Embrace It
Resistance 2[PS3]
9/10
by Jason Polansky
If video game developers decided to write a book titled “How to Make a Sequel,” you could bet your ass that the first topic of discussion would be Resistance 2, a title that is bigger, louder, and just more badass than its predecessor in every possible way. Whether you’re playing through the tough-as-nails single player story arc, tearing through the cooperative campaign with up to eight friends, or simply taking part in a 60 player online deathmatch, it’s safe to say that Resistance 2 succeeds at delivering a stellar successor to the PlayStation 3’s premier launch title.
Let’s jump right into it. This single player game picks up immediately where the first game left off. After finishing his mission against the alien Chimera invasion of England, your protagonist, Nathan Hale, is taken back to the United States for his next mission. Fans of the first title will immediately notice a lack of narration and a large focus on Hale’s story. You’re thrown into the action right off the bat when your helicopter is shot down by a machine that is the size of most skyscrapers. This does a great job of showing off the scope of Resistance 2. You are constantly pitted against larger-than-life bosses that tower high above and leave you intimidated. Fortunately for you, you have access to developer Insomniac’s trademark arsenal of imaginative weaponry. Unlike their Ratchet and Clank titles, you won’t be shooting tornadoes or turning enemies into penguins. What you will be doing, however, is shooting through walls with the Auger Rifle and wielding a magnum pistol that shoots remotely detonated explosive rounds. Though the arsenal isn’t nearly as diverse as the one found in the first Resistance, it stands out from the rest of the first person shooting pack and will certainly leave an impression.
On the multiplayer front, the cooperative campaign allows for up to eight players to team up among specifically tailored co-op missions, but the real standout is the adversarial mode, which allows for up to sixty players to be in a match at once. To avoid absolute chaos, each team is divided into separate squads to duke it out among various sections of the expansive maps. Inevitable 30-on-30 shootouts break out, and when they do, the result is groundbreaking in the sense that no slowdown or lag is ever present, even in the midst of endless explosions and gunfire. The multiplayer mode adds legs to the already beefy ten-hour-plus single player game.
Resistance 2 is the complete package and shows Insomniac’s ability to take what it learned from one entry of a franchise to improve upon the next. The only issues that it suffers from are problems that few in the target audience will even notice. For one, the single player campaign is way too difficult at times and will likely turn off those that aren’t proficient in first person shooters. My only other gripe is the fact that this game ends, and I simply didn’t want it to. It’s ironic that this game is titled Resistance, as the last thing you’d want to do is just that.
They Split? I Didn’t Even Know They Were Dating!
Thursday / Envy Split LP
10/10
by Ryan Mallette
For a band that is blamed for inspiring an entire music movement, New Jersey’s Thursday fell into the shadows relatively quick. Enjoying profound success with their 2003 album War All the Time, the band failed to overcome their previous achievements with their subsequent releases. Their later albums found the band moving in a completely different direction that alienated much of the band’s core audience. With their newest release however, Thursday have finally found a way to balance their roots in hardcore with their love for ambience.
Japanese hardcore band Envy have much less to prove on this album, as they have been consistently well-respected since their decade long career began. The band continues to show why they have earned their esteemed image by providing songs that fit perfectly with the rest of their catalogue.
Thursday hit the ground running with “As He Climbed the Dark Mountain.” Speedy drums alongside a guitar-lead quickly ascend as singer Geoff Rickly commands the entire band on their summit. Here, Thursday pushes on with the urgency of their younger days. Guitarists Steve Pedulla and Tom Keeley battle each other for staccato glory, only to be overcome by drummer Tucker Rule’s gunfire snare. “In Silence,” a dark instrumental, fully realizes its potential in the form of a five-minute epic. Keyboardist Andrew Everding leads the way in an eerie, post-apocalyptic progression that is powerful in its simplest form, accentuated by mechanical drums and shoegaze-inspired guitar that fills the entire soundscape. Everding begins the next song with an electric piano progression, but just as you throw on your slippers to enjoy a serene ballad, the band crashes in, once again filling your head with urgency. Rickly is the highlight of this one, as the band sonically bursts with his every word, “We hold our hopes like cigarettes / Then we leave them dying in the grass.” Ascending limitlessly, Rickly proves he has mastered his vocal range as he belts out every word with an amount of pride that hasn’t been seen in this band in years.
“Appeared and Was Gone,” a remix of “In Silence” done by Mercury Rev’s Anthony Molina, serves as a beautiful transition from Thursday’s onslaught into Envy’s. The instrumental track is remarkably brutal, with a spacey atmosphere and even more synthesized drums. As the reverberating guitar begins its climb, the backround progressions die out before the entire song makes a thunderous return in a blistering grand coda.
Envy starts off with the lightest track on the album, “An Umbrella Fallen Into Fiction.” Tetsuya Fukagawa speaks softly over serene guitars and lighthearted piano. Before the track closes, Envy segues into a blistering guitar-driven bridge. This plays perfectly into the punk-inspired “Isolation of a Light Source,” which features breakneck screaming and guitar before falling once again into serenity. Envy’s highlight is certainly the last song, “Pure Birth and Loneliness,” as a slow, 6/8 beat carries the wash of guitars through a soft-sung valley. A snare roll then leads a spoken word section into a heavy, yet still peaceful time change. The song explodes near the end with a guitar onslaught of octaves and reverb leads, bringing the album to a fantastic close.
In this split album, Thursday and Envy both showcase their abilities and prove that they are extremely powerful bands, providing over 30 minutes of epically brutal, yet emotionally saturated compositions.
You Heard Right ... These Dudes Are Assholes
Ruiner - I Heard These Dudes are Assholes
4/10
by Lauren Ciarpelli
Ruiner, the hardcore band from Baltimore, Maryland, has given themselves a name by touring heavily and being badass. The music revolves around heavy drums, loud guitars, and generally pissed off misanthropic lyrics. It is hard to name any of their songs that do not contain the word fuck. Ruiner has been extremely successful considering their first show was in October of 2004, and by 2007 they signed to Bridge Nine Records, on which they’ve released two full length albums.
The latest release, I Heard These Dudes Are Assholes, is a fourteen-song collection compiling their previous EP’s. The album consists of eight songs from What Could Possibly Go Right, two from a split EP with Day of The Dead, and four rare demos out of print and no longer available until now.
Though the beginning two tracks are energetic, the first song that sticks out is track three, “Adhering To Superstition” —mainly because of badass guitar riffs and pissed off lyrics, ending with the gang chant, “If I had a time machine, HELL YEAH!” Another song that demands attention is “Getting Over The Overs,” a break-up song that shows they aren’t completely heartless, yet still BAMFs at the same time. The first part of the album finishes off with the song “Six By Six,” that contains an interesting, almost optimistic closing line “When it rains it fucking pours / and I’m digging ditches but I’m still smiling.”
The two songs “Dear Philadelphia” and “Sincerely” from the split EP are a lower quality when compared to the previous eight tracks, which brings down the awesomeness a bit. The songs themselves aren’t bad, maintaining Ruiner’s core sound and anger. The record ends with “Sincerely” and some more depressing lyrics, “Expressing ourselves for a chance to lose it all/ And we are the ones who have nothing.”
Nothing brings this album down more than the re-released demos, Adhering To Superstition, Paint Peals, Six By Six, and The Lives We Fear. When advertised, the re-released demos were the main focus, and being re-mastered by Nick Zampiello (Hope Conspiracy, Have Heart, Converge) didn’t save them whatsoever. The demos are poorly salvaged, have terrible sound quality, and it is a task to distinguish anything between them.
Unfortunately, this album is nothing new or exciting. It is most of their songs released by a smaller label (1917 Records), only now being released though Bridge Nine. Releasing a “new” album with not one new song is fucking bullshit. Seriously, this was an epic fail at trying to make money and promote Ruiner. Good luck finding it in any store, and ordering it online takes for-fucking-ever. Save yourself the time and money…and sanity.
oh, I’m Way Past the Limit
Hinder - Take It To The Limit
1.5/10
by John Hugar
That’s it! I’m declaring a moratium on all this bullshit right now! For those who don’t know, mainstream rock radio has basically sucked a big dick for the past decade now. Every year it gets worse and worse. Originality and creativity are drying up left and right, in favor of schlocky ballads, and fake “rockers” that make me pray for the return of Winger and Dokken. When Nirvana unleashed Nevermind on an unsuspecting society, it promised a rock revolution. Sadly, that dream died along with Cobain, and ever since, we’ve had to deal with mediocre artists like Theory of a Dead Man, Daughtry, and quite possibly the worst offender, Hinder. The problem is, this album isn’t just mediocre, it’s just out-right offensive. Dull, cynical, and so clearly pandering to the lowest common denominator, Nickelback’s last album sounds like OK Computer in comparison.
First off, let’s take a look at this album cover. What do we have here? All the heartthrobs from Hinder hanging out in front of their mansions with their shiny new sports cars, looking like douchebags, surely planning on banging underage girls later in the evening. Way to appeal to the blue-collar contingent, guys. “Hi, we have way more money than you, and we could easily fuck your girlfriend. Buy our album!” Spare me. Now, let’s take a look at the actual songs (and I use that term loosely) that make up this album. How about the title track? It features Mick Mars from Mötley Crüe, so it has to at least be decent, right? Wrong. Very wrong. It has no hooks whatsoever, and Austin Winkler’s feeble screaming sounds like the painful cries of an Abu Ghraib inmate just as the electroshock travels from the car battery to his genitals.
Admittedly, not all the songs on here are this bad. Lead single “Use Me” is catchy enough, but it loses credit on the grounds that it swipes the riff of “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” and isn’t half as good. The second single, “Without You,” is a generic power ballad, not even living up to the Mötley Crüe song of the same name, but you can probably listen to it without having an aneurysm. Don’t quote me on that, though.
As for the rest of this album, it’s basically just generic crap that you’ve heard a million times before, being sold to you for what sadly will not be the last time. Hinder desperately wants to portray themselves as bad boys. A bunch of rebels, misunderstood by society. The problem is, they are the biggest beneficiaries of the corporate machine around. They’ve gotten rich and famous as a result of radio programmers wanting to make their music as bland and dull as possible. Their lack of musical personality is the number one reason for their success. They’re too faceless to resist.
I always hear people talk about how horrible radio had gotten in the early ‘90s, before Nirvana came along. But let’s face it, the situation is ten times as bad now. I mean, at least back then we had Metallica’s Black Album, and Skid Row’s sadly underrated Slave To the Grind. At this point in time, there are no mainstream rock bands that give me any hope for the future. Hinder are just one of many pathetic, unremarkable bands poisoning the radio, and Take It To the Limit (way to steal a title from the Eagles, assholes!) is a prime example of how miserable things have gotten. It has no interesting qualities, yet it’s sure to go platinum. It’s become clear that we need another band like Nirvana to shake up rock music. If no band like that comes along, it’s only going to get worse from here.
