Ben Richardson

Meaner streets

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Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned

(Rockstar North; Xbox 360)

GAMER Ever since the "next-gen" consoles shipped with capacious hard-drives and easy access to the broadband interwebs, gamers have been paying the price. Picking up where the boxed expansion pack model left off, publishers realized they could nickel-and-dime their fans with "downloadable content packs," recalling the "Batmobile sold separately" chicanery of action figure advertising and failing to deliver even the most rudimentary bang for your buck.

It comes as something of a relief, then, when a developer eschews horse armor and warmed-over levels too crappy for the retail version and provides some downloadable content actually worth the bandwidth, let alone the greenbacks. Grand Theft Auto IV makers Rockstar North restore some hope with The Lost and Damned, a worthwhile 10-hour nugget of episodic expansion that once again turns gamers loose in the open-world cesspool of Liberty City.

You play Johnny Klebitz, a surly biker with bad tribal tattoos and a cadre of "brothers" in the Lost, one of the metropolis’ warring biker gangs. Engaged in a power struggle with the gang’s atavistic head honcho and mired in the world of crime that defines Rockstar’s dystopic settings, Klebitz is soon fighting for his life.

In keeping with the expansion’s hog-wild characters, Rockstar has retuned the motorcycle physics, making two wheels the optimum number for peeling around the vast gameplay environment. Your character has access to a handful of powerful new weapons, and your easy-riding cohort is a phone call away if you’re in need of manpower, horsepower, or firepower. New multiplayer modes cater to the bike-centric gameplay, including a new race mode in which competitors with baseball bats reenact Electronic Arts’ classic Road Rash series.

The writing and motion capture is consistent with the GTA series’ surpassing quality, and Rockstar again proves that careful characterization and plotting makes for a more engrossing gaming experience than a coterie of anonymous sidekicks yelling "boo-yah!" The events of The Lost and Damned intersect intriguingly with the original game, but this is both a blessing and a curse. Despite the developers’ best efforts, Johnny Klebitz isn’t half the protagonist GTA IV’s Niko Bellic is, and the moments when Bellic shows up are an unfortunate reminder of this fact. As with Bellic, the writers make an ill-conceived stab at humanizing their star criminal in Klebitz, presenting him as a voice of reason and moderation. But this all flies out the window once he’s mowing down cops in the dozens. Then again, when you’ve got a fully automatic shotgun to play with, who cares about psychological realism?

“Defiance”

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REVIEW A serious Holocaust movie like Edward Zwick’s Defiance has to start with archival footage. See, there’s Hitler, shouting in German. Say! Where did Zwick get shots of the Wehrmacht plundering the Bielski farm in Belarus? Oh, it’s fading into color — guess he filmed them himself. After the German invasion of Russia, the Bielski brothers took refuge in a nearby forest. They harassed Hitler’s supply line, provided shelter to fellow Jews, and generally defied things (Nazis, collaborators, Russians, each other). They led complicated but ultimately heroic lives, the kind that Hollywood distills into turgid cinematic pablum before slapping on a "based on a true story" title card. The times were rife with moral quandaries, difficult decisions, and summary execution. Zwick’s characters grapple with these thorny issues by shouting at each other, brow-furrowing, and brooding. If the Third Reich had declared war on central casting, the Bielskis would have been screwed: Daniel Craig is charismatic, but uncomfortable with leadership; Liev Schreiber is passionate, but too thirsty for revenge; Jamie Bell is meek and shy, but overcomes these defects. Harried by an acne-scarred traitor, they protect the socialist in Trotsky glasses, the avuncular rabbi who never thought they would amount to anything, and their three perfectly calibrated love interests. Take that, Nazis!

DEFIANCE opens Fri/16 in Bay Area theaters.

Change rejection

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AC/DC stormed onto the international stage with a song called "It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll). The song was an incendiary introduction to the Australian band’s brand of overdriven razor-boogie, and vocalist Bon Scott’s nasally shriek cataloged a life of hedonistic melancholy that ended with his death from alcohol poisoning in 1980.

It is rare for a group to write a song so prophetic of the challenges that lay ahead of them, even rarer for an outfit to suffer the loss of a charismatic frontperson and continue to exist. Less than six months after Scott’s tragic death, AC/DC got to the top. Recruiting singer Brian Johnson, the combo released Back in Black (Atlantic, 1980), a smash-hit record that went on to become the second-best-selling album of all time.

Towering pinnacles of success often have unintended consequences. Musicians accustomed to the travails of the industry suddenly find themselves with a seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of fan support, and enjoy the unquestioning indulgence of every creative whim. The desire to reinvent — to cast off cloying expectations of past success and established image — can be irresistible. This tendency has given us Kiss’ disco era, a Chris Cornell R&B album, and more iterations of Madonna than anyone cares to remember. Garth Brooks became Chris Gaines. The best-selling album of all time, the only one to beat out Back in Black, is Michael Jackson’s Thriller (Epic, 1982). I think you can see where I’m going with that one.

AC/DC, by contrast, has stayed so doggedly true to its original concept that it’s hard to imagine the band members even entertaining the idea of change if only to reject it. Their new album, Black Ice (Columbia), is the first in eight years, packed chock-full with the Young brothers’ stuttering, bluesy guitar riffs and Phil Rudd’s studiously unadorned drumming. The big surprise this time around, if you can call it that, is the inclusion of slide guitar on the track "Stormy May Day." The band’s been around for more than three decades, and a largely technical change in instrumentation on a single song qualifies as news. That’s sticking to your guns.

They’re still writing tunes with "rock ‘n’ roll" in the title, and Black Ice clocks in with four — quite an accomplishment in the field of writing rock songs about rock, which AC/DC more or less perfected. The quality of the tracks is neither here nor there, and it was fun reading the world’s Important Rock Critics write circles around themselves trying to think of something clever to say about the latest disc. In fact, if AC/DC has a talent besides writing infectiously simple rock mega-hits, it is confounding music writers.

They may not conjure the same arena-shaking adrenaline of the glory years, but no one’s really expecting that. The songs all sound the same, but that’s always been true. Their craft is so finely honed that they avoid any blunders or clunkers, and their stubborn enmity toward innovation makes them immune to any ill-advised tinkering with songwriting or sound.

They won’t even sell their stuff on iTunes, an anomaly that makes them a veritable dinosaur in the age of experimental "pay what you want" download ploys, when even the Napster-suing nofunskis in Metallica have been brought into the electronic fold. A lot of noise is made about AC/DC being an "album band," a commendable if quixotic adherence — the mind reels at the amount of money they could make off frat boys looking to round out the keg party playlist with a little "You Shook Me All Night Long." Then again, when you’ve already sold 200 million-odd albums, what’s left to buy? A plane for your plane? Maybe AC/DC could bailout the Big Three.

It’s not every band that proclaims a long road to the top, and then proceeds to walk it. AD/DC lamented that it "Ain’t No Fun (Waiting Round to Be a Millionaire)," but they waited and ended up millionaires. They argued that "Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution," and 42 million in sales proved them right. They saluted those who were about to rock, and got saluted right back. Their new album went No. 1 in 17 countries. If there’s one last self-referential song left to sing, it’s a cover of the Beatles’ "Don’t Ever Change."

Let it reign

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Fallout 3

(Bethesda Softworks/Zenimax Media; XBOX360, PS3, PC)

GAMER "War. War never changes." These words have introduced three Fallout games, intoned by narrator Ron Perlman as the camera pulls back to reveal a landscape devastated by nuclear bombardment. The world of Fallout is one steeped in retro-futurism, imagining a history in which the end of World War II was succeeded by rapid technological progress but complete cultural stagnation. In the 21st century, competition for resources leads to the Chinese invasion of Alaska, quickly countered by the American annexation of Canada. The question of who fires first is deliberately elided, but the human race soon witnesses the dawn of the apocalypse.

A small fraction of humanity weathers the mushroom cloud, eking out a living among the rubble. Still others are preserved within vast underground vaults. You begin life in Vault 101, literally emerging from the womb and triggering an inspired character creation sequence in which your father’s delivery room commentary on your sex, name, and future appearance is interrupted by menu screens that allow you to customize these qualities.

Emerging into the outside world, you are thrust into the vast and dangerous Capital Wasteland, which encompasses Washington, DC, and its environs. Bethesda Game Studios, having acquired the Fallout license from Interplay, has designed an enormous, incredibly detailed, and realistic landscape, filled with places to explore and characters to interact with. Danger and fun lurk in every bombed-out building.

The realism has its drawbacks. The first two Fallout games had graphics so simple that they allowed the player to fill in the gaps with his or her own imagination, and the fully realized world of Fallout 3 takes some getting used to if you’ve played the first two games. The series’ trademark dark humor is also somewhat diminished. Bethesda doesn’t have the knack for the pulpy, dystopian treatment of slavery, cannibalism, prostitution, and drug use that the previous installments did.

Gameplay is conducted in either the first or third person. The "V.A.T.S." targeting system is back in fine form, enabling you to aim at limbs and heads RPG-style and generally wreak havoc. It also can be played as a more traditional FPS, although this mode feels rubbery and inferior.

As much as it would have accorded with critical ethics, I have not played the game to completion. There is too much left to explore, to experiment with, before I set the events in motion that will conclude the main narrative. Despite my backwards-looking gripes, Fallout 3 is a masterwork of world creation, an apocalypse too good to leave, and a game almost too good to win.

Doomed balloon

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REVIEW Quantum of Solace begins with the taut energy of an over-inflated balloon, picking up where Casino Royale (2006) left off with an arrestingly shot car chase on a crowded Italian highway. At first, the air leaks out as a trickle; a fistfight on a collapsing scaffold intercut with a bareback horse race establishes Daniel Craig’s Bond as the jockey astride a steed of international chaos, and the expected litany of double-cross and intrigue unfolds with practiced but forgettable verve.

Soon wayward bullets and even more wayward dialogue punch holes in the balloon, and the hiss is almost audible as all the excitement and fun begins to leak out of the movie. Overhyped screenwriter Paul Haggis plods away with execrable emotional grand narratives of revenge, love, and betrayal that have no place in a Bond film. French actor Mathieu Amalric does his best as a tousled sociopath masquerading as an environmental crusader, but by the time his eeeevil plan is revealed, it’s hard to care. Newcomer Olga Kurylenko is serviceably sultry as the requisite arm-candy, but one wonders why the producers went all the way to Moscow to cast a Russian model to play a Bolivian secret agent. As for the title, it still doesn’t make sense.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE opens Fri/14 in Bay Area theaters.

Blunt “Force”

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Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

(Lucasarts; XBOX360, PS3, PS2, PSP, Wii, Nintendo DS)

GAMER Star Wars stories should start with yellow-lettered title crawls. This summer’s animated movie Star Wars: The Clone Wars thought it could do without, and it sucked. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed has a title crawl, which is good, because in addition to being a mega-hyped, third-person 3-D action game, it also contains some fascinating revelations about the history of the galaxy far, far away. The game is set between episodes III (Revenge of the Sith) and IV (A New Hope), and you play as Galen Marek, code name "Starkiller," who is Darth Vader’s secret Sith apprentice. Vader rescues Marek as an infant during the Great Jedi Purge; this affecting act of compassion concludes the game’s inspired intro level, which lets players control Vader as he lays waste to the Wookiee planet of Kashyyyk.

Starkiller soon grows into a powerful dark jedi. True to the title, the gameplay focuses on the numerous ways that the force can be unleashed to wreak destruction on anyone standing in his way. The game’s Havoc physics engine and Digital Molecular Matter animation system realize a world in which almost everything can bend, break, shatter, or be tossed across the room with the wave of a midichlorian-rich finger. Like any good jedi, Starkiller is a one-person army, and dispatching waves of enemies with lightsaber, lightning, and the power of "force grip" can be immensely entertaining.

When it’s firing on all cylinders, the game is a joy, but it is frequently marred by reprehensible design decisions. Targeting with force grip is infuriatingly finicky, and the boss fights tend to culminate in cheesy "press the correct button when it flashes on the screen" mechanics. Action set pieces, like wrangling a crashing Star Destroyer using the force, might have sounded great on paper, but they end up as exercises in frustration. In contrast to Half-Life 2 and Portal, which gave gamers intuitive tools to transform the game environment before letting their creativity run wild, The Force Unleashed relies on boring, familiar force puzzles.

While most video games shoehorn lackluster plots around top-quality gameplay, The Force Unleashed is the rare game that does the opposite. The story, by project lead Haden Blackman — see our interview with him on the Pixel Vision blog — is engrossing, with cleverly developed characters and real pathos, and Battlestar Galactica vet Sam Witwer brings Starkiller to life with bar-raising motion-capture chops. Unfortunately, playing The Force Unleashed will be an experience familiar to all modern Star Wars fans: one that involves taking the good with the bad.

Carcass

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PREVIEW Besides creating one of the most ungainly acronyms in the English language, NWOBHM, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, galvanized a global infatuation with metal that lasted more than a decade. As the music pioneered by Motörhead, Iron Maiden, and Judas Priest touched off an international powder keg, it lost its UK focus, along with nods to Tennyson and the kind of goofy patriotism exemplified by bands like Saxon.

Left behind by the mid-1980s was a younger generation of English musicians, roiling in the Margaret Thatcher–stirred urban cauldrons that produced metal’s earliest heroes, and disaffected by the commoditization of Maiden and Priest. By exhibiting an inexhaustible appetite for extreme music’s nascent movements and a talent for combining and improving on them, Liverpool’s Carcass began a second, newer wave of equally influential British heavy metal.

Along with their co-conspirators in Napalm Death, Carcass drew on thrash, hardcore, early death and black metal, and the abrasive sound of NYC post-punk band Swans to create a genre called "grindcore." Pushing the compositional potential of metal to its absolute limit, the band inspired countless followers to attempt similar feats of complicated, abstruse, yet relentlessly heavy songwriting.

The daunting power of their musical imaginations was perversely mirrored in their lyrics. Weaving stomach-turning tales of autopsy and disembowelment, Carcass’ anatomical knowledge was so thorough it led some to believe that they were doctors, or at least medical school dropouts. Despite a 13-year hiatus, the band has returned to its practice, supported by death and black metal luminaries that would not exist without them.

CARCASS With Rotten Sound, Suffocation, 1349, and Aborted. Fri/19, 8 p.m., $32.50. Grand Ballroom, Regency Center, 1290 Sutter, SF. (415) 673-5716, www.regencycentersf.com

Colorful, brutish, and short

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Sid Meier’s Civilization: Revolution

(2K Games; Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo DS)

GAMER Reviewing games means reviewing a lot of sequels. Mainstays like Final Fantasy (Square Enix) remind us that game publishers are the only people besides porn makers willing to append "XIII" to anything, and this fall’s Madden ’09 (Electronic Arts) proves that gamers are willing to buy the same product once a year, 20 times. Still, repeat installments allow game designers to refine their original creation, often on a much bigger budget. A game’s best elements can be emphasized and streamlined, its worst overhauled or jettisoned, its complexity more fully realized.

There is no series in which retooling is more apparent than Sid Meier’s Civilization (Microprose), which first appeared for the PC in 16 colors in 1991. Bearing the tagline "Build an empire to stand the test of time," the game did just that, allowing Meier an opportunity to refine his creation in four official sequels and numerous spin-offs. Each game has expanded on Civilization‘s timeless turn-based gameplay, which kicks off in 4000 BC with a band of nomadic settlers and spans the breadth of human history. Sid Meier’s Civilization: Revolution is the franchise’s first foray into the lucrative console market, foreign territory to most strategy titles due to the difficulty of micromanaging a global empire with a cumbersome gamepad. As an adaptation, the game performs impeccably, tackling a complicated interface with aplomb and introducing subtle changes that make the gameplay more action-packed and less time-consuming without altering its totemic core mechanics.

A cartoony, isometrically viewed 3-D makeover and brief in-game battle animations nod to the graphical prowess of modern consoles, and the game introduces a robust online multiplayer component that seeks to solve Civ‘s perennial quandary: how to make a game that lasts three hours on the short end a viable player vs. player enterprise. Though finding a game using the built-in system was quick and painless, waiting for my opponents to finish their turns was not, and it seemed that the inclusion of a chess-style timer in the early stages would become a curse when managing a far-flung empire in the end.

Credit is due to Meier for pushing himself as a designer — transutf8g a beloved, epic computer franchise into a digestible, fast-paced console title is no easy task. One hopes his efforts will win Civ new fans, but in striving to make an accessible game, Meier has elided one of Civilization‘s cornerstone enjoyments: the correlation between the scale of the experience and the time it takes to play a game. There is simply no other franchise that allows you to launch a SCUD missile at Tenochtitlan because Montezuma made the mistake of destroying your iron mine, 5,000 years ago. 

Hirocks

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"We’re like a cockroach," explains Hirax vocalist Katon W. De Pena early on in our lively recent phone interview. "You can’t kill us." De Pena founded Hirax in Los Angeles in 1984, and if his enthusiasm is any indication, the enemies of metal better start stockpiling Raid. Although they never achieved the towering reputation of the bands they rubbed shoulders with in the 1980s, De Pena’s newly reinvigorated outfit is working harder than ever, deep in the once-underground thrash trenches including gradually disinterred, now-ascendant old-schoolers like Death Angel, Exodus, and Testament, and eager newcomers such as Municipal Waste, Hatchet, and Merciless Death.

Hirax has second billing behind Exodus at the 11th Tidal Wave Festival, a free outdoor metal concert taking place July 5 and 6 in John McLaren Park. Way back in 1984, the band got its first big break with a feature in Tim Yohannon’s influential Bay Area zine, Maximum Rocknroll, and De Pena overflows with appreciation for the support San Francisco has shown his group over the years: "Playing free is like giving something back to the movement that helped spawn thrash metal. We have a lot of great memories from playing San Francisco."

The outfit has always had a fiercely independent streak, which served them in good stead when a bunch of guys in flannel hacked down the tent pole at the metal big top in the early ’90s. Since parting with Metal Blade in 1986, Hirax’s members have been the masters of their headbanging domain, releasing albums through their own label and distributing them around the world through licensing deals with major players like Relapse and Century Media Records.

This uncompromising approach has won them widespread respect, and relentless touring has uncovered dormant thrashers desperate for something to rock out to. De Pena has become a connoisseur of the American metal heartland. "In the US, there are cities that are just amazing, like Allentown, Penn.," he says. "We meet these fans, and it puts it in perspective why you do it. They believe in you. That they care so much keeps you caring."

It looks like a new dawn for thrash in America, and De Pena thinks his band is ready to capitalize. Crediting his natural stubbornness and the support of his "total metalhead" wife who saw him through the dark days of the ’90s, the ebullient frontman sees a bright future ahead. "I think people are looking for something exciting, and thrash metal has that," says De Pena. "It always was very exciting. Over the last 10 years, music has gotten pop-y or emo or nü metal, and people have wanted something with more edge to it. It’s just gotten better and better [for Hirax] every year."

TIDAL WAVE FESTIVAL

With Exodus, Psychosomatic, Havok, Ludicra, Saros, and others

Sat/5–Sun/6, noon–6 p.m., free

Jerry Garcia Amphitheater

John McLaren Park

45 Shelley, SF

www.thetidalwave.org

Ninja binge

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NINJA GAIDEN II

(Tecmo/Microsoft Game Studios; Xbox 360)

GAMER It was 1988 when the original Ninja Gaiden began emptying the coin-purses of arcade addicts with its relentless difficulty and catchy soundtrack. Twenty years and roughly eight installments later, the series should be winning prizes for consistency. In the new Ninja Gaiden II, the player once again takes command of über-ninja Ryu Hayabusa and his trusty Dragon Sword, wading shuriken-first into a merciless onslaught.

The 1989 NES port reputedly introduced cinematic cut-scenes to the console medium, though unfortunately the visual innovation was paired with decidedly lackluster plotting. Nineteen years have elapsed, yet it’s no different this time around: a coalition of malefactors has teamed up to awaken an unspeakably powerful evil, and it’s up to you to stop them.

Despite this creative stagnation, gamers and developers keep coming back to Ninja Gaiden for one thing: the combat system, which has been consistently satisfying and incredibly hard in every version. In 1999 a Tecmo developer named Tomonobu Itagaki marshaled "Team Ninja" and began work on the first modern, 3-D iteration of Ninja Gaiden, which was released on the original Xbox and PlayStation 2 in 2004.

Itagaki’s initial combination of state-of-the-art graphics and unforgiving difficulty resulted in what has been hailed by many as the greatest action game of all time. And while it often makes you want to smash your controller against the wall, mastering the fluid, frenetic combat is eventually quite satisfying. Breaking with longstanding action-game tradition, the number of enemies is precipitously reduced, with a commensurate increase in cunning and deadliness on the part of Ryu’s adversaries. Rather than beating impossible odds with frantic button-mashing, the player is forced to actually get good at the game.

For better or worse, Ninja Gaiden II picks up roughly where its predecessor left off, bringing back familiar weapons and combo attacks as well as Ryu’s traditional enemies in the form of the malevolent Black Spider Ninja Clan. The graphics engine is snazzy and modern, and the health bar system has been made more merciful by Ryu’s ability to automatically regenerate some health after the conclusion of a fight.

One new feature sets the game apart from forerunners: the gore. While the 2004 version made it possible to dispatch enemies with a well-executed decapitation, the sequel ups the dismemberment ante like an amputee fetishist. Even first-time players will find themselves lopping off legs and arms with alacrity. It wouldn’t be Ninja Gaiden without a frustrating catch, however: desperate de-limbed opponents become serious threats as they resort to ever-more-suicidal attacks. Close in on one and hit the Y button, though, and Ryu will perform an "obliteration technique," a choreographed slice-and-dice that precipitates a cinematic camera angle and veritable tidal wave of viscera.

Itagaki has finally caved to an "easy" difficulty level, and beginners or even experienced gamers will be grateful for the "path of the acolyte." Despite this and other sanity-saving measures, like the addition of automatic save points before boss battles, the game can still be enraging. Ranged attackers know where you’re going to be before you do, and the third-person camera remains uncooperative. One boss even explodes after you defeat him, killing you instantly until you figure out the thoroughly asinine solution.

There’s really no point in complaining. Fiendish difficulty will always be the order of the ninja day, and the "game over" screen might as well be replaced by a picture of Itagaki’s smug, stunna-shaded face. By the time you ascend Mount Fuji to do battle with the final boss, however, the sense of accomplishment is huge. For those looking to master the best melee combat modern gaming has to offer, Ninja Gaiden II is the only serious choice. For those looking to acquire a frustration-induced medical condition, it’s also a great option.

What the hell

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(Capcom; PlayStation 3, Xbox 360)

GAMER Video games are often pilloried for expressing a particularly juvenile kind of male fantasy, where chain-mail thongs and Kevlar corsets comprise the latest in bulletproof lingerie and mindless, balletic violence is the order of the day. Despite the efforts of more high-minded game designers, every so often a game comes along that confirms the worst of these stereotypes. Devil May Cry 4 is exactly this game. The latest in the wildly successful Capcom franchise abounds with lovingly rendered cleavage, in which cup size is dwarfed only by the polygon count, huge phallus-substitute swords the size of stepladders, and inanely macho dialogue. Players assume control of Nero, an apprentice slayer who replaces Dante, the hero of the first three installments. The plot is effectively nonsense and its function is identical to that of a porn movie, with the sex swapped out for violence. It establishes who will be fighting, where they will be fighting, and the various configurations they will fight in — and then gets the hell out of the way.

Game play is built around a satisfying beat-’em-up system that harks back to classic arcade side-scrollers. Using his monstrous sword, his trusty pistol, and a magically imbued left arm known as the Devil Bringer, Nero unleashes all sorts of punishment on waves of enemies. Stringing together attacks without taking damage allows you to build "combos," which the game grades on a scale that is undoubtedly familiar to its core player-base: eighth-graders. The most pedestrian pwnage will earn you a "D," for "deadly." More complicated attacking will allow you to garner "C" for "carnage," "B" for "brutal," and "A" for "atomic," all the way up to SSS (higher than A), which stands, of course, for "super sick style."

The combat system is abetted by the game’s purposely cartoonish physics, which are tweaked so that firing your gun or using your sword after jumping actually enables you to stay in the air longer than you otherwise would have. This kind of jumping is escapist fun. Unfortunately the game also relies on another kind of video game acrobatics, the dreaded "jumping puzzle." Occasionally Nero will have to perform a series of choreographed leaps to continue his quest, while the game ratchets up the annoyance level mercilessly by adding time limits and enemies that spawn every time you screw up.

These challenges are further complicated by Devil May Cry 4‘s frustrating camera system. Although a freely roaming perspective has been de rigueur in 3-D games for some time, Capcom decided to stick with a fixed viewpoint during most of the game, obscuring important items and areas in order to pimp the game’s admittedly lush environments. When the angle does change, it is often an infuriating 180-degree shift, so that the joystick direction you were just using to move forward now moves you backward, making basic actions like walking through doors disorienting in the extreme. Devil May Cry veterans disappointed in the new protagonist will be happy to learn that Dante appears as a player character about halfway through the game, along with his arsenal of weapons. Once Dante appears, however, the player is inexplicably forced to play through the same levels he or she just completed as Nero, except in reverse order.

This kind of backward-looking regression sums up Devil May Cry 4‘s flaws. Working in a medium that is getting ever more sophisticated, Capcom has made a game that cloaks yesterday’s tired, game play in today’s fancy graphics and hopes no one notices. I, for one, will not stand for this kind of … hey! Check out the rack on that Dominatrix Ninja from Hell!

Driving reign

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Rockstar Games/Take-Two Interactive (XBOX360, PS3)

GAMER Since its April 29 release, more than 6 million copies of Grand Theft Auto IV have been purchased. While Take-Two Interactive is still taking contractor bids on Scrooge McDuck–style cash swimming pools, the gaming press has worked itself into a frenzy, bestowing five-star reviews and expostuutf8g on how GTA IV will revolutionize gaming, culture, and possibly the world.

This hyperbole exemplifies gaming’s innate pathologies. Since their inception, video games have been portrayed as the puerile inferior to other entertainment media, and game designers, players, and critics have long coveted a seat at the table alongside the realist novel and the feature film. When a game as ambitious as GTA IV is released, advocates are quick to frame it as the "future of the medium," a kind of messianic product that will show those old-media Luddites what they’re missing.

GTA IV is not video Jesus. Still, by any reasonable standard, it’s an incredible game, taking the hallowed legacy of the previous GTA games, striving to be bigger and better, and mostly succeeding. At this late date, weeks after its debut, describing it as "only" the next Grand Theft Auto game can seem like very faint praise. Then again, criticizing the game using the metric of its hype is like getting a Benz for your 16th birthday and complaining that you didn’t get a Batmobile.

The GTA series is credited with inventing the "sandbox" game, which drops the player into a vast interactive world with little or no agenda. Complete the missions that drive the story forward — or don’t. Murder passersby until the police have to call in the National Guard — or don’t. Furnished with the power of today’s consoles, Rockstar Games has created a staggering sandbox, recreating New York City’s five boroughs (and a miniaturized New Jersey) in such loving, exhaustive detail that it’s hard to list all the coolness concisely. There’s a working subway system, multiple hours of fake, satirical television — one could go on forever.

In addition to the huge strides the game makes in environmental design and artificial intelligence, it also delivers the latest in interactive storytelling. You play Niko Bellic, a veteran of Balkan strife who disembarks in Liberty City hoping to escape his past and embrace the American lifestyle his previously arrived cousin Roman has touted as luxuriant and easy. Of course, it is not, and Niko is inexorably drawn into the criminal underworld he tried to leave behind.

While it doesn’t quite deliver the reinvention of the immigrant narrative parsed by some reviewers, the game provides an engrossing tale, full of three-dimensional characters (in both senses of the phrase), magnificent action sequences, and deft plot twists. The voice acting is superb and extensive; many conversations have alternate versions, expecting you to get killed and end up listening to them twice. The character animations — in a sense the game’s other kind of acting — convincingly capture the most esoteric gestures, down to the shudder of a crime boss as a line of Colombia’s finest explodes into his sinus.

The save system is still frustrating, and the prospect of replaying a long, violent confrontation after failing right at its end is often almost too much to bear. Despite GTA IV‘s unfettered gameplay, the missions are still very conventional and leave little room for creative problem-solving. Sure, there are a number of red pill–blue pill dilemmas. But in a game that allows you as much freedom as GTA, having to stick to the plan in each attempt becomes annoying. The new multiplayer mode provides a panoply of game types, ranging from traditional death-match and racing modes to cops-and-robbers high jinks that exploit what’s best about the game. Unfortunately the interface is confusing and finicky, and the online player-base seems to still be enmeshed in the game’s vast single-player story.

Grand Theft Auto IV is not without its faults. It may not establish video games as a serious medium. But if you want to have 300-odd hours of fun, there’s no better way to spend $60.

Big and getting Gigantour

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In a few days, a legion of heavy metal maniacs will throng the Event Center at San Jose State University for the third annual Gigantour. Created by Megadeth frontperson Dave Mustaine, the package consists of bands he has handpicked for their ability to deliver high-energy live sets to arena-size crowds. In addition to the venerable thrashers in Megadeth, the tour has included a number of the biggest names in both modern and classic metal such as Lamb of God, Anthrax, Overkill, and Opeth.

The 2008 incarnation of Gigantour has tapped Bay Area greats High on Fire, who seem to be playing in front of bigger audiences with each passing week, and given the youthful Arizonans in Job for a Cowboy their first taste of the big time. While American metal is robustly represented, Mustaine has also called on two European bands that are legendary in their own countries. Subsumed by the banner of Megadeth, Sweden’s In Flames and Finland’s Children of Bodom are holding down the kind of opening slots that have become unfamiliar to them, promoting new albums to each other’s fans and trying to reach that ever-elusive next echelon of success.

In Flames guitarist Jesper Strömblad sounded weary but enthusiastic when reached by phone from Worcester, Mass., where he was preparing to play the first day of the New England Metal and Hardcore Festival, which included the entire Gigantour lineup on its initial night. The group was honored to join the outing, he said, adding, "Megadeth is one of my personal favorite bands."

In Flames was formed by Strömblad in 1990 in Gothenburg, Sweden, a university town that during the ’90s hosted a profusion of melodic death metal, honed into a form so distinctive that it became known as the "Gothenburg sound." Typified by carefully composed neoclassical guitar harmonies, the style was popularized by bands such as At the Gates, Dark Tranquillity, and Soilwork (from nearby Helsingborg), but it reached a creative peak on In Flames’ 1996 full-length, The Jester Race (Nuclear Blast).

In Flames’ new A Sense of Purpose (Koch) hasn’t lost the searing dual leads that define the group, and as Strömblad was right to point out, "You can hear a song from today’s In Flames, or an old song — you can hear it’s us." Creatively, however, the band has been caught in a downward spiral since 2002’s Reroute to Remain (Nuclear Blast), which introduced clean singing, slower tempos, and hollow electronic textures into the band’s repertoire. As Strömblad explained, "playing fast is not necessarily aggressive, or heavy. What we want to put in the music is big dynamics." Those musical contrasts are present, but accompanied by stark differences in quality between the outfit’s modern and classic material.

While In Flames has evolved, Finnish outfit Children of Bodom has mostly stuck to its guns, churning out adrenaline-fueled speed-metal full of catchy neoclassical shredding on the keyboard and guitar. Founded in 1993 in Helsinki, the band takes its name from Lake Bodom, a small body of water in the city’s suburbs that was host to the country’s most infamous triple murder, which claimed the lives of three teenagers on a camping trip in 1960.

The group’s frontperson, Alexi Laiho, is a veritable guitar hero, in addition to being an unrepentant party animal. Finally reached by phone in Baltimore after an initial hangover-thwarted attempt, he insisted that Children of Bodom’s daunting technicality was a natural outgrowth of his songwriting, rather than an attempt to show off. The band’s greatest strength is clear when Laiho and keyboardist Janne Wirman chase each other up and down the scales, and Children of Bodom, at its best, sounds like a demented, amplified string quartet. No surprise, then, when Laiho mentioned the artist the combo listened to for inspiration when recording its groundbreaking early albums: "Mozart."

Children of Bodom’s new Blooddrunk (Spinefarm) certainly cites the ax-master’s love of booze and is a more memorable effort than 2005’s Are You Dead Yet? (Spinefarm). The solos are as incendiary as ever, and the band’s embrace of progressive-rock tendencies has yet to blunt the Vivaldi-style virtuosity of its songs.

Speaking with two bands that have ascended to the metal mountaintop and gotten a look at the downward slope on the other side, it seemed important to ask if this new period of prosperity, exemplified by Gigantour, had a catch. After all, metal has fallen on hard times before, even when it seemed poised to conquer the world for good.

Surprisingly, Strömblad and Laiho provided nearly identical answers. "You always see different styles [of metal]," said the In Flames guitarist. "The genre of metal will always be popular. The different styles can grow big for a while and then go away." Laiho concurred: "Because the metal scene is so big and wide, and has different categories, it’s never going to implode on itself. It’s always going to be evolving." As long as people in Sweden, Finland, and America are willing to forge the next In Flames or Children of Bodom, these two six-string titans will be proven right.

GIGANTOUR

With Megadeth, In Flames, Children of Bodom, Job for a Cowboy, and High on Fire
Mon/19, 5:30 p.m., $37.50

San Jose State University, Event Center Arena

290 S. Seventh St., San Jose

www.ticketmaster.com

Metal Mania: See you in the darkness

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While Oakland’s metal elders continue to thrash despite the odds, a new generation of bands is poised to augment the Bay’s already fearsome reputation. San Francisco’s Animosity was founded in a summer school classroom, where 14-year-old Leo Miller found the accomplices he needed to start gigging with his local hardcore heroes. Although Miller lists NorCal skull-crackers like Hoods and Sworn Vengeance as inspirations, Animosity’s goals were clear: "If you listen to our first demos, as pathetic as they were — we were 14 — we were trying to play extreme metal, from the beginning."

Their fall 2007 album, Animal (Black Market Activities), is a maelstrom of frantic leads, limber blast-beats, and guttural roars, produced by Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou. "We didn’t want to make an overproduced, studio death-metal record," explains Miller. "The trend nowadays is to have everything doctored, triggered, and quantized." The band begins a North American headlining run on April 7.

Likeminded Oakland death metallers All Shall Perish have raised eyebrows with their chunky syncopation and eerie guitar parts, working alongside Animosity to establish the Bay Area as a flashpoint for metal’s most extreme permutations. The group is currently in the studio smelting a follow-up to 2006’s The Price of Existence (Nuclear Blast), and the lockstep interplay between drummer Matt Kuykendall and guitarists Ben Orum and Chris Storey is sure to yield thunderous breakdowns and furious shredding, with singer Hernan "Eddie" Hermida glass-gargling over the top. Expect the album in late 2008.

The region’s extreme contingent might pile on the beats per minute, but there’s also a groovier game in town. If you think that San Francisco’s stoner story starts and ends with High on Fire, prepare to be blown away by Floating Goat. Drawing on the best of Pentagram, Sabbath, C.O.C., and a host of others, the outfit’s surging, sinuous riffs are infectiously heavy. Vocalist Chris Corona’s soulful singing and dive-bombing hammer-ons soar above the fray, while bassist Ian Petitpren and drummer Aaron Barrett comprise the rest of an extremely powerful trio. The band is currently unsigned, plying 2006’s self-released album The Vultures Arrive on the Northwest touring circuit.

Even more thunderous than the swung hum of Floating Goat are the volume-addicted San Francisco duo Black Cobra. Eschewing the classic rock roots of stoner metal in favor of tectonic doom and clattering thrash, Los Angeles expats Jason Landrian and Rafael Martinez make a racket that defies their paucity in numbers. Buried deep within the sludgy, swirling fuzz are hoarse shouts and gloomy guitar dirges, anchored by Landrian’s two titanic tom-toms. The duo is currently touring Europe with Austin riff-minstrels the Sword and Oakland hesher-darlings Saviours, and return to play Annie’s Social Club on April 24.

This untapped vein of younger metal is only just now being disinterred. Although the death of the Pound has made venues harder to come by, these rough new ingots continue to forge themselves in the fires of relentless touring, building a reputation that might one day be compared to that of the Bay’s thrash greats, one riff at a time. Call your friendly neighborhood concert booker and request the best in San Francisco metal by name.

FLOATING GOAT

With Super Giant and HDR

May 27, 8 p.m., call for price

Parkside

1600 17th St., SF

(415) 503-0393

www.theeparkside.com

Metal Mania: The return of the kings

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It’s a Sunday night in late February, and the facade of Slim’s is shrouded by the shadow of a monstrous black tour bus. Inside, middle-aged bikers rub shoulders with teenagers in skin-tight jeans and garish print hoodies. At the bar, tattooed hipsters vie for position against glowering heshers and balding suburban fathers in polo shirts. As New Orleans black metal band Goatwhore kicks into a crescendo, the masses teem, pumping their fists and offering devil-horn salutes. Song finished, vocalist Ben Falgoust gulps for air before raising the mic to his mouth: "Are you guys ready for Exodus!?"

The multitude roars. They are ready for Exodus; ready to rock out to a band that formed in San Francisco 28 years ago, before many of them were even born. They are ready to help write a new chapter in the bloodstained tome of American metal and ready to crank their iPods to 11. After the winter of the ’90s, when the genre hibernated through grunge, boy bands and rap-rock, metal is back in bearlike force, packing halls across the nation and charting albums with astounding frequency. (Most recently Lamb of God’s Sacrament (Epic) hit number eight on the Billboard charts in September 2007, and the Bay Area’s Machine Head reached no. 54 with The Blackening [Roadrunner] last April.)

While it’s true that some of this success is due to the work of our nation’s talented young headbangers, it is the reinvigoration of the genre’s veteran warriors that makes the renaissance so momentous. Almost three decades ago, the Bay Area witnessed the birth pangs of thrash metal: a frantic mixture of hardcore punk and the burgeoning new wave of British Heavy Metal that would come to define heavy music in America for much of the ’80s. This generation of thrashers produced Metallica, who need no introduction, but it also produced a pair of massively influential bands that never quite garnered the spotlight they deserved: Exodus and Testament.

After years of strife, drug addiction, illness, and disregard, these two titans are both back on the road, promoting brand new albums to brand new fans with the same fury they mustered in their youth. As Exodus guitarist Gary Holt puts it over the phone while taking a well-earned respite from the road: "We’re proving that the founding fathers still know how to do it better than anyone else."

Rob Flynn — guitarist for the vintage Oakland thrash band Vio-lence and current frontman for local groove-metal crowd-pleasers Machine Head, who were recently nominated for a Grammy — has witnessed the thrash revival from both sides of the stage. Speaking by phone from his tour bus, he lauds the two bands’ success: "Exodus and Testament are appealing to an entirely new generation of kids, as they should." This appeal is the result of a national hunger for musical authenticity that both outfits are eager to sate. Similarities between Reagan- and George W. Bush-era politics have fueled a new wave of thrash polemics, and the bands’ undiminished ability to slay from onstage has won them a new legion of supporters.

EARLY SUCCESS


Exodus was the first of the two bands to coalesce. Holt joined forces with childhood friend Tom Hunting on drums and Kirk Hammet on guitar; Hammet would play on the band’s early demos before leaving in 1983 to join Metallica. In 1985, the group released Bonded by Blood (Torrid), an incendiary full-length filled with breakneck tempos and anthemic, shout-along choruses, eminently deserving of its place on the short list of best metal albums.

Testament got off to a slower start, forming in 1983 under the name Legacy, which had to be scuttled after a jazz combo of the same name complained. Joined in 1986 by a man-mountain of a singer named Chuck Billy, the group released their debut, The Legacy in 1987 on Megaforce Records. While they retained the pummeling tempos that defined the thrash idiom, they drew heavily on the progressive leanings of lead guitar player Alex Skolnick, a prodigy who joined the band when he was just 16. Their third album, Practice What You Preach (Megaforce) was extremely well-received, with the title track garnering video plays on MTV throughout 1989.

When interviewed by phone, Billy is quick to point to two catalysts for the music’s early success. The first was its combative nature, which pitted ascetic thrashers against their mortal enemies, the so-called posers. Groups sought out ever more extreme tempos and tunings in order to alienate the hair-sprayed acolytes of glam metal, whose temple was located on Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip. Beyond distinguishing themselves from their gussied-up foils in Mötley Crüe, bands strove to out-do each other: "It was all friendly competition, the desire to be bigger and do better," explains Billy.

Flynn sums up the impact of Testament and Exodus memorably: "If it wasn’t for those bands, there wouldn’t be a Machine Head. When I was a kid, Exodus was my favorite band of all time. Bonded by Blood was like my life. I once punched some kid in the face for saying that Gary Holt sucked."

In addition to Vio-lence, local outfits like Death Angel and Forbidden released classic albums during this period, taking advantage of a record industry shopping spree that was triggered by the success of the Big Four — Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, and Slayer — during the years 1988 to 1990. This success had its consequences as the towering reputation of those four groups began to overshadow the lesser-known acts that had helped pioneer the thrash idiom. The slight sticks with Holt to this day: "We were one of the first thrash metal bands ever, and it certainly sucks when you hear people referring to the ‘Big Four’ and you’re left out, considered by some to be a ‘second-tier’ band."

THE DARK AGE


For Exodus and Testament, things would get much worse before getting better. As the airwaves clogged with one metal band after another, the genre’s countercultural status began to erode. Diagnosing the problem, Holt recalls the beginning of the music’s slow implosion: "I’ve always thought metal needed a common enemy. It became a parody of itself." On Jan. 11, 1992, Nirvana’s Nevermind (DGC) hit No. 1 on the Billboard’s album sales chart, neatly coinciding with Capitol Records’s decision to drop Exodus from its lineup, and ushering in a long winter for metal in America. Exodus broke up. Testament sustained itself by touring in Europe, where, as Billy explains, "they didn’t have that grunge thing, so it’s been all metal, all the way." Faced with uninterested record executives and a fan base that was buying flannel, thrash retreated into the underground.

Financial struggles were soon compounded by medical woes. In 1999, Testament guitarist James Murphy was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Although he made a full recovery, Murphy was forced to rely on a number of local fundraisers to afford treatment. In 2001, lightning struck twice, and Billy developed a rare form of cancer known as germ cell seminoma, which also necessitated extensive and expensive treatment. In August 2001, San Francisco’s dormant thrash community banded together for "Thrash of the Titans," a benefit concert to raise money for Billy and Death frontman Chuck Schuldiner, another metal god battling cancer (Schuldiner passed away in December of that year). The concert showcased reunions by Exodus, Death Angel, and Legacy, the pre-Billy incarnation of Testament.

As the metal community united around its stricken heroes, old grudges were put aside, and the two bands began making tentative comeback plans. The reinvigoration of Exodus was tragically put on hold in 2002 when original vocalist Paul Baloff suffered a stroke while riding his bike and lapsed into a coma, eventually being taken off life support at his family’s request. While Holt was pained by the loss of his old friend and bandmate, he was determined to soldier on: "I felt like I still have something to prove, even if I don’t. I still keep a chip on my shoulder."

Billy recovered fully in 2003, and Testament was offered a slot at a metal festival in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Reenlisting the participation of Skolnick, who had left the band to pursue his interest in jazz, Testament rediscovered the pleasures of touring for new audiences and found itself poised to regain some of its past glory. As Billy explains, "The whole music business is all about timing. The reunion show that brought people together again enabled people to put their problems aside, to do it for the music. The reason those bands weren’t touring was that the climate of metal wasn’t right.

"I think the bands like Shadows Fall, Trivium, and Chimaira — all these bands making names for themselves by bringing back our style of music — its perfect for a band like us," he continues.

By the time this article is published, Testament will have played two sold-out shows at the Independent, a triumphant homecoming in a city eager to acknowledge its extensive thrash history. On April 29, they will release their first album of new material in nine years, The Formation of Damnation, on Nuclear Blast, a label that is also the new home of Exodus, who released The Atrocity Exhibition … Exhibit A in October 2007.

Billy describes the Testament release as a return to form, with more traditional thrash elements replacing the midtempo brutality that defined their ’90s material. "We hadn’t written a record that had lead guitar sections," he says. "We have Alex Skolnick back in the band — it was feeling good, like it used to. I wanted to sing more, not do death metal vocals. I wanted it to be heavy, but have catchy melodies." The few tracks that Nuclear Blast has divulged to journalists confirm his analysis: they include scorching Skolnick shred and singing that is at times almost hooky.

The Atrocity Exhibition is a more modern-sounding recording, appropriating the blast beats and Byzantine song structures of death metal and continuing the trend established by the act’s two other recent releases, 2004’s Tempo of the Damned and 2005’s Shovelheaded Kill Machine (both Nuclear Blast). This evolution has its detractors, much to Holt’s frustration. "Some people want me to write Bonded by Blood over and over again," he says, "But I can’t." Despite the protestations of the purists, Exodus’s recent material is invariably successful at adapting the techniques and innovations of a new generation of metal without compromising the group’s essential sound.

Both bands will continue to tour voraciously throughout the spring and summer, eager to win over new fans with their daunting chops and undimmed energy. According to Holt, their hard work on the road is already paying off. "It’s a change for us to look out in the audience and see kids that are 17 or 18 years old," he says. "In the last five years we’ve been beating ourselves to death on tour and we’ve acquired a new audience. The old guys all have mortgages and their wives won’t let them go to shows anymore." This time around, even the subprime lending crisis is unlikely to deter Exodus and Testament. Far from being nostalgia acts, the two bands have relied on their competitive natures to keep their music on the bleeding edge of metal, refusing to sacrifice even a lone beat-per-minute to old age. Buoyed by fans both old and new and revered by a rapidly expanding metal world eager to give them their due, the new order is bonded by the blood of the past — but looking toward the future.

Silver Griffin

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LOCAL LIVE Silver Griffin is composed of three extremely competent musicians, the kind who turn toward one another and half-smile after the execution of a particularly tricky harmony or a successful groove. The band traffics in a muscular, half-danceable brand of indie rock that’s notable mostly for the meticulous slickness of its composition — airtight, but not quite suffocating.

The trio took the stage Sept. 22 at the Rockit Room, breezing through a note-perfect set of songs alternately slinky and strutting. The gig served as a CD release party for the band’s self-released debut, a collaboration with veteran producer Sylvia Massy (Tool, Prince, Red Hot Chili Peppers) titled Here in the Night. The tunes are mostly built off frontperson Liam McCormick’s lilting lyrics and lithe leads, which culminate in chiming eighth-note chorus chords and the vocalist’s wistful, high-register crooning.

Silver Griffin’s songs occasionally evince jazz underpinnings, which might explain the well-honed musicianship that makes the group such a satisfying live act. On record, however, otherwise taut tracks are plagued by meandering horn solos and swells that recall a horrific combination of smooth jazz and Maroon 5’s discarded ideas, convincing at least this reviewer that collusion between indie and fusion is not in anyone’s best interest. McCormick is also a thoroughgoing abuser of the falsetto "Ooo-ooo" vocal technique, often choosing to deploy such dolphin-language scat antics at precisely the point in the song when a memorable lyric would be a bonus.

These caveats aside, Silver Griffin has its fair share of moments, especially when the songs play to the strengths of the talented rhythm section duo, Greg Black and Seabrien Arata. Set standouts included "Taste My Kiss" and "Goldfinger," a shaken-not-stirred homage to the classic Shirley Bassey James Bond theme.

SILVER GRIFFIN Sat/6, 9 p.m., $7, Time Out Bar and Patio, 1822 Grant, Concord. (925) 798-1811, www.timeoutconcord.com

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