coming, my OCD is just making it impossible to not listen to everything I own and make sure it is impeccably organized.

Sorry about the lack of updates, my fellow prisoners. I’ve been writing like mad lately and have also been attempting the daunting task of doing my top albums list for 2008. I didn’t realize how much catching up I had to do when it comes to listening to stuff that came out last year. That is the beauty (curse?) of having so much music at your fingertips and a strong case of computer organizational OCD.

So I’ll hold you over with a clip of Danse Macabre, a German screamo band that does everything right.

If there is one thing that sets the casual fan group apart from their more hardcore counterparts, it is their differing opinions on sports titles. One group sees them as a necessary purchase year to year, others see them as simple expansions; nothing but a roster update and some negligible gameplay tweaks, a way to extract the most money from everybody with the least effort. The one series that has seemed to at least make an attempt at something fresh from year to year has been EA’s NHL series. While most other of the major sports franchises have been stagnant for a while, NHL tries to add something every year, some years it works (’09) and other years, well, not so much (’07). This year we have been promised more than 200 refinements to the system, and most of them seem to revolve around something that hockey games up to this point have never gotten right. The physicality. One of the most important parts of the sport is often the most overlooked in the genre, and this year EA seems to want to address that. If this were a Team Fortress 2 update it probably would be called something like “Enforcer vs Agitator” or “I Hate You Tie Domi.”

Aside from a Day is a very good screamo type band from freedom France. These guys will be making an appearance in my top albums of 2008 posts, which is why I thought to put something of them up here. That list is coming, eventually, I have album OCD too much and want to make sure I don’t miss anything.

Also, what is with Europe just decimating us with music lately? All their screamo and hardcore bands sound like they got stuck in the mid 90s, which is wonderful.

Nostalgia, thy name is Ghostbusters.

There are very few franchises that are remembered so well from so many gamers’ childhoods than Ghostbusters. By a pure miracle of space and time or whatever deity you tithe to, Ghostbusters has also somehow avoided over-commercialization that so many of our beloved childhood memories have succombed to. There has been no terrible movie adaptation with Megan Fox, and outside of the forgettable Extreme Ghostbusters cartoon, the one that was so stuck in the political correctness overload of the mid-nineties that it looked like an advertisement for a state college, it has also avoided any terrible Saturday Morning resurrections. We are all still thanking our lucky stars that Egon is not on in the morning fighting spiky haired antagonists with a deck of collectible cards (available at Target).

Rolo Tomassi is one of those many bands I get flack for liking. More experimental than they are anything else, they play an odd mix of cybergrind and prog wankery that just doesn’t seem like it should go together, yet does. They will be making an appearance in one of my next album posts so here is your prepping. There will be a test on this. I should also point out that everybody in the world either hates this band, except for me, or they just never play in front of good crowds. Every single video I have ever seen of them on Youtube is in front of a crowd more tepid than possible for creatures with a pulse. Bizarre. England must kind of suck.

And yes, I honestly like this band.

And no, not just because the singer is hot.

So today I have to finish previewing NHL 10 before I can get anything else done. I don’t really have the focus I need for it but, since I’m pretty awesome, I’m sure it will turn out alright. When I’m finished I plan on doing a few album dumps and maybe posting some retro reviews today, assuming I can pull myself away from Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead enough to actually get something else done.

I was just reading on Kotaku that Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 might actually be compatable together, which at first alleviated any of the furious rage I had over Valve pulling their first real scumbag company move. The more I thought about it, however, the more I realized I’m still bothered by what they are doing. Valve was always a very fan friendly company, sure it helped them that Half-Life is a cash making juggernaut and they also had two of the best/most popular multiplayer titles (Day of Defeat and Counter-Strike) and the best PC content distributing service, and arguably just the best content distributing service, at their fingertips. This let them do things like make Team Fortress 2 the best supported game with updates, additional content, and even game changing freshining ups. When Left 4 Dead came along and turned out to be a cash zombie cow it was both assumed and promised that it would be as well supported as their other games.

The first big updates did introduce us new and interesting content, and the game has been continuously updated to keep the game fresh and make things more balanced and enjoyable. Looking at it though, the only thing Valve really gave us was Survivor mode, and while that was a game changing addition the rest of the updates boiled down to some bug fixes and balance cahnges and introducing the two versus maps that were curiously absent in the first place. No new maps outside of The Last Stand in versus, one new game mode, no new weapons. This didn’t bother anybody though because even Team Fortress 2 started off slow.

Then Left 4 Dead 2 was announced at E3, and absolutely everybody felt hosed. Usually I make fun of the community when they get all up in arms over a business acting all business like, but this was like having a fan favorite kick your pooch in the mouth. When EA does something shady, ruins a small company or shows an absolute disdain for their own supporters or the industry as a whole, it is much easier to accept because they are like the Korvac of the video game industry. Valve has the exact opposite reputation, so when they pull a Darth Vader it gets twice the backlash. It gets even worse when you dig a little deeper and find out that a good bit of the content being talked about as new in Left 4 Dead 2 is actually already included in Left 4 Dead 1. A server mod can be downloaded and installed that simply unlocks the new additions, additions that were hidden in the source code of the game itself.

I still have hope that Valve will find a way to remedy this situation and not alienate the majority of L4D’s userbase. They took a step trying to explain that the two games might actually exist together, as in the same server browser and same community. Much like the way you can play Halo or CoD even if you don’t have any of the extra map packs. The problem is that this makes Left 4 Dead 2 into just an expansion pack. A full priced expansion pack.

The only remedy here is that Valve releases Left 4 Dead 2 at a lower price point, or at least continues to release new content for the original Left 4 Dead. Either way, Valve needs to watch where they go here. It didn’t take long for EA to turn the corner to the dark side, and it won’t take Valve long either.

Yesterday, I mentioned the pure awe inspiring amazingness of On the Might of Princes and promised I would produce further evidence, well here it is. All three of their full lengths. Probably among the strongest discography out there.  The Making of Conversation is the weakest of the three, and even it is better than 90% of what anybody else could hope to produce, plus the only reason Sirens isn’t perfect is because it doesn’t have For Meg on it. I’m not even giving any of these albums individual reviews because of how necessary I feel that they all are to your collection. I don’t care what genre of music you listen to, this stuff should be appreciated or you should have your license revoked.

What license, you ask?

Your being a fucking human being license. If you listen to any of these releases and don’t like them, you should just go right to wherever you got your Human license and just leave it right on their doorstep with a little note that reads “Thanks, but it just isn’t working.” Then sign it with a heart because you are a got dang pansy.

For those of you who need more prodding and are too lazy to watch the live videos I posted yesterday, On The Might of Princes plays a kind of space rocky post-hardcore that only recently found a foothold. They were certainly a couple years ahead of their time and would be the best act in this genre if they existed today instead. They worked a bunch of different things into what they did and it shows. Each album is diverse and captivating from start to finish, you will hear everything from American Football to Drowningman in this. There are not enough buzzwords in the world to do them justice. Atmospheric? Innovative? Yeah sure. They all work.

Just put these on your iPod already.

On The Might of Princes – The Making of Conversation (1999)

On The Might of Princes – Where You Are And Where You Want To Be (2001)

On The Might of Princes – Sirens (2003)

So I realized the other day that I’ve never posted an album that I gave five stars princesses to, I decided that I would just grab one and throw it up here to remedy that.

Of course, while I did, I found some absolutely amazing videos of one of the best bands ever. Like Penfold, they were pretty much transcendiary when it came to genres and who listened to them. I remember Youtube not really being a ripe ground for videos of them, but recently that must have changed since I found these two gems. While the quality isn’t perfect, it doesn’t even matter. Both from reunion shows and both of “For Meg”, which just needs to be heard to believe how spectacular that song is. Somebody could play that song at you through a concrete wall and you would still probably get those weird little music goosebumps. I’m aware that making that statement probably means I just gave a bunch of people “douche chills”, I don’t care. This band rules.

In a couple of minutes I’ll post their discography, but I figured these needed to get top billing.

To be honest, I wasn’t really entirely interested in Killing Floor before its release. I know a handful of people considered it an anticipated title, but I was hesitant. I only really became interested in it when my Left 4 Dead CAL clan all decided to purchase it. I gained a little bit more interest when I realized that this was actually the retail release of the UT mod of the same name. I love a good Mods to Riches story, who doesn’t? One of the greatest games of all time, Counter-Strike, was originally a mod and now it is considered an iconic PC title. When a mod is plucked from the free community and invested in, it is because a company believes that mod is going to make money. This is how you can almost always bank on mods in this same situation being stellar. It is like when in baseball when some kid straight out of high school get bumped into AAA or even the pros, or in hockey when some 18 year old is on the starting lineup of a playoff contender, or in football when a team spends a high draft pick on a guy from a Junior College or Division II school. The person making the decision on putting this amateur in the limelight thinks that they are good enough to win games and make money. So, safe to say, I went from uninterested to checking the “Fully Interested” box on my Anticipatiometer.

Then I saw the price point.

A while back I made a post about Penfold, hands down one of the best bands from my area and one of the most underrated bands in existence. In a recent Youtube wandering session, I stumbled upon a video of their last non-reunion show, aka one of the best shows ever, and figured it would make perfect sense to share it with the pair of you reading this.

I actually got an e-mail asking me what was up with the site and why I haven’t been updating the serial novel. Well, a lot has changed in the last couple weeks. I’ve found an artist who is interested in the project and we are beginning to work together to find a way to make this as interesting as possible. I want to do the build up to the story right, and my photoshop/artistic skills just weren’t enough. On the plus side, the serial novel itself is as done as it needs to be while still allowing me wiggle room with plot elements when feedback starts coming in. The addition of an artist doesn’t mean this is going to become a graphic novel or comic, but moreso that we will be working together to provide you all an interesting experience aesthetically. The negative side of things is that I now can’t give you a date for when it will (re?)begin.

In the mean time, you can check out some of my video game coverage at FACEOFFgames.com, I am also pitching ideas to a few other websites in order to get more experience and hopefully start taking off a little in this field. I’ve also, apparently, left Hardcore Gamer magazine due to some issues that don’t need to be revealed here.

The incredible plus of working for FACEOFF is that it has afforded me some freedom to be able to, and I know this is going to blow your mind, ACTUALLY START UPDATING HERE! Look for a lot more music posts and geek nonsense, plus my own flawless opinions, in the coming days. I mean it this time.