Why I Won't Be Playing Fallout 4 until 2017 (And Even Then, I'll Probably Pirate It)

I don't often write about gaming because... well, Im not really sure why I don't write about gaming more. I'm extraordinarily passionate about gaming because I feel like it's a wildly under-appreicated artistic medium. A perfect example of my video game obsession; I was personally offended (something something "triggered!" rabble rabble) by Roger Ebert's campaign to denounce video games as a valid medium for consideration of their merit as (capital "A") Art, especially when games like Bioshock, Red Dead Redemption, and The Last of Us so clearly answer the question "can video games be Art?" with a resounding "Duh."

The thing about video games, even more-so than music and film, is that industry is directly tied into their production. Very few studios exist that are capable of pumping out AAA (in industry terms; top tier, professional content) titles without budgets easily rivaling some of the most expensive movies ever made. Despite genres and game types, the largest of these games generally always compete to sell as many units as possible, meaning that the bottom line is often more important than the many aspects of the game itself.

More like "wallet exsanguination" and "malnutrition after 2 days of testing mod fixes and shit that should have been in the game in the first place."

In this respect, Bethesda, current owner and developer of the Fallout franchise treads a fine line. Their games are legendary among players for their open world gameplay and the ability to enable the user to craft the kind of roleplaying experience the user would like to have. In their pursuit of massive, open ended, open world gameplay, graphical fidelty has been something of an afterthought for most modern Bethesda titles. In the past, the rhetoric from Bethesda has been that, technologically, it has previously been impossible to offer the kind of open world games they create while maintaining "bleeding edge" graphical fidelity. Okay. That's not too big of a load to swallow, I mean, not even 15 years ago, 3D video games pretty much looked like marginally more articulated Lego minifigs, stiffly bumbling around grainy textured polygons that sort of looked like the things they were supposed to represent. Even the launch titles for the last generation of consoles look seriously dated compared to what developers were able to squeeze out of them at the end of their life cycle. Compare Call of Duty 3, to The Last of Us or even 2010's Red Dead Redemption, a game that came out only 4 years after the system launched. Graphical fidelity has made leaps and bounds in terms of improvement in just the last five years alone.

And here we get into the turd on the fine china... Consoles. It is unarguable fact that they are holding gaming back in terms of what is capable, graphically, in video games. They use outdated and cheap hardware in an effort to provide customers with a “cheap” and “plug and play” video game experience. Honestly, Im not talking shit on console gamers. I own several consoles. I love all video game platforms, BUT, it is undeniable that consoles help corporate bottom lines, not gaming as a community. The games that look beautiful on consoles do so in spite of the technological limitations of consoles, not because of them.

Now, when we talk about graphical fidelity, fewer games are as graphically advanced as The Witcher 3. Gorgeous, even on consoles, one only has to play this game on any platform to come to the conclusion that we are, undoubtedly, in the age where graphical fidelity is no longer tied to game size or complexity. So why, then, does Fallout 4 look worse than current generation, and modern PC titles, yet still cost the same amount as them? The answer is the bottom line.

Suddenly, we come to a grim realisation... In a lot of cases, Ebert was actually right. Why? Because we keep defending the bottom line. Every single time a game is released unplayable without a day one patch (-cough, hack- nearly every modern title), we defend the bottom line. Every single time a PC port is locked at 30 FPS (-cough cough- Watchdogs... -cough, sputter- Arkham Knight), we defend the bottom line. Every single time a game has major, gamebreaking bugs (-cough- every open world Bethesda title ever released for the PS3, -cough, hack- these last few Assassins Creed games), we defend the bottom line, and we tell developers and publishers that we're willing to swallow their rancid, three day tequila and taco bell bender jizz. Their lowest possible effort. Their budget spent more on stupid fucking marketing gimmicks, rather than innovative gameplay and graphic fidelity.

How much money did Bethseda make off Skyrim? 1.3 BILLION fucking dollars. So tell me, why in the actual sweet mother of pigfuck does Fallout 4 look worse than titles nearly ten years its senior? Shave the .3 off that number, make that .3 the theorertical budge that Fallout 4 could have had, and shitpunting blammo, I can almost guarantee you've got a budget that can support a new engine AND YOU'VE STILL GOT NEARLY A BILLION DOLLARS PROFIT FROM YOUR PREVIOUS GAME, a game which "only" cost 90 million dollars to make, by the way. Something, my basement dwelling friends, is very rotten in Sovengaard.

I'll be the first to admit, I'm not an industry guy. I don't head a wildly successful development company. I've never produced a AAA title in my life. Obviously, every single penny of profit doesn't go back into game development, but something... something, and I just can't quite put my finger on what, tells me, instinctively, that 1.2 billion in profit is a sum of money that more than adequately covers the total cost of development of the average Bethesda game, including programmer salaries, and extraneous costs. Fuck, for that kind of money, Bethesda could probably manufacture the game disks themselves, but here we are in 2015, and Bethesda's mouth animations are literally the equivalent of badly dubbed Godzilla movies. In fact, they're worse, because even in Godzilla movies, the actors were saying real words and using real facial movements. Bethesda just had a guy program mouth animations for the song "eep, op, ork, ah, ah" and called it a day.

When Bethesda slimily teamed up with Steam to fracture the outstanding mod community that finishes their games for them by trying to monetise traditionally free content provided by people who, by and large prefer the modding community remain unmonetised, the gaming community was in an uproar. Within a weeks time, Bethesda retracted the "experiment" (unfortunately hinting that this was not the end of their bullshittery, and that they'd be back to fuck up their mod community again some day), and gamers rejoiced in the fact that they'd come together to stick up for themselves. Now, here we are at Fallout 4 launch, and every single person who speaks up and says "Hey, uh... does anyone else notice that this game looks demonstrably worse than every other quality title on the market right now? That's a concern for many of us, and we're not getting a great value here" is fucking bulldozed by a hypetrain of unbelievable fanboyism who practically deifies a developer who has religiously fucked over its customer base in the name of profit.

This shit is like punching people in the face for pointing out oil spills because you have an unreasonable love of that stupid Exxon tiger tail novelty toy. It needs to stop. If we want better quality from developers, we need to start demanding it. We've shown that we're capable of unifying and demanding better treatment from developers. We're capable of changing the tide of the industry from moneygreedy corporatism back to developers who are as passionate about developing video games as we are about playing them. We're capable of this and more, but apparently “OOH SHINY” trumps “Hey, uh... this bag of pixels and code you just sold me is bunk as shit. Im taking my money back whether you like it or not.”

Death Warmed Over: Reposts From Beyond the Forbidden Zone pt. 1 "Fuck This: Faith No More - Tribute of the Year"

I’m not quite sure how or why, but almost every single band that cites Mr. Bungle or Faith No More as an influence so entirely misses the subtlety and nuance of both bands that, often times, when said bands mention them, I’m not even sure they’re talking about the groups I know that have those names. I’ve briefly considered that, perhaps, there exists an alternate universe where Faith No More is actually just Disturbed with better singing, but then something like Tribute of the Year comes along and destroys that theory with 2 discs worth of songs I’m exceptionally familiar with, but rendered with such surprisingly little taste or tact or knowledge of the inner workings of the source material that I almost suspect they hired M. Night Shyamalan to oversee the project and he decided that the twist ending to the whole affair was going to be “Every song sounds like shit.”


Years ago I inherited a spindle of CD-R’s from a still, to this day, unknown source. At the very top of that spindle was a disk upon whose label it looked like a stroke victim had hastily scrawled the “words” “VHGHVSLEX CRAB NICKA”. Confused, intrigued, and a little bit scared, I inserted the disk into my computer and what rotting hell was unleashed that day has yet to be banished to the nether regions of my memory.


Once, a friend and I were walking down a suburban street, yammering about this and that, whilst a mother and her small child were perambulating the opposite side of the thoroughfare. The child tripped on some errant chunk of pavement and fell face first onto the cold concrete. Silence bestilled the neighborhood for roughly 3 seconds before the child screamed “OH MY GOD! WHY DID THAT HAPPEN TO ME?” At the time, myself, my friend, and even the child’s mother laughed heartily at the shattering of the boys naive assumption that the world was a fair place, where the innocent remained so, and no harm would come to those who were themselves doing no harm. The method by which I discovered Tribute of the Year elicited a similar response from even my long jaded brain. In short, my review for this entire collection of… songs… could very easily be “OH MY GOD! WHY DID THAT HAPPEN TO ME?”, but you and I both know there are more delicious black licorice mix-ins in this shit sundae than just an anecdote about a child injuring his brain.


Years ago, Invisible Records splintered an offshoot imprint called Underground Inc. Much of the history of the label is lost to the annals and the more obscure tomes of the industrial rock history books, but as I understand it, Underground Inc. was essentially a place for industrial rock artists who didn’t necessarily want to sign with Invisible Records, but wanted wider distribution than their own niche labels could manage. In addition to this, Martin Atkins offered unsigned bands an opportunity to appear on a label compilation, with the vague insinuation that this could lead to a record deal with Invisible. The catch was that the bands themselves had to pre-order copies of the compilation at a bulk price, and then sell the product at shows to recoup their investment. Basically “pay to play”, and not exactly a guarantee of anything more than the ability to say “Yeah, my band was once on an Invisible Records related compilation,” little attention was paid to quality control, and the bands with the most money, more often than not, were the ones who ended up on the compilation, leaving everyone to hawk a product full of unlistenable junk, just so you, if you made it on to the comp, could sell your friends an album full of crap with one of your tracks on it.

Mind numbing mediocrity and, and ear destroying, unlistenable garbage since, 

oh... 2001. Probably. 

Why is this relevant, you ask? Because I can think of no other reason why 83.33% of the bands on this trainwreck even made the cut for the tribute. VooDoU, Bile, Tub Ring, Hate Dept. and Grim Faeries were either previously signed with, or featured members of established Invisible or Underground Inc. bands, but the rest of the bands were culled from the Real Notes From Thee Underground compilations (-sigh-, unnecessary use of TOPY neologisms and errythang), and quite honestly, the varying “quality” of “prodcution” and “talent” alone (and I use those terms even more loosely than my quotation marks might suggest for some of these acts) warrants a purchase point of negative money. You COULD pay me to own an actual copy of this album, but you’d be so deep into Warren Buffets pocket that you would legally be considered a strand of his ball hair after you calculate interest on the loan. But enough of my yakkin’. Here comes the pain.

VooDoU – “Stripsearch”


When I first fired this disc up, I actually thought that it was a mix CD and the first track was the original Faith No More version of “Stripsearch”, which is, by all accounts, a standout, later era FNM song. Part trip-hop, part metal, all balls, “Stripsearch” finds FNM experimenting beyond even their regularly scheduled weirdness, and the result is something like Moloko meets Crowbar without the yelling. I’m not sure if VooDoU sampled the opening keyboard flourish from the original track, or managed to recreate it so faithfully that I briefly thought I was listening to the original, but all comparison stops at that tiny detail.

I don’t know what the fuck VooDoU were going for, but “discount night at the county fair haunted house” was never a vibe I got from the original. The original is dangerous and slinky. This is like a Vincent Price advertisement for a “15 Spooky Sounds For Halloween” cassette tape. The listener is immediately assaulted by shitty production and mixing, the female singer can definitely not hit the lower notes of Pattons register in the refrain, and VooDou added a really obnoxious, completely superfluous keyboard element that sticks out like a candy raver at a lower Alabama truck stop. Spoiler alert folks, this is actually one of the better tracks on the album, so strap yourself in. This homemade rocket sled is only going downhill and into the creek from here.

Bile – “Midlife Crisis”


I’ll get this out of the way right now, I’ve never liked Bile. Nothing they’ve ever done has ever struck me as interesting, or even novel. Their production is weak and the musicianship is shockingly subpar, even for an industrial rock band (Sorry Levi, I love your bass playing something fierce, but your continued involvement in Bile mystifies me). Many industrial rock bands are capable of maximising simple structures and repetitive elements. Bile are not one of those bands.

A single in heavy rotation from the Angel Dust album, “Midlife Crisis” is heavily rhytmic, featuring Patton syncopating percussive elements of his vocals, and alternating with gigantic, operatic belts of often very strange (for pop music, at least) harmonies. Krztoff, on the other hand, literally sounds like he phoned his vocals in. Like he was lying in bed with a tub of Chunky Munky and he called the studio and they pointed the phone in the general direction of a dynamic mic. Who, exactly, thought it would be a good idea to completely re-write and eviscerate the bridge/breakdow into the most turgidly standard hunk of worthless garbage known to man? What the fuck happened to the drum track? Puffy’s ingeniously minimal syncopation, and Matt Wallace’s careful production are reduced to some cut and paste assfuckery from the preset library of whatever sampler Bile rented from Guitar Center that weekend. Okay, 2 down… 28 more to go. –twitch-

Parallax 1 – “We Care A Lot”


Oh. Ohhhhhh… Oh no. First of all, I don’t… Oh man. I don’t even know where the fuck to begin. For starters, the jungle drum loop from “Erotica”? Not necessary. Not throughout the entire song. I wouldn’t like it here or there, I wouldn’t like it anywhere. I don’t know whose idea it was to hire Marv Albert to handle vocal duties, but he and guitarist Joseph Merrick need to go back the drawing board in the day room at the home for the monstrously deformed, because “New Jack fuzz metal” isn’t a genre anyone, anywhere, ever wants to listen to. Also, this is the start of a disturbingly consistent trend on this album of singers who simply can NOT parse the phrasing, inflection and timing of the source material, for reasons I can hardly fathom, aside from the fact that so few of them got any other parts of the song right that I can only assume the only versions of these songs these people are familiar with are either general MIDI renditions or cell phone ringtones. Christ, that was bad. Like, bad bad. I would be very shocked if this album had anything worse to offer.


Tub Ring – “Mouth To Mouth”


Tub Ring actually have the distinction of having worked with Trey Spruance who produced, mixed and even performed on their 2001 album, Drake Equation the year prior to the release of Tribute of the Year. Whether or not Trey had a hand in the production of this track is difficult to say, but given some of the poor production and mixing choices on display here, I’m going to go with “no.”


Definitely one of the less shitty tracks on this tribute, it is, however, unforgivably marred by the completely unnecessary addition of slap and pop basslines where there were none before, and some wonky bullshit with the kick drum on the inexplicable jungle sample that makes its way into the chorus. Crappy drum production and pointless jungle samples are something of a theme with this tribute.

I get the feeling no one in Tub Ring actually wants to be in Tub Ring. 

Imbue – “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies”


Holy fuck, no. Just… no. STOP. STAHHHHHP. More sampled jungle drums and… how, HOW do you fuck up the phrasing of the lyrics this badly? Maybe if these guys were from eastern Europe or something I could forgive phrasing this terrible, but they’re from Baltimore… which may actually explain a lot more than I’d anticipated. Terrible. Terrible is really the only way to describe this. Not to mention, the singer has neither the breath control nor the vocal range to approach the intensity of the original track. Here’s a hint; when you have to REMOVE words from the lyrics of a song because of your phrasing, you’re phrasing them wrong. Did anyone listen to this album before it was shipped?


The Donkey Punch – “The World is Yours”


I really had to resist the urge to credit this band as “Shitty Type O Negative” in the byline up there, because that’s exactly what they sound like, but I figure any band who names themselves “The Donkey Punch” got exactly what they deserved.


Honestly, I’d rather be donkey punched than ever listen to this song again, but while I’m still pissed; why, WHY would you choose to cover a song you KNOW you have no hope of replicating vocally? Patton pulls off an extremely high pitched whistle register scream that not many professional, trained vocalists could even dream of producing. “Peter Tinfoil” over here gives it a shot and the results are embarrassing, to put it mildly. At the very, very least, if you’re hell bent on covering a song, and you don’t even have the slightest chance of pulling off the most difficult part of said song, leave it out of the arrangement. I can’t believe I’m not even halfway done with the first disc of this album yet. I feel like I’ve listened to at least 15 shitty Faith No More tribute albums already. Who decided this crap should be 2 discs long? Im going to kick Martin Atkins in the nuts if I ever see him.


Daiquiri – “Everythings Ruined”


What IS this bullshit? There aren’t enough daiquiris in the universe to make this song good. This is especially egregious, because this is one of the most beautiful songs on Angel Dust, and they turned into some art school, Mr. Bungle-wannabe pablum, when the original is perfect in its simplicity. “Hey guys, you know how, like, this song is really just kind of awesome and not very complicated? Let’s ignore every single thing about it in the hopes that people think we’re smart and edgy.” Also, Singer Guy; take a knee. This is a tribute album, not a contest to see who can “out-Patton” Mike Patton, yeah? You’re at about a Peeping Tom and I need you to be about uh… I dunno… “Everything’s Ruined”, ya feel me? Are we done yet? Can I go home, or… No? 23 more tracks, you say? Sometimes I wonder why I work here.


Drowning Season – “Kindergarten”


Well, the music for this isn’t exactly terrible, aside from the obnoxious, obvious drum machine, but the singing is painfully bad, and some of the guitar effects are overly reminiscent of Limp Bizkit’s needless production ornamentation. With some more work and a different singer, this could have been a really chill little downtempo tune, but that absolutely didn’t happen, and since I’m not going to sit here and mentally filter out the awful parts of the song just so I can enjoy the bass and about 40% of the guitar playing, I’m going to just damn this track to the lake of fire with the others.


The Rib – “Malpractice”


At first, I thought this was going to be a cover of “Torgo’s Theme” from the movie Manos, The Hands of Fate. I’m still not entirely certain that it isn’t. Also, you know what this track didn’t need? Melodica. Or concertina. Or to be recorded or released or conceptualised as a project. Mostly those last few things, though.


Ichabod – “Absolute Zero”


Left off of King For A Day… for good reason, “Absolute Zero” is a boring song of interest only to Faith No More completionists. Something of a poorly executed throwback to the early days of FNM, Ichabod actually do the track a favor by giving it a grimy kind of “hardcore” treatment here, making it sound something like a rejected Acid Bath song. By the standards of any band, it’s still a bland offering and a mediocre oasis in the desert of suffering that is Tribute of the Year. If this album were a road trip from Detroit to Yakima, this song would be Wall Drug.


The Sump Pumps – “Be Aggressive”


From the first note of this song I knew I was going to hate it, but, not even kidding, this song makes the “We Care A Lot” cover sound like a fucking lost Beethoven symphony by comparison. I could be mistaken here, but this may very well be the song that Blood On The Dance Floor heard and decided to base their entire musical output upon. Every single aspect of this song is horrifically bad by any standard of measurement you care to mention.

I humbly submit that if the Sump Pumps did, in fact, inspire Blood on the Dance Floor,

that we try them for crimes against humanity. 

For the sake of brevity, I’m going to lump these last four tracks together because they’re all so spectacularly hideous that exegeting them for any reason whatsoever is of so little benefit to mankind, on both an objective and critical level, that doing so would literally waste time in a geological sense. For reference, modern humans have existed for about 250,000 years. Dinosaurs existed for about 180 million years. The earth is about 4.5 billion years old. In my opinion, spending any more than five minutes writing about the remaining songs on this album would be an insult to both modern and ancient history, and a slap in the face to all that is sacred and good about life as we know it, as a species capable of abstract thought, not even taking to account that no less than TWO of the songs contained herein were already covered by other bands on THE SAME FUCKING DISC.


I know, I know… you have a burning question right now, searing your insides like a red hot poker of curiosity. “But Mort, were they better than the other covers?” Fuck you. Disc 2 next week [editor: or whenever he gets the courage to try it]. I thought I could do this whole thing in one go, but I’ve literally depleted my ability to tolerate this nonsense for at least 7 days.



(First published on Feburary 25th, 2014 on Deaf Sparrow)

When Megaton Leviathan went on tour some months ago, I got to see a lot of the country that I hadn't seen in a number of years. I'm hardly a patriot, but I love America. Not in the football, bipartisan, "tookerjerbs" kind of way, but in the way that it's a vast land of absurd cultural variety.

For about 5 years or so I spent a great deal of time travelling the states by a variety of methods. That was nearly a decade ago. Perhaps it's refracted through the lens of youthful idealism, but what I remembered was vibrant; troubled like any nation, but despite my inherent misanthropy and pessimism, there was a sense of endless wonder. Like I could travel forever and just stop somewhere for a little while and explore whenever the mood struck me.

What I saw of the country this time around was practically frightening. Large swathes of the land, even cities or suburban areas I've seen numerous times were either ghost towns, pitted with or comprised entirely of abandoned, decaying buildings and overgrown plots of land, or cities that mostly seemed either split down the middle with clearly defined areas of wealth and poverty, or cities that looked straight up on the brink of financial collapse.

Nowhere was I so shocked at this stark change of climes as I was in NYC. Bushwick was... full of fucking hipsters, and I could literally smell the American Apparel hounds circling, just waiting for all the monied people to move in so they could then price out the hipsters and what was left of the people of color and build a bunch of luxury condos. I saw this in other cities, but The City is MY city. I was born there. I may have spent most of my youth in it's mountainous backyard (aka, the Poconos), but New York runs through my veins as sure as the dwindling street hustlers, Rockaway Beach, downtown before The Great Cleansing, that shitty roller coaster at Coney Island, pizza, Times Square at Christmas, pizza...

Seriously, fuck this thing.

I moved when I was six, and I only sporadically made it back for family gatherings and the occasional uh... "recreational substances" purchase later on in my young adult life. That never stopped NYC from being my home in my heart, and I never stopped admiring the fierce, independent, artistic, working class social melting pot that city stood for. Birthplace of No-Wave, Hip Hop, co-author of Punk and Death Metal and a million stops in between... I don't know maybe I'm waxing romantic. For better or worse, New York is a very, very big part of who I am as a person. 

So it saddens me greatly when I read something like this:

https://np.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/2ryxv2/reshaping_new_york_from_buildings_to_bike_lanes/cnkpcec

(For those unfamiliar with reddit, the link at the very top of the page with the thumbnail next to it is a link submitted by a reddit user, shared for the consideration of the rest of the userbase. All the posts below it are comments and discussion regarding the original link. In this case, the link to the NY Times article at the top of the reddit page should be visited for maximum comprehension of the comment displayed beneath it.)

Not just because it literally pains me to watch my city being dismantled by corporate hagfish, but because a comment mentioned later in the reddit comment section about "national economic trends of de-industrialisation and financialisation" is unequivocally true, and the country that I also love is being further divided into a kind of modern feudalism by which it will be ever increasingly harder to escape the crushing trappings of poverty and crime unless you're either born into, or magically ascend to the domain of the wealthy elite.

As far as I can see, there is no cure for this. Money and special interest rule the land, and maybe not tomorrow, but in some foreseeable next week, we'll be a nation of homogenised, rich white people, littered with the detritus of our criminal poor, while the handful of the middle class that manages to hold on desperately tries to climb the economic ladder in an effort to escape the bought and paid for media scaremongering of the growing "poverty menace."

It's not a future I look forward to. Much as I love touring, it's also a very heavy sense of foreboding that tempered much of the enjoyment of the gloriously bohemian fix for my insatiable wanderlust that playing live music in a different city every night provides.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope digital fabrication matures quickly and becomes commonplace, and steals the thunder of laissez faire capitalism before it sucks us all into a black hole of binary social economic order. We'll probably bomb ourselves into new and unimagined realms of primitivity before that happens though, so I guess that's something to look forward to. 

And here I thought it'd be at least a month before I broke my New Year's resolution to be more positive.