Hawkman by Dan McDaid

GRAND THEFT AUTO V SELFIE

Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods

Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods further explores the celestial chicanery at work in Akira Toriyama's martial arts universe. This astral plain is a functioning bureaucracy, full of bizarre middle-managers who spend their days tending to their own micro-planets and gawping at galaxy shredding match-ups. The latest edition to this heavenly hierarchy is Bills, a purple man-sized cat who also happens to be The God of Destruction.

Like most felines, Bills is lazy and capricious, tending to obliterate planets according to whim rather than strictly reasoned logic. Journeying to Earth on the off-chance there's someone there powerful enough to fight him, Bills instead spends the majority of his time breakdancing and sampling appetisers at Bulma's birthday party. Although Goku does eventually ascend to a new super saiyajin form buff enough to stand toe-to-toe with Bills, Battle of Gods is more of a comedic victory lap about oral-stage fixated idiots, who just happen to be insanely powerful, than a gruelling battle for survival.

SCROUNGE

Recently released on PS3 and Vita, Jasper Byrne's Lone Survivor is a 16-bit style side-scroller set deep in miseryville. Stuck in a rotting apartment complex full of featureless slabs of Splatterhouse meat, players must scrounge for supplies and tip-toe past lumbering deadites. There's also a nifty sleep cycle mechanic that can be chemically induced for bonus items. Don't become too reliant though - pill gobbling chips away at an unseen sanity meter.

Battlefield 3 - BON VOYAGE MOTHER FUCKER

Considering how it's often touted as the realist's choice, it's funny how Battlefield 3's elective spawn system allows TheSandyRavage to get the kind of shotgun feed greed all but impossible in the arcadey Call of Duty series.

CHAINSAW MAN

The latest The Evil Within footage out of Tango GameWorks suggests an experience not unlike the abortive Hallucination BioHazard draft of Resident Evil 4. Trailed at E3 2003, this unreleased build saw a poisoned Leon S Kennedy trapped in a haunted house stuffed full of spooky ghosts and creepy dolls. Players would stumble through violent figments of Kennedy's imagination as he inched ever closer to a kidnapped companion from a previous game. As well as high definition reskins of the released Resident Evil 4's siege sequences, it's encouraging to see Mikami experimenting with stealth and finding elegant ways to weave movement prompts into the title's cinemascope mise-en-scène.

Charli XCX - SuperLove

And Let Nothing Stop You by Chris Faccone

METAL GEAR SOLID (KONAMI COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT SOUND TEAM JAPAN - WARHEAD STORAGE)

101 Things To Do In Grand Theft Auto V

Following the completion of his Black Ops II weapon guides, XboxAhoy has diversified his YouTube channel with videos about the history and culture of computer games. His latest is a look at the myriad of time waste features available in Rockstar's newly released Grand Theft Auto V.

SH MonsterArts King Kong

Battlefield 3 - SLUG

TheSandyRavage putting close-quarters work in on PC Battlefield 3. 

Rage Against the Machine - No Shelter

Godzilla (1998)

Roland Emmerich's stab at Godzilla is desperate to stress its weaknesses. Clocking in at nearly two and a half hours, the film spends an inordinate amount of time in the company of sitcom rejects hamming up an ugly New Yorker routine. Godzilla seems to think of itself as a Big Apple slice of life comedy that just happens to have a mammoth lizard in it - Friends with a radioactive guest star. Maria Pitillo is particularly lost, her performance nothing more than a series of vapid frowns. Likewise Matthew Broderick approaches the material with a complete absence of machismo. I don't think I've ever seen an action lead so devoid of bass. His boyish simpering is actually kind of revolting at times, particularly towards the end of the film when the actor insists on waving his arms around whilst running away from several million dollars worth of Spielberg steals. If Broderick can't even be bothered to act scared, why should we be thrilled when he escapes?

This Godzilla begins with stock footage of America's hydrogen bomb tests overlaid with French radio chatter. I presume this is supposed to illustrate the French weapon tests at Moruroa in the mid-1990s that led to a worldwide moratorium on their wine? If so, why use antiquated footage of Bikini Atoll? Those images are seared into the collective conciousness as gross examples of Cold War dick-waving. You can't add a bit of looping and pass them off as something else. Regardless, Godzilla is apparently a mutated iguana caused by the dastardly French. Their government feels so bad about it they've dispatched Jean Reno to keep an eye on the situation. From an anthropological perspective this makes Godzilla 1998 kind of interesting. The Japanese Godzilla was born from American hydrogen bomb testing, yet there was never any attempt in those films to demonise Japan's post-war allies. The original Godzilla is repeatedly considered as a punishment for mankind, Japan assuming responsibility for the creature and what it represents. All humankind has erred by allowing nuclear weapons to come into existence, not just individual countries.

In this American Godzilla the buck is passed. France is solely to blame for this terrible lizard, despite having conducted roughly a fifth of the nuclear weapons tests America has. This disingenuous white-washing harms the film. Why shouldn't Godzilla be about a country confronting its misdeeds? How patronising is it to think the filmmakers felt these questions couldn't be asked during a Summer distractor? If Godzilla can't be about national introspection, why does it instead have to revolve around drippy journalistic sabotage? Why is more time dedicated to taking pathetic potshots at Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel than considering American culpability in nuclear cataclysm? For that matter, why is Roger Ebert the mayor of New York? Wasn't he based in Chicago? This staunch empty-headedness is symptomatic of a film allergic to even the most basic level of seriousness. Godzilla has been designed as product, an anodyne unit shifter free of artistic expression or intellectual consideration. It's a contemptuous thing, riddled with antagonistic pitch think and directed at an audience it assumes to be brain dead.

Godzilla vs Destoroyah

With the threat of an American Godzilla series looming over them, Toho decided to give their creation the send off he deserved. Godzilla vs Destoroyah is an elegy, as much for tokusatsu cinema as the King of Monsters. The incredible success of Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park aroused interest in other monster properties, jump-starting TriStar's own Godzilla project. A Hollywood produced Godzilla promised bleeding edge mechanical and computer generated special effects. Toho's more modestly budgeted films were on the verge of looking hopelessly outdated. If America's new Godzilla was successful, more films would be produced. The Japanese original was in danger of becoming a footnote.

This sadness is evident at every level of Godzilla vs Destoroyah. Director Takao Okawara frames the film with the same sense of melancholy he brought to Godzilla vs Mothra. The usually eternal Godzilla is dying. His heart is pumping out dangerous amounts of heat causing the kaiju to go into nuclear meltdown. His body is criss-crossed by larva coloured veins, his spines glow red hot. Smoke hisses from his pores. Godzilla acts like a rabid animal, demolishing Hong Kong before the film's even properly started. Japanese and American scientists theorise that should the monster detonate, the blast could render the Earth uninhabitable. Desperate to defeat this walking Chernobyl, researchers reconsider the oxygen destroyer that defeated the original Godzilla. Before any breakthroughs can be made though, a rapidly evolving anti-life creature is discovered. The stage is set for a showdown between two competing cataclysms.

Koichi Kawakita's final contribution to the Godzilla series is perhaps his best. The special effects director juggles four separate creatures, each with their own distinct design philosophy. Godzilla is transformed into a mobile level 7 event, pissing steam and glowing like a supernova. Little Godzilla has matured and mutated into an adolescent, athletic version of his father, while the Super-X III looks like a B-52 bomber put together by the Tracy brothers. Finally there's the satanic majesty of Godzilla's enemy Destoroyah. The Heisei series has been obsessed with pitting Godzilla against corrupt opposites. First it was a female clone born from a rose, then a machine, followed by a cosmic pretender. Finally it's a demonic reflection given life from the ruins of the original monster. When Godzilla and Destoroyah finally clash it isn't the dull laser war that has marred the last few entries. The monsters slash and tear at each other, they hurl their bodies about and stamp Tokyo flat. It's apocalyptic and engaging in a way the series hasn't hasn't quite managed since Godzilla vs Hedorah.

Godzilla vs Destoroyah's greatest achievement though is in the way it characterises The Big G. The monster is elevated from a roaming natural disaster to a fully-fledged dramatic participant. In a moment of respite during the final conflict, Godzilla wanders over to where his son has fallen. He finds a shattered, dying creature. The towering radioactive beast tries desperately to breath his poisonous life force into his offspring. When Godzilla Junior fails to respond, Godzilla is bereft. Okawara has the confidence to hold the moment and play off Kenpachiro Satsuma's suit acting. 22 movies deep we get to see the impassive kaiju monarch considering defeat. He's had enough. There's no chance of respite, this Godzilla must die. This vital, important Japanese cultural icon is close to his end. Beyond this point his name will surely start to mean something else. His form adopted by another, with the potential to be internationally relevant. When Destoroyah is eventually vanquished it's almost an afterthought. He isn't important. All that matters is that this Godzilla can't control his temperature any longer. His spines bubble and drool, his skin tumbles off like ash. Time slows. Akira Ifukube's beautiful score rises. You'll believe a God can die.

Transformers #0 by Geoff Senior

Carpenter Brut - Obituary / Wake Up The Presiden†

PUDRIDERO 2

CASTLEVANIA: SYMPHONY OF THE NIGHT

Battlefield 4 - SHARPSHOOTER

Last week EA invited a chunk of the YouTube superplay community out to LA to mess around with the latest build of Battlefield 4. If you're a fan of RPG trickshots, you're in luck. TheSandyRavage has that shit on lock.

Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla

Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla represents a series in terminal decline. Unlike the lesser Showa efforts, the film doesn't even have brevity on its side, clocking in at just over 100 minutes. Apparently at least twenty minutes were shorn from an early assembly cut, considering the ineptitude on display here I shudder to think what horrors those sequences contained. After all, this is a film in which the co-pilot of a skyscraper sized mole machine launches an attack on his commanding officer in the middle of a Godzilla strafing run. We spend at least a minute watching the rest of the MOGUERA crew dragging the unconscious pilot from his flight seat, then propping him up in the back corner of the control room. Again, this prolonged coup d'état was initiated in the midst of playing chicken with The King of Monsters.

Once again we're stuck dealing with uninvolving human characters, leaden plotting, and dreary island hopping. Worst of all, SpaceGodzilla employs recycled footage to paper over unsatisfactory miniature effects. The most egregious example of this is a sea battle between Godzilla and the Japanese navy, borrowed from Godzilla vs Biollante. SpaceGodzilla simply fails to coalesce. Resident psychic Miki Saegusa is relegated to fretting and, despite a hide bristling with cosmic diamonds, the SpaceGodzilla monster winds up being the Toho equivalent of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace's Nuclear Man. Blessed with a more muscular frame and seething with spikes, the cosmic clone disappoints - he's little more than a scratchy, bitey, prima donna. Like Nukes, he's also had orange lightning scrawled all over its body in post. The film makes zero effort to characterise this SpaceGodzilla. Although apparently acting under his own volition, the monster doesn't enjoy the carnage he creates. He's simply a Godzilla shaped obstacle. One-and-gone director Kensho Yamashita even manages to fumble Koichi Kawakita's beautiful redesign of the MOGUERA mech from The Mysterians, repeatedly shooting it from the same boring television angles.

Peter Gabriel - Red Rain

Peter Weller talking about the RoboCop shoot.

"There's moments in my film history - and I'll give them to you right now - that have just been wildly, psychotically, enjoyable. One was doing the drug-bust sequence in RoboCop, because the Walkman had come out, so you had these little earphones that you could put in the RoboCop helmet, and I was playing Peter Gabriel's Red Rain during all the gunfire. Me with the 47 shot Beretta automatic pistol, blowing bad guys off balconies and stuff while Red Rain was pumping in my ears."

Interview extract via AV Club.

2000 AD Prog 66 by Mike McMahon

Nirvana - All Apologies (Unplugged)

Riddick

Vin Diesel deserves better than this. I'm not really sure why. Most of his films are basically awful. I just quite like him. He's a faintly absurd action proposition, his main skills are that he's blessed with a rumbling voice and that he's devoid of hair. There's a refreshing lack of irony in how we are asked to consider the action star Vin Diesel. He's big. He has muscles. He kills things. His voice is incredibly deep. His voice is so fucking deep in fact that it never registers above a growl. It's always guttural and wheezing. How masculine is that? Ludicrously so. At its best Riddick recognises this. The film actually features a scene in which Vin out barks a gigantic space mutt. To prove himself the alpha Vin lowers his voice to an intimidating subwoofer frequency. Of course the hyena thing relents. An extra long first act contains Riddick's best material. His betrayal at the hands of an expensive looking empire bleeds into a desperate desert trek in which Vin makes himself immune to alien venom by constantly poisoning himself with it. Disappointingly, Vin eventually makes it to civilisation, initialising a dire bounty hunter scenario full of sexual assault, illogical double-crosses, and the kind of tin-eared action talk last heard in Ghosts of Mars. What a waste.