Thursday 26 April 2012

Golden Axe II by Boris Vallejo


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Message board rumours have it that Sega are on the verge of releasing digital download trilogy packs for Streets of Rage and Golden Axe. Hooray! Naturally, the Golden Axe release features the middling Mega Drive sequels rather than this spiffy 32-bit arcade effort. Yo Sega! How about a coin-op specific issue featuring Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder and Golden Axe: The Duel?

Wednesday 18 April 2012

Tuesday 17 April 2012

WHO'S HOLDING?

Blur - She's So High / Chemical World / Tracy Jacks



SMILE DAVID



Michael Fassbender kills it as the (presumed) ancestor to the Ash and Bishop 'droids - David 8 - in this
Prometheus viral tease. Fass plays David distracted and daydreamy, like the skin-job science officers of the first two Alien films. There's also a twist of disingenuous play-acting, with Fass staring his audience down like an amoral car salesman, or a cable TV God-botherer. He doesn't believe any of the shit he's saying, it's just what he thinks you want to hear. He's a human shaped instrument, programmed with fealty and deference. He's absolutely incapable of not acting in your best interest. Honest Guv'! I also quite like the idea that his number designation fits in with vague Alien / Blade Runner micro-continuity, David 8 as the successor model to Scott's idea of Deckard as a Nexus 7 synthetic.

Saturday 7 April 2012

KNIFE CRIME


Knives seem to be becoming the extinction weapon of choice in cult clobber flicks. Apparently, bone breaking lacks permanence; gunfire much too anonymous. If you really want your movie ruin to compete, you've got to arm your hero with something sharp. Notable examples in the last few years include Van Damme stabbing up derelict Soviet blocs in Universal Soldier: Regeneration, and Won Bin never meeting an artery he didn't like to slash in The Man from Nowhere. The Raid: Redemption makes a play for similar notoriety with this sequence. The re-branded Raid is out now in the US, and will arrive in May in the UK.

Wednesday 4 April 2012

STATIC BATTLE PLATFORM


Probably best not to focus on the Ironhide toy's flimsy robot mode, eh? Before Transformers there was Diaclone, a Japanese toy line about human controlled robots that could shift between vehicle and humanoid modes. Presumably, the toys that would become Sunstreaker and Ironhide were rescue bots in the thrall of the future clothes kid glimpsed at the ad's close. Funnily enough, when majority fiction control reverted back to Japan, we got Super-God Masterforce, a Transformers series in which human pilots changed into heads and engines to control lifeless robot giants.

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