Caution !! Zombies Ahead !!

People in Austin should be very careful from now on. Seems that Zoey, Bill, Francis, and Louis will have some action after all ;)



Thanks enrevanche, this made my day ;)

A Black Metal Night: Celestial Bloodshed

I just came to the Sargeist and Baptism gig last Saturday, with support from Celestial Bloodshed (Norway) and Aosoth (France). Very good Black Metal night !!

I was very happy to be able to see Aosoth for the first time.I failed to see them the previous time for the last Black Metal is Rising fest, because they were playing way too early, and I came after the end of their set.

Also very impressed by Celestial Bloodshed, which I never saw before. They have a very strong impact on stage. The singer is kind of scary ;)




I bought their album Cursed, Scarred And Forever Possessed after that (it's not a new band), and I like it. It's really Black, but it's not at all generic Black Metal like some said.

Not Everyone Likes Metal....

FUCK THEM !!!!!!!




That said, if you want to declare your love to the girl of your life, try this powerful method guys:



But beware I will decline all responsibility on the result

Black, violent and depressing

This is Shining. Their last album Halmstad begins with a song called Ytterligare ett steg närmare total jävla utfrysning (Yet Another Step Towards Complete Fucking Desolation) !! And here are the first words, a little poem before the screaming:

As I was going up the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there,
He wasn't there again today,
I wish, I wish he'd go away.

This is the beginning of Antigonish, a 1899 poem by William Hughes Mearns. That, with the arrangement of the Beethoven Moonlight sonata, is only an example on how well they are able to mix classical influences with raw black metal.

Last gigs of the year

I was able to go to some of the gigs planned for the last months of the year

• The Paris date of Heidenfest on November 9th, with Eluveitie and Primordial . Both were great (Alan of Primordial has an incredible impact on stage). I was less impressed by Finntroll, but maybe it is because it is too far the kind of music I like the most



• Enslaved on November 18th, very powerful as always, I really would have missed something great if I did not attend to their date in Paris. Plus they really master light effects in their shows... but the music would have been really excellent by itself, even without these light effects.



• The Satyricon show on November 23th. I must say that I needed several listenings of their new album to really appreciate it, but after that.. I must say it is really a great album, less accessible to their previous one maybe, but superior IMHO. However, the ultra-clean quality of the CD casing do not make it justice, the album is much much better than that. For the record, they began by Commando and ended by Mother North, of course.



• Morbid Angel + Keep of Kalessin + Marduk on November 28th: Marduk as powerful as ever; really I know a lot of people that were coming only for them. However Morbid were the main act of the night and they were very good too. Of course they ended by The God of Emptiness


• Cradle of Filth + Gorgoroth on December 2nd: It was the second time I saw Gorgoroth on stage, and they were as good and evil as the first. This time they put wooden crosses and crucified models on stage. It is a band that has no problem fulfilling what you light expect from their music after seeing this kind of props on stage. They are far, far from being ridiculous, trust me. Hmm it was not the case with Cradle of Filth (however I was not there for them but for Gorgoroth). Apart from the songs from their last album which I found very good on stage (as I felt also good on album), the rest was really ridiculous.

I was not able to see Asphyx and Hail of Bullets on 11th and 12th December near Amsterdam, too much work in Paris to be able to take some days of to Amsterdam. That's bad, because these are really two f*** great bands !! I hope to be able to see them next year !!!

And for next year ? There's Deicide / Samael / Vader on the 11th January. There's also a Shining tour around May (but not coming to Paris), and there's next Hellfest in June. And maybe a lot more ? Gorgoroth's Infernus side just anounced that Pest will return as vocalist, 1349 is recording a new album, Pantheon I will release a new album mid 2009, and maybe Carpathian Forest will tour before the release of their next album, in December 2009...

Bioshock: One hell of an overhyped game

I bought Bioshock at a discount price some months ago, and I did not install it before yesterday.

You now, I don't really play video games everyday, I have not finished Half Life 2 EP 2 yet. My hard drive crashed one year ago, I had to reinstall Steam, the video game, and begin from scratch.

As I bought Left 4 Dead recently and I'm enjoying every second of it, I wanted to try another video game to compare: maybe I was too much into this zombie stuff ? Bioshock was praised as one of the greatest video games ever made, with a very deep and convincing story, and I really anticipated to try it (zombie stories have to be simple, this is a rule of the genre).

Let's face it: I was very very disappointed with the video game so far, from its faulty installation to it's gameplay:

• Installation: I have a video card which does not handle Shaders 3.0, and this game will not work at all if you don't have a 3.0-capable card. Of course this mandatory requirement is not written at all on the retail box (they only mention DirectX 9.0), and browsing through a lot of threads on the subject, I feeled cheated. However, some good people were able to recompile the shaders provided in the games installation directory to make them work on 2.0 shaders-capable cards. By the way, it means that 2K could have done it before or after the initial release, but of course they did nothing.


• Graphics: Those I saw did not convince me, but I will put this under the fact that I don't have the required video card to play this game. Let's assume that they are good if you have a card that meets the requirements of the game


• Gameplay: It very much look like a child console game. I really, really don't like games were every things you must do are advertised with glowing colors and oversized objects in the game. For example, at the beginning, you need to break a lock; this lock is much oversized compared to the other objects in the area, and is in a glowing gold color. It's the same for all objects that you must use (even cigarettes). All that looks like Super Mario, not a FPS, and it drives me away from the story.


• Radio: During all the part of the game I played, I always had a radio on with a voice-over who explained everything to my character. Stop this !!! A video game is not a book, and this looks like a very bad movie. I don't need this. Are you convinced by your story ? Then you don't need to feed it to the player like baby milk, it's advertised as a mature game after all. With this over-present voice-over, I feel that the developers have not been able to really flesh this in the game. I may be spoiled by the Half-Life 2 way of telling stories, which is in the level-design itself, but it's easier to simply record tons of pre-recorded text. So much for the convincing story.


• Level-design: levels are not very interesting IMHO, again it looks like a platform game, not a shooter. All rooms pretty much looked the same to me, and I became bored of navigating through them after a while.


• Characters: There maybe are some strong characters in the game, but the average NPCs you encounter all look the same and act the same. The first encounter was great (the woman who carry a revolver installed of a baby in a stroller), but after that they all looked the same for me.


• Gameplay: That's nice to loot dead NPCs for money, Eve, or health, but after the second time you do it it does not look logical at all (and the three available slots are really plain ridiculous). Again this looks very much like a 2D platform game, not a shooter. Do you think it is logical that almost every NPC bring some handy health kits on his person ? I don't. There are other games which are very careful to put items where they are logical in the universe they have created. Half-Life was maybe the first to present a convincing universe, where for example health kits were only available in logical places. It was in 1998 guys !!


• Morals: Reviewers praised the moral choices that the game present to the player. I don't really see what is the moral choice between taking the ADAM of the Little Sisters (thus killing them) and rescue them. In short this is between being evil (which could be cool in a video game, I reckon), or good. Those who mistakingly take this cheap trick for an interesting moral choice should buy Deux Ex and play this fantastic (if old) video game. I still remember the moment in the game when my employers (a kind of Sci-Fi CIA government agency called UNATCO) assigned me to kill a terrorist called Juan Lebedev. When my character is in front of him, he asks "Do you know who you are, and who are your employers ?". You could assume before that he was the bad guy, and after that maybe he is the good guy, but the game does not let you to think so simply. It would now be very simple just to go away without killing him. But at this moment, your superior, a not very sympathetic woman called Anna Navarre arrives and urges you to do what you were assigned to do. OK, the game let you do what you want: killing Lebedev, killing your superior, or going away without killing anybody (but knowing too well that she will finish the job). You are free, but neither of your choices are simple, or "good", nor "bad", in a moral point of view (and the story will unfold, a bit differently, depending on what you choose to do). This is a game with morality choices, no a childish thing giving you a black a white illusion of a choice.

All in all, a very much overhyped game.

Beautiful freaks

From Left 4 Dead, of course...
As you see, there's not only one type of infected ;-)




And beware of the witch !!