Die For Metal

The Questionable Truth

Limp Bizkit are engaged in making "the heaviest, most crazy metal record of all time."

Those among you who haven't yet laughed today, you're welcome.

The conclusion to the biggest videogame trilogy of this generation (no, the other one).

It's certainly taken us long enough to get here, but at last details on the climactic installment in the Assassin's Creed franchise are starting to flow thick and fast. After being confirmed by developer Ubisoft only a few days ago, here we get our first glimpse of the series' fresh setting, that of America in the throes of the Revolutionary War, and of out newest hooded protagonist, ostensibly named Connor.

George Washington himself seems to be making an appearance at the end of the clip here, begging the question of exactly how the backdrop ties in with the series' ongoing conflict between the Assassin brotherhood and the Templar order. Obviously we don't now much yet about story or motivations, which will doubtlessly be revealed in dribs and drabs as we inch towards the game's prospective release date of October 30th (I'll be disappointed if they don't do something with the Adam Weishaupt conspiracy theory though, that one's ripe for the picking). What we do know is that all of the dangling plot threads, including the journey of Desmond, the modern-day Assassin being made to relive the genetically inherited memories of his ancestors, are due to be tied up in this installment. Ubisoft kind of have to, after all; the end of AC2 tied the series' conspiracy obsessed narrative in with the events of December 21st, 2012, and as such, the series needs to explain its entire elaborate fiction before that date ceases to be in the future.

Gameplay-wise, this installment looks to represent something of a paradigm shift for the franchise, moving away from the densely packed, parkour-friendly European cities that have characterised proceedings until now and moving instead towards the natural environments of the American frontier. It looks to be going a little Red Dead Redemption, with emphasis placed on traversing and surviving unpopulated swathes of wilderness (one gameplay element is apparently killing wild animals for their pelts). All sounds pretty badass to me - Brotherhood and Revelations, while fun, often felt a bit claustrophobic, confining the player to Rennaissance Rome and Constantinople respectively, and this could be the breath of open air the series needs. And of course, the game looks great. Assassin's Creed has always been a handsome series, but in recent years it's lagged behind the very best of the best in terms of technical performance. No more, it seems. That entire trailer was made using the in-game engine, and in terms of the level of detail in environmental effects in particular, it just looks like a step up from previous entries.

All due respect to Mass Effect 3, but for me, this is the videogame event of 2012. Assassin's Creed is damn near the most intriguing and refreshing blockbuster franchise in all of gaming, and its continued success is one of those things that renews my faith in the taste of the consuming public. It's one of the few attempts at a story-driven, high production-value series of games that presents an alternative to the drab, monosyllabic uber-machoism that characterises most Western gaming and the syruppy, rainbow-vomit melodrama that's a staple of the Japanese gaming diet; offering characters who are badass and masculine while still being charismatic and likeable, environments that are colourful and pretty but still feel tangible and lived in. There has been criticism of the series' lack of innovation and forward movement over the course of the last two, non-numbered installments on both the level of story and gameplay, but I don't really see that as a problem. Returning to the universe of Assassin's Creed year on year has felt like watching successive seasons of a really well planned TV show, one that reveals its secrets slowly and deliberately, methodically building to that one big payoff.

Now that payoff is finally on its way. October 30th can't get here fast enough.

Don't see nothin' in need of redeemin'.

If you care now, have ever cared, or are ever planning to care about the state of contemporary martial arts cinema, then I probably don't need to tell you that you should already be psyched out of your mind for The Raid. If, however, you've managed to miss out so far on the buzz for the single most important hardcore action movie in a decade at least (I think Ong-Bak has finally met its match), then here's the lowdown: this is the second collaboration between rising Indonesian martial-arts star Iko Uwais and Welsh-born writer-director Gareth Evans, the first being 2009's Merantau, itself a pretty respectable if unspectacular riff on Ong-Bak that served mainly to introduce the viewing public to the underexposed native Indonesian martial art silat.

That's alright though, because Merantau was little more than a proof of concept. It was the appetizer and now we can see the waiter threading his way to our table with a big, juicy, mouth-watering main course. I'd say it looks indescribably awesome, but if you've watched the trailer, you hardly need me to sell you it any more than it already has. Me, I've been operating at what I thought was optimum hype capacity since the Indonesian trailer hit late last year, but now my brain seems to be overclocking. Seriously guys, holy fucking shit.

One fly in the ointment though, is the new decision to append the useless subtitle Redemption to a title that, to be honest, isn't all that inspiring to begin with. I mean, why? What consumer, exactly, is going to be swayed on purchasing this film by the presence of what amounts to one more word obscuring the poster art? It's not just that Redemption is one of those handful of words that also includes Revelations or Requiem or Evolution that can be thrown into any title without it meaning a goddamn thing, but that this very same subtitle was used for another martial-arts flick that achieved a healthy cult following less than two years ago, and it was at least somewhat justified in the case of Undisputed 3 given that it was a) a sequel and b) a film where redemption actually figured into the plot thematically. Y'know, as far as theme can be read into any flick about a surly Russian kicking men in the throat.

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Misadventures of Colonel Campbell, Geriatric Cyborg Ninja

WARNING: HUGE FUCK-OFF METAL GEAR SOLID 4 SPOILERS INCOMING.

So, it seems that Metal Gear is happening again. Kojima Productions is on the lookout for "engineers, artists and game creators" to help create a new installment of auteur designer extraordinaire Hideo Kojima's massively popular and utterly insane stealth game franchise. We don't know when, but it does look like Kojima could be shooting for the next generation of consoles - the IGN article does mention "next-gen gaming engine technology" to use with the studio's in-house FOX engine, although that's a slightly ambiguous statement as by some quirk of memetic nomenclature, the current console generation has never really stopped being referred to as "next-gen." Nevertheless, it looks like we're due for a few firsts in the Metal Gear franchise, what with the game seemingly being developed for both consoles and PC and with an apparent emphasis on collaboration between East and West, with work locations listed in both Japan and California.

Now, I'm a pretty ardent Metal Gear Solid fan, and I wish I could say I was turning cartwheels at this news, but for one minor yet significant detail: the series is absolutely over. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find a series that's over in terms more absolute than this one. 2008's MGS 4: Guns of the Patriots didn't so much draw a line under the narrative dating back to 1987 as it did carve a fissure under it a mile deep. The Patriots were destroyed and their system of control decommissioned! Revolver Ocelot is dead! Solidus is dead! Liquid is really really dead! Major Zero is dead! Vamp is dead! They brought Big Boss back to life for 20 minutes only to make him even more thoroughly dead! Snake was left with a year left to live at the outside! Raiden got decyborgified and reunited with his wife and child to lead a nonviolent life! Meryl got married to that annoying twat! Everything was explained, revealled and resolved in painstaking, borderline OCD detail. Every theme discussed, there was a conclusive statement made about. There is literally not a single card left in this universe's deck.

I honestly don't know what to make of Hideo Kojima sometimes. Here, he's created one of the deepest and most complex stories in videogame history, not to mention dedicated a quarter-century of his life to it, and yet he seems to have remarkably little regard for the integrity of his creation. Yes, I have the same reservations about the upcoming Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, but then, that game was outsourced to another developer and seems unlikely to retroactively undo MGS4's herculean effort at tying everything up given that it's a spin-off whose status as canon is dubious. Anything more closely tied to series continuity, however, seems to me bound to end in disaster. The image of Big Boss above might indicate we're doing prequels again, as in MGS3 and the two PSP releases, but then, that well's pretty much tapped at this point too. I mean, what else is there left to reveal about the events of Big Boss' life in the 60s and 70s without becoming redundant? One possibility might be a game centred around The Boss' exploits during World War II, but then, she was supposed to have been eight months pregnant during her operations then, and a game where you control a heavily pregnant woman lugging her belly around the French countryside slitting Nazi throats has even greater potential for bathos than a game with the word "Revengeance" in its name.

I know Kojima's gone on record as saying that MGS4 wasn't the conclusion he'd wanted for the series, both in terms of gameplay and story, and I respect the fact that he wants to make the "ultimate" MGS. But I'd much rather see him explore these ideas in a new IP, rather than continue a story that's he's done everything in his power to ensure can't possibly be continued. Drawing everything to a gigantic grand finale in MGS4, and then going ahead and making MGS5 anyway because the conclusion wasn't entirely satisfactory has the uncomfortable feel of George Lucas-esque revisionism. How are players supposed to feel any sort of closure from these games with the knowledge that it could all be undone in a couple of years when another installment comes along? I mean OK, Friday the 13th fans have been doing it for decades, but I really don't want to know how the mind of a die-hard Friday the 13th fan functions. That's a dark and scary place to go.

Oh, and one more thing. Hideo, if you're absolutely committed to bringing the world another MGS title, would you at least consider postponing it until after maybe making that new game in that other franchise that you've been jerking fans (myself included) around over for the better part of a decade now? I don't want to come across like an entitled fanboy, but there's a limit to how much I can be teased.

Faster than a laser bullet, etc. etc.

Yep, it's that time again kids. Dragonforce are back and more in need of ritalin than ever before. Their new album The Power Within - their first studio outing in four years - is due for release in April, and the first official promo track entitled Fallen World hit the web a few days ago.

I'm the kind of asshole who'll dependably boast that he liked something before it was cool, but it's true that I caught Dragonforce earlier than most people. Back in mid-2005 they were one of the bands that shepherded me out of my crap metal-but-not-really Kerrang! fodder phase and into the world of REAL METAL, where men are hairy and guitar solos are long. Ever since Through the Fire and Flames became famous as the greatest challenge the Guitar Hero franchise had to offer, there's been a considerable amount of backlash against their straight-from-the-adrenal-gland stylings, particularly from power metal purists; to this day, you can't swing a dead cat in a Youtube comments section for a Blind Guardian or Lost Horizon song without hitting someone wishing Dragonforce death by stoning. Well sure, their music is essentially shallow, their songs at once extremely formulaic and suffering from rampant ADHD. However, even though I moved on to greener pastures around the time Ultra Beatdown came out, I've never really stopped liking Dragonforce. They're fun, they're energetic and they bear absolutely no pretensions about what they are.

The new track (embedded below) is an encouraging sign in a few ways. The band's DNA is basically unchanged; Herman Li has apparently claimed that this is their fastest song ever, not that I could really say I noticed, seeing as after a certain point the human ears lose their ability to distinguish between stupidly fast and hyperbolically stupidly fast. What is noticeable is that the songwriting is considerably tighter than usual, which I rate as a positive. I generally like my music epic and sprawling, but it's encouraging that Dragonforce actually do know how to bring a song in under five minutes long (Strike of the Ninja doesn't count). Also graciously absent is the blatant studio artifice that plagued Inhuman Rampage and to a lesser extent Ultra Beatdown; no 8-bit video game sound effects here. I still think Dave Mackintosh's use of blastbeats is a bit excessive, a suffocating drumming technique that should only ever be used advisedly in power metal, but hey, Dragonforce have only ever evolved in baby steps, so I'll take what I can get.

Of course, this is all skirting the one big change, which is the first new song featuring new singer Marc Hudson, replacing Z.P. Theart. A few long-time fans have voiced their displeasure about the change, but personally, I was never really that attached to Theart, and I've been on Hudson's side ever since the video announcing his arrival to the band, in which he lets rip a twelve-second war cry that could just about be described as "Heimanian". On Fallen World, he's mostly content to ape Z.P.'s style, but I'm holding out hope that on the new album he'll distinguish himself with a few good sustained, full-voiced banshee screams like an old-school power metal singer. Time will tell. Either way, Dragonforce have piqued my interest for the first time in quite a while.

"I've... heard things you people wouldn't believe."

If you're a fan of prog rock at its most pompous, bombastic and head-spinningly creative, chances are that Arjen Lucassen is a name you're already familiar with. His project Ayreon was one of the premier institutions of prog for over a decade for two good reasons; firstly, the gargantuan, trippy meta-narrative that linked all of its recordings (most of them double-albums) together into one of the most expansive conceptual tapestries in all of music, and secondly, that in spite of the fact that Ayreon was essentially Lucassen's personal vehicle, over the years it played host to literally dozens of guest vocalists, each given their respective characters to play in Lucassen's stories. Ayreon's guest have included some pretty illustrious names in the past, among them Devin Townsend, James LaBrie, Mikael Åkerfeldt, Daniel Gildenlöw, Russell Allen and Bruce Goddamn Dickinson.

Sadly, Ayreon was put on ice after 2008's (kinda underwhelming) effort 01011001, but then again, Arjen Lucassen is one of those slightly unhinged overachievers who seem to be drawn to prog - for every one of his projects that ends, another five seem to spring up in their wake. He has one underway now, in fact, and in its making he seems to have topped himself with regards to awesome and esoteric guest spots:

Yup. Rutger Hauer, he of Blade Runner and Hobo With A Shotgun fame. He's not the first name that would've jumped to my mind for an actor to do a guest spot on a rock or metal album, but when I think about it it makes more and more sense, considering the penchant for monologues he demonstrated in his two most famous roles. Yeah, he's usually more quietly intense than hammy or bellicose, but that may well be more in keeping with Lucassen's typically atmospheric, introspective kind of music. I love me some grandiose concept albums, and this has got me excited now to hear what sort of soap-opera DMT trip Lucassen has planned this time. That, and I'm just happy that an actor I like is being paired with a musician whose work I enjoy and respect, considering Orson Welles and Christopher Lee were taken decades ago by vacuous cheesemongers Manowar and Rhapsody of Fire respectively.

No, really. Orson Welles narrates on Manowar's debut album. It was 30 years ago, and I still can't quite get my head around that.