I'm Ok

One of very few advantages of living in a third or second rate country is that most things that are imported into the country come completely uncensored and the politicians are so busy ripping people off and paying money to the mafia that they don't really care if there's a video game or a book that makes children kill each other in a gruesome way. All those angry mothers, anti-video game movements, religious fanatics and uninformed senators seem like a dream from here. Despite that this situation does produce some good things. A man by the name of Jack Thompson called video game "murder simulators" and that they should be banned all together. So a group of programmers met and made a murder simulator to piss the guy off.

The story of I'm Ok is about an asian father whose son was beaten by his peer with a baseball bat. The murderer receives a life sentence but Osaki Kim (the O.K. guy) feels this is not enough and proceeds to slaughter everyone who made the video game that the murderer played.

The game is an old school side scroller with not really any innovative gameplay but it's to be expected since this game was more of a message rather than a video game. Nevertheless it's fun to play simply because of the overhyped violence and nods to several video game trends. It offends everything. What's even better the visual presentation looks like it was done by Paul Robertson. I'm not sure if he had anything to do with this game but it looks very much like his style.

Enjoy and a have a few laughs.

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Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers - Moanin'

When bebop was king and when Charlie Parker along with his many copycats scoured the land during the 50s people began to forget what it was all about. Jazz evolved into a more intellectual and more demanding musical direction. It almost completely left behind its previous sound of pop music but it also started to forget its roots. Then came along Art Blakey with some other marvelous people and told everyone to calm the fuck down and remember the old blues days. This is pretty much (highly caricatured of course) how hard bop started. Instead of focusing solely on raging solos and all dem harmonies it focused on the melody and the blues feel of jazz. Moanin' is a seminal, and also great, album to explain just what hard bop was and is about. It was new and it was innovative but it also showed respect to the previous sounds of jazz fusing it with the new sound that Charlie Parker popularized. It's sort of a middle ground. And it rips shit up. :D It was also the first album that Blakey did for Blue Note.

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What it was all about.

Cobalt - Gin

Cobalt stirred quite a lot of noise when they released Gin back in 2009. It even won some awards for the best album of the year and so on. That's not really important when it comes down to it. Before Gin they had a steady stream of albums. Some were good (like bird eater) and some were okay in a mediocre okay way. Gin on the other hand took me by a surprise. I didn't expect much but I received more than I could ever possibly want. The community seems to register this band as a war metal band. I'm not really sure as to what that specifically means; this sounds basically as a thrashed out black metal. It has relatively catchy riffs, not that much tremolo-ing and screaming vocals in a grunty way. Or something like that, I lost my creative words somewhere to be able to explain the sound.

What's interesting about this band is that the two members of it rarely see each other. One is in the military serving somewhere in Korea (I think, I don't feel like checking out that at the moment) while the other lives in the US. According to an interview I saw they meet up every year or so to record an album. It's almost like one of those internet bands. In any case this actually gives them a lot of freedom and time to think about their compositions and how they will eventually play it out when they meet each other. This system so far turned out to work great and this album is a solid proof of it. It's exceptionally good and I warmly recommend it to any metal enthusiast. The only downside is that there are no (official) lyrics.

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