JACK THE RIPPER

Platinum Games bounce back after the Anarchy Reigns Sega shit out with Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. This Raiden stand alone started out as Kojima Productions tech demo, in which users got to precision slash gigantic stationary fruit during slow motion super state sequences. Completely unable to tease a game out of the dicing concept, Koji Pro handed off the title to Platinum Games for a rescue. Not only have the studio delivered a title that looks like the spiritual successor to the wonderful Vanquish, they've managed to weave the precision slash mechanic into gameplay WHILST UPSIDE DOWN. Show offs.

CUFFLINKS

Looks like OO7 is having a nightmare time in this new international ad for Skyfall. Underestimated by his superiors and foes alike, nursing a shoulder wound courtesy of a fellow MI6 agent, and, to top it all off, pursued by an out-of-control industrial excavator. But, despite all that, fuck having loose cufflinks. An international man of mystery's gotta look correct.

Supergirl by Frank Miller

Big Boss by Ashley Wood

STORM ONE 2025

After a string of portable games and a disappointing this-gen spin-off, Sandlot and D3 have finally announced a true sequel to Earth Defense Force 2017. Hooray! Earth Defense Force 4 takes place eight years after Storm One single-handedly saved the Earth from the threat of the Ravagers. For this sequel looks like he's drafted in the PaleWing jet-pack pilot (last seen in the second PlayStation 2 instalment) to help him muscle around collapsing cities blasting gigantic insects and their robotic pals.

Hardware

Sold as a stalk and slash, Richard Stanley's Hardware instead excels as a piece of world building. Hardware takes place in an unnamed city that reads like a transatlantic mishmash of London high-rise poverty and LA emptiness. People are ferried about on canals by rock star cab drivers, pop-up butchers appear in concrete basements, and everybody talks wistfully about fleeing to salvage scrap in what's left of New York. Stanley's idea of a post-apocalyptic civilisation is utilitarian and faintly miserable. 24 hour TV stations pump out blurry atrocity images and 90s goth rock pop videos. It's as if this terrible future nurses a raging hard-on for anything pre-bomb, endlessly screening absolutely any surviving video footage. Everything feels worked over and damaged. The people themselves are reticent and ruthlessly self-sufficient.

Kill quarry Jill Berkowski locks herself away in an apartment with bank vault security while she weaves together brutalist metal sculptures. Her nomadic boyfriend Mo is a grunt with a metal hand that fights in some vague interstellar conflict. They're so close Jill wands him with a Geiger counter before she even considers admitting him into her home. Elsewhere, Stanley's experience documenting the Soviet war in Afghanistan seeps into the film. Beyond the city is a vast radioactive desert full of rotting military equipment, ripe for re-purposing. A trade exists around gathering pretty tech fragments and selling them on as trinkets. Shell-shocked survivors self-medicate with foil packed jazz cigarettes and drink from boiled nettle stews. There doesn't seem to be any localised form of law or order, instead tribes huddle in and around tower blocks armed to the teeth. Stanley's doomsday society isn't just the usual desperate scrounging, instead it's oddly functional. Away from the city there even seems to be an overworld in place, fighting unseen wars and rationing out anti-procreation propaganda packaged as populist media.

Unfortunately this is all just set dressing. The slight plot, lifted from a back-up story in a Judge Dredd annual, digresses from robotic murderers to include an extended sequence involving a moist lipped perv who spends his days spying on Jill. There's an idea in there about the kind of agoraphobia you'd have to cultivate to survive in a wasteland, but really this peeping tom intrudes simply to sex up the body count. The MARK-13 people smasher itself isn't particularly exciting either. Aside from a glaring metal skull decorated with Old Glory, the android looks like a half-finished college art project. The body it cobbles together for itself, although realistically low-rent, never really stress inhuman lethality. Instead, thanks to its tiny, waddling legs, it just seems pathetic.

Giant Robo by Makoto Kobayashi

Heihachi Mishima by Simon Bisley

Radiohead - Nude

Dredd 3D

The most arresting thing about 2000 AD's Judge Dredd is its sheer lack of remorse. A flagrant disregard for human life is everywhere in the future shocked comic strips. Even during routine procedurals, panels bulge with wide-eyed citizens choking on experimental riot gas. If Mike McMahon is drawing, crowds of featureless people are very likely to tumble off insanely high super structures to their splattering, inky demise. Living in Mega City One is repeatedly stressed as dangerous. It isn't just polluted and depressed, it's listless and insane. With zero job opportunities available, most citizens means of expression tend violently criminal, with Dredd and the Judge system positioned as the overwhelming, incorruptible, response.

1995's Judge Dredd tried to position the character as a wronged knight locked in a dynastic struggle. Dredd is nothing so rote. He isn't something so specifically heroic - he's violent, borderline cruel. In film terms he's something closer to an exploitation cinema hero. Dredd is like a summation of Clint Eastwood's 60s and 70s career trajectory - the taciturn individualism of the Spaghetti Westerns married to the laconic fascism of the Dirty Harry franchise. Sprinkle in some Death Race 2000, and the violent, compromised heroes of 1970s British war comics, and the result is Old Stoney Face. Thankfully, Pete Travis and Alex Garland's Dredd 3D is exactly as wonderful as everything I've just described.

Karl Urban's Dredd physically recalls the punkier, more athletic drafts of late 70s McMahon, with the eagle shoulder as less a piece of artistic ostentation and more a body armour detail. Urban is also able to wrinkle his mouth up into an alarmingly accurate approximation of the downturned stingray mouth co-creator Carlos Ezquerra always drew. With little to say, Urban communicates through body language. His Dredd snarls and prowls, utterly unfazed by the twists and turns the Peach Trees siege throws his way.

With Dredd's personality locked and thriving, it falls to Olivia Thirlby's Anderson to experience growth. Over the course of Dredd she evolves from a flunking rookie to a calm and capable tool of destruction. Her inclusion seems to not be just about bringing a female perspective to Mega City One but also an opportunity to see how someone human reacts to the otherness of Judge Dredd. Her story is about becoming a respected component; someone Dredd will allow to watch his corners while he blazes through an army of drug dealers. Anderson, and how Dredd responds to her, also allows screenwriter Alex Garland to work in a key latter-day aspect of Dredd as a character. This unnamed Hotdog Run allows Dredd to play senior Judge, carefully measuring his cadet's suitability in terms of their personality, rather than the binary terms they expect. This examination officer angle revealing, perhaps, Dredd's sole human drive - fairness.

Garland's decision to show Dredd's day-to-day, rather than try and panel beat three or four mega-epics together means a consistent atmosphere and tone is allowed to develop. Dredd's casual indifference to endlessly escalating violence is allowed to be the focus rather than, say, how he responds to the machinations of clones and shady superiors. This expression of Dredd is confident enough to be anti-arc. Joe doesn't grow. He doesn't change in any recognisable way. Travis and Garland instead drill down to a core, foundation level aspect of the character's unending appeal. No matter what is thrown at him, he'll shoulder it like it's nothing, endure and, eventually, cave someone's fucking head in.

Public Enemy - Harder Than You Think

Transformers #83 by Geoff Senior

Devilman by Josh Simmons

Judge Dredd by Simon Bisley

CRITERION

Spider-Man by Joshua Smith

SABATA

Ennio Morricone - Here's to You

XOF

Well, this is all I'm going to be thinking about from now until the day it's released. Details are scarce, but it certainly looks like Big Boss is back in this ten minute hype reel for Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes. Awesome things to look out for include: a kid with a microphone port in his chest, a chap with the skin and mouth of a snake, and rainy contra compounds full of angry dogs. Maybe we're finally getting a game inclined to wade into the moral gray of Latin America's secret wars? Series fans may also notice that this sequence is basically a this-gen upscale of Snake's arrival in 1990's Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. Listen out too for an Ennio Morricone track last heard in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Branded to Kill by Ian MacEwan