E3 - Replaced

A beautifully produced trailer that apportions a significant amount of its runtime to showing off some genuinely lovely parallax scrolling. Hey, if you've got it, flaunt it. Coatsink Software and Sad Cat Studios' Replaced looks to replicate the static menace of Euro-platformers like Flashback or Another World, whilst also drawing the camera a little further away from the player's charmingly animated avatar, further stressing the constant vulnerability of a flesh figure climbing around a heavily industrialised, and apparently post-apocalyptic, landscape. 

E3 - Metroid Dread

Originally announced as a Nintendo DS game back in the mid-2000s, Metroid Dread finally becomes a reality, courtesy of Nintendo and Metroid: Samus Returns dev MercurySteam. Dread, a side-scrolling shoot-and-explore, sells itself here with a robotic stalker character who pursues Samus through the game's fracturing stages. Big fan of the camouflage ability, seen in the latter half of the trailer, that has Samus' armour take on the colour and texture of her metallic surroundings as a way to evade the laser scans of her roaming enemy. 

E3 - Despotism 3K

Apparently already available on every other video game platform under the sun, Konfa Games and Gameplay First LLC's Despotism 3K is on its way to Sony's systems. Despotism casts players as an evil AI overlord, breeding then press-ganging hundreds of fragile humans for amusement and basic sustenance. Think Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream reinterpreted as a mobile strategy game. 

E3 - WarioWare: Get it Together!

Due September on Nintendo Switch, WarioWare: Get it Together! promises dozens upon dozens of perfectly judged input instances, each absolutely seething with the same wit and character displayed by Wario, the game's in-universe designer. WarioWare is a consistently delightful series that, this time out, promises players opportunities for co-operative prodding. 

E3 - Hades

Supergiant Games' Hades finally washes up on Sony (and Microsoft) shores. The Switch release was the proud winner of umpteen Game of the Year awards in 2020, steering the indie friendly rogue-like genre away from repetition - or outright tedium if you prefer - towards a twitchy, beautifully atmospheric, jaunt around Greek myth. 

E3 - Elden Ring

After a few years of radio silence, we finally get a good, rolling, look at Elden Ring, the latest game from Hidetaka Miyazaki and FromSoftware. At first glance this latest iteration of the studio's finely tuned dark fantasy template looks to be selling itself on an idea of vista - vast, horizontal, expanses to plunder, necessitating a phantom steed. A closer look at these gameplay clips reveals, not just context specific jumps and launches but, at least when riding your horse, a double-jump mechanic. These stacked, player inputted, leaps imply vertical exploration, an entirely new dimension of nosing about that, more than likely, builds on the pagoda sneaking seen in 2019's Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

BVSMV - Morning Window

Berserk: The Golden Age Arc II - The Battle for Doldrey

Toshiyuki Kubooka's Berserk trilogy continues with Berserk: The Golden Age Arc II - The Battle for Doldrey, a more assured attempt at adapting Kentaro Miura's long-running, now never-ending, manga. The lifeless computer animated dolls, that stood out like a sore thumb in Berserk: The Golden Age Arc I - The Egg of the King, have melted into the background for this sequel. Although figures and their movement routines are still often sourced with 3D animation techniques, Kubooka's follow-up does a much better job of arranging them in ways that are sympathetic to tone and visual style of the overall piece. While it's likely every single frame has at least some element of computer-assisted correction, the stuttering, glaringly artificial, touch that marred the previous film is largely absent. 

The Battle for Doldrey's server banks are instead used to provide the massive backgrounds and frothing extras that add a sense of scale to events that teeter on the edge of world-changing. Tolkien-sized castles come under siege - hammered with rotting livestock hurled from enormous trebuchets; scaled by expendable knights who are blasted and burnt for their trouble. When considering our main characters, a digital affect is most obvious in the film's swirling, repetitive, action. Real, observational, detail remains pointedly two dimensional - hand animators trusted to communicate snarling disgust or the first prickles of human affection. For their centrepiece, Kubooka and his animators quote the swirling, simulated, ballroom of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, staging a choreographed dance in which The Band of the Hawk (now elevated to the level of nobility as a reward for their consistent military successes) effortlessly match the Baroque movements of a ruling class who previously spat on them.

Where The Egg of the King centred Guts and his horrifying past, Battle for Doldrey selects Casca, the Hawk's only female commander, when exploring an interior perspective. Her early life, much like Guts', was one marked by violence and cruelty. Casca is preoccupied with one moment in particular, Griffith rescuing her from a brutal nobleman attempting to rape her. In Casca's recollection Griffith is a beautiful fairy tale prince who towers on his horse, radiating light and warmth - a prophet portrayed as an armoured innocent. Casca's dream is at odds with her slowly dawning realisation that this outwardly angelic man views people in stark, transactional, terms. Clarifying this point, Griffith concludes the film by mechanically seducing a naïve Princess, partly to subsume his fixation on a now departed Guts, but also to reassert the sexual power that underlines his hold over other people. While Princess Charlotte responds, delightedly, to his every touch and tweak, Griffith remains impassive. When their mouths first meet, Griffith doesn't even close his eyes. 

HPSHAWTY & EMUNE - Gettin' High

Soundblaster by Rui Onishi

snaer. - Midnite

Lancelot du Lac

Robert Bresson's Lancelot du lac is hardly explosive but it does begin with a level of clattering action that it has no intention of returning to. Exhausted knights - struggling under the weight of their gleaming plate armour - batter each other, cleaving heads from bodies and stabbing mechanically at groins. Geysers of blood blast from these punctures; lacerations frothing up around the coverall's gaps or seeping through the freshly made dents. Bresson's take on Arthurian legend begins in the midst of cataclysmic failure then. The grail knights have returned home empty handed after a long, fruitless campaign. Sir Percival, the purehearted youth who took possession of the grail according to 12th century poet Chrétien de Troyes, isn't just absent. He has, as the opening legend informs us, completely disappeared.  

Bresson portrays the remaining round table knights as listless hooligans, cursed with a deeply ingrained boorishness that ensures that this film never transitions to a state of romantic fantasy. Our brief glimpse of the grail quest is marked by a series of ruinous, and seemingly pointless, encounters that culminate in the armoured survivors thundering past a burning farmhouse and its collapsed inhabitants. Bresson and editor Germaine Artus cut back-and-forth between this pitiless outcome and a squad of polished knights thundering along on horseback. These men not just responsible for this atrocity but, quite apparently, completely indifferent to it. Laura Duke Condominas' Queen Guinevere has the measure of these robotic murderers though, describing how they all turned on each other when they realised their mission was failing. She goes further, chiding Luc Simon's Lancelot for believing that God is a transmissible power, that could be seized by brutes. 

Constructed to deny the visceral release of a well-mounted action sequence, Bresson consistently works against the expected building blocks of a fairy tale epic. Sieges and battles take place off-camera and a jousting tournament is abstracted to four recurring images: a musician's hands pinching and manipulating their bagpipes; standards hurrying up then crashing down a flagpole; the whirling legs of Lancelot's prize horse; and appreciative reports from the audience sat in The King's box. Momentum is directed into the floor. We see hooves churning up a field rather than a resplendent lobster bearing down on their equally dazzling rival. It's often as if the camera cannot bear to look upon these men, adopting the eye-line dodging perspective of the brow-beaten serfs who buzz around this nobility; literal extras who, as far as these maniacs are concerned, never quite meet the criteria of person. Even Lancelot, the rugged French knight who makes a cuckold of his dithering British King, issues threats of violence at his social inferiors, promising swift retribution should his fanciful demands not be immediately met. 

Hotel Pools - Vacation / Waves

Super Mario Bros. - The Morton Jankel Cut

Released to the Internet Archive in an interim edit that splices together an open matte VHS with a one-of-a-kind cassette containing an earlier, baggier, edit of the film, Super Mario Bros. - The Morton Jankel Cut proposes, by dint of existing, a rejuvenation for this notoriously troubled production. Liberated from the estate of producer Roland Joffé, this interlaced assembly runs twenty minutes longer than the film as originally screened, offering (at best) trace elements of directors Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton's initial, more overtly dystopian, vision. Massaged to a legibility appropriate for the video tape rental era by Garrett Gilchrist, a professional artist and illustrator with a gift for film restoration, these timecoded additions offer punctuation rather than axis. They provide clarification at a detail, rather than conceptual, level. 

Almost unbearably dull, especially in its latter half, this longer Super Mario Bros delivers a brief fizz of ideas and lopsided imagery - particularly when considering the ways in which the film's central, dinosaur-derived, metropolis differs from our own world - then tanks itself with a plot that bumbles back-and-forth, never quite engaging. Like Highlander II: The Quickening before it, Mario Bros is world-class production design in search of a story, or even a consistent tone, to anchor it. The film is physically built around the strangeness of a technological society created by cold-blooded lizards rather than tribal mammals. Muggings are rife in this pollution-choked city. Brightly coloured pedestrians crash into each other, dressed for aggression displays and loaded down with weapons designed to jolt anyone who strays too close. Commuters, packed into sparking dodgems, rush around in an unheeding, almost suicidal, rush. 

Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo make for a charming pair of dunderheads, especially in early scenes where the two actors are allowed the space to react to bizarre circumstances rather than tedious plotting. Hoskins, on occasion, even summons up the same righteous, barking, frustration that underpinned his brilliant comedic performance as Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The film's most exciting sequence sees the Mario brothers picked up then processed by the fascist, gun-obsessed, stormtroopers that pass for police in this universe. Fleeing in a squad car so absurdly souped-up that it requires arresting gear to park, a blood-boiled Mario Mario crashes around the city's highways, using the vehicle's bulldozer blade to overturn incoming traffic. The sequence isn't just successful because it transforms a future shocked joyride into a destruction derby, it's also the only time that the film's madcap plotting, ace visual design, and pre-release deletions coalesce into something purely entertaining. 

Carpenter Brut - Maniac feat. Yann Ligner

Dhalsim by Hungry Clicker

Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown - MODEL 1

The obvious highlight (to me at least) of this instant DLC for the newly released Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown is the Model 1 era costume models. Available for every character, even those that did not appear in Yu Suzuki's ground-breaking arcade hit, the outfits swap out the new, Dragon Engine enhanced, fighter drafts for some lower polygon count figures and beautifully simple block colouring.  

Demon Slayer - Kimetsu no Yaiba - The Movie: Mugen Train

Reminiscent of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Superman story, For the Man Who Has Everything, the enormously successful Demon Slayer - Kimetsu no Yaiba - The Movie: Mugen Train traps its Shonen Jump heroes on a living train that has lulled their party, and all the other passengers, into a tranquil slumber designed to massage their digestion. Series lead Tanjiro Kamado dreams of his life before demon slaying, a time of modest routine when his mother and many headstrong siblings were still alive. Crucially, this recollection isn't picturesque or idealised, the family are snowbound and dirt poor. Tanjiro's father is elsewhere, leaving his sickly looking mother to crush up stale leftovers when prepping treat meals. Tanjiro's nostalgia then is rooted in the reality and, quite apparently, the love that underlined these moments - a more powerful tonic than naked wish-fulfilment. 

Trespassing in this private realm is an assassin, a sleepless commuter enslaved by the steam-powered monster, looking to hack and slash their way beyond this fantasy construct into a metaphysical space where Tanjiro and his demon slaying friends are especially vulnerable. As a weekly comic lead Tanjiro is, naturally, possessed of a staggering intuition, able to recognise the trap he finds himself in, explain it to the audience, then counter the incoming attacks. The method by which Tanjiro liberates himself is unusually ferocious though - repeated, grim episodes in which he is required to cut his own throat, over and over again. Tanjiro's enemy quickly recognises this suicidal routine, unleashing scattershot sleep blasts against the swordsman in an attempt to trick Tanjiro's somnambulistic reflexes into a ruinous self-harm. The cruelty of these assaults is exacerbated by Tanjiro's sensitive, childlike demeanour. We're not watching an expert effortlessly overcome challenges; like many of his Jump stablemates, Tanjiro is an innocent forced down a path of repetition and physical reconfiguration. 

Forhill - Clouds

MegaDrive - Informant