Farewell, Mark Greening. We hardly knew ye...

The new Electric Wizard album is available to stream at NPR right now. I'm about two-thirds in to it right now and it's easily their best record in a long time. The return of Mark Greening behind the drums is so fucking welcome, it's a damn shame he's already gone.

Mobile Meth Lab

Police stopped a man in Yardley, PA for an expired registration sticker and stumbled on a mini meth lab. The suspect, Michael Sember, allegedly left drugs and paraphrenalia in plain view of the officers conducting the stop. A subsequent search of the trunk turned up chemicals used in the manufacture of methamphetamine and Sember reportedly copped to trying to manufacture meth in his car.

Opium Smoking in the Chinese Tradition

A recent viewing of From Hell led me down a black hole of opium-related internet searches, whereupon I discovered an interview from two years ago in Collector's Weekly. The interview is with Steven Martin, a collector of antique opium paraphrenalia who ended up becoming addicted to the drug. Martin shares a number of fascinating details about the traditional Chinese method of smoking opium..

The traditional Chinese method of smoking opium is actually a form of vaporization. If you're lucky enough to find good quality opium in the States or Europe and you throw it in a bowl or bong and put a torch to it, you're doing it wrong. The method devised by the Chinese prevents certain alkaloids in the opium from being burned and makes the effects more enjoyable than simply smoking or eating it.

Furthermore, scenes depicting opium smoking in London during the opium heyday are bullshit. As far as Martin can tell, opium smoking didn't exist in England. Contemporary depictions by writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde are so bad he considers them "laughable". Inauthentic depictions extend to other media as well, and Martin calls out From Hell and Once Upon a Time in the West in particular as being inaccurate.

Though Martin is obviously well versed in opium smoking and antiquities, he seems less knowledgeable about addiction itself. He believes that a prodigious opium smoking friend was killed by her withdrawal symptoms and says "[a]ccording to the old books, [withdrawal] used to kill people pretty violently." Opiate withdrawal, though incredibly painful and uncomfortable, is not considered deadly by any modern measure.

The full interview is quite lengthy and well worth a read. I'll definitely be picking up his two books in the future.

True Crime: How to Impress an Irish Mob Boss

The Irish Mirror has a story out of Cloverhill Prison in West Dublin about a "well known sportsman" awaiting trial on drug charges who attempted to impress an Irish gangster by brutally attacking a correctional officer. The inmate, reportedly incensed over the CO's refusal to let him speak with the alleged crime boss, attacked the guard, biting him and attempting to gouge out his eyes. This comes on the heels of another attack on a correctional officer over a missing razor blade. A week before this incident, a guard was attacked by three "drugged-up convicts" after he tried to confiscate a missing shaving razor.

The prison will see work stoppages this week over "dangerously low" staffing levels in the prison, which have allegedly contributed to the attacks on guards.

True Crime: Self Decapitation

A New York man recently committed suicide by tying his head to a pole, hopping in his car, and flooring it. "Spectacularly gruesome" is one way to describe it. "Batshitfuckinginsane" would be another.

STG Review - Hard Corps: Uprising

I’m a little late to the party on this one, but I never really connected my Xbox to Live until I got a new model 360 this past Xmas after my Arcade model shit the bed earlier in the year. A few weeks ago I remembered playing the demo when it was originally released and decided to make it my first ever XBLA purchase. Arc System’s modern run and gun has a lot going for it, but unfortunately Hard Corps: Uprising is hamstrung by a number of balance issues that prevent the game from being a top-tier STG. 

The game is quite a looker, with the kind of nice, sharp sprite work you’d expect from the developer of Guilty Gear and BlazBlue. The visual balance between the sprites and the 3d enemies and backgrounds is tight, without the clashing the can sometimes occur when pairing 2d and 3d. Unfortunately, the explosions are a disappointment. Most enemies go down with barely a whimper and the bosses especially are pretty lame. It is especially sad when a game is as graphically advanced Uprising is and its destruction lacks the flair of games released in more than five years before it (Shattered Soldier, Contra IV,and Gunstar Heroes immediately come to mind).

Of course, all that is window dressing with all the running and gunning to do and Arc delivers the goods when it comes to action. Characters can dash, double jump, air dash, climb walls, and cling to ceilings. There are also a handful of moves that can be pulled off while dashing, including a vault, a tackle that allows you to plow through obstacles, and a side step that lets you slip right past enemies, and six weapons in addition to the standard pea shooter. While I’ve seen a number of folks complain that the game is slow, the truth is that it is only as slow as your individual play style. You can play methodically, as the default walking speed is fairly slow, and kill everything in sight, but it is equally viable to dash through the stages dodging enemies and vaulting over obstacles to quickly skip large swathes of enemies.

For the most part, the stages are laid out so you can take advantage of all your moves and weapons and the variety helps keep the game fresh. There is a big incentive to experiment once you have the basic stage layouts down and there are a ton of hidden 1ups and medals to find too. It is this process of learning the ins and outs of the stage design and how to power through them though that exposes the games flaws.

The game has two modes: Arcade and Uprising. Arcade is how the game would be presented if it were a coin-op and each character has a standard move set and starts with the same weapon. Uprising, on the other hand, is sort of a consolized version of Arcade where each character has a shop where new weapons and abilities can be purchased via points earned by playing the game. This is where the balance problems come in. Arcade mode forces you to level up your weapons by picking up multiple power ups to a max of three. Uprising modes weapons will always be at whichever level you’ve unlocked in the shop. Additionally, Uprising’s shop has two firing upgrades; Automatic fire and Rapid fire that pump up the damage of your pea shooter and weapon pickups.

Why does this matter? Because in Arcade mode the standard weapon fires painfully slowly and some of the weapons (Ripple and Chain Laser) need to be carried across multiple stages to be levelled up decently. This isn’t a problem in the non-boss portions of the game, but the bosses, of which there are many, become a massive pain in the ass when you lose your power-ups. Some of the early bosses can be taken out in their first attack cycles when you have a fully powered weapons, especially in Uprising with level three weapons and Automatic and Rapid fire unlocked, while taking substantially longer when you’re stuck with the shitty slowly firing standard weapon in Arcade. 

On one hand, it would be hard to knock this aspect if Rising mode was the standard game mode and the stages and bosses were balanced around fully leveled characters and their additional moves (Krystal, for example, can purchase a triple jump and a double air dash), but if you’re going to include a base Arcade mode with standard move sets for each character the game should be balanced for the arcade and the one credit clear. That’s not to say a one credit clear is impossible for out of reach, I’ve managed in to the 6^th stage on a single credit with roughly 20 hours of play time split between Rising and Arcade, but a better balance could have been struck by making the upgraded Rapid fire the default firing speed of the standard weapon in Arcade. Automatic firing could have been made a power-up like Contra’s Rapid, perhaps with several levels of speed that could be balanced by capping a weapons power at two.

There are other minor annoyances here and there. The game occasionally drops an input, which can be a real pain in the balls depending on where and when it happens. Konami continues the great tradition of nickel-and-dime DLC bullshit by locking two characters up in additional downloads for $2.99 each. The load times between stages are fairly long as well, not that I necessarily mind since I generally use that time to shove food and drink in my face, and all told the game is perhaps a bit overlong. A single credit clear of Rising mode, factoring in plenty of deaths, will take between an hour and an hour and fifteen minutes. 

Even with these problems, the balance of weapons in Arcade mode being the biggest issue, the game is still pretty damn good. Rising mode gives you plenty of options and leeway for experimenting with strategies and learning the stage layouts and boss patterns. Arcade mode requires a lot of precision, patience, and careful management of weapons. The graphics look great and there are a number of cool set pieces (Bouncing around the rockets in the elevator shaft at the end of Stage 7 is fucking killer), but a few adjustments to Arcade mode could have made it even better. While it’s definitely not the best run-and-gun, it definitely makes a promising starting point for a new franchise. We’re not likely to see another game in the series any time soon, if ever, so snag it while you can before it disappears along with the PS3 and 360 download services.

True Crime: Vietnamese Drug Murder in Philadelphia

The New York Daily News says it all: "Two brothers were loaned $100,000 to buy drugs, but spent it all at a Chester, Penn. casino before being abducted by a Philadelphia drug lords."

The two victims were allegedly taken to a home in Southwest Philadelphia, where they were beaten and tortured. From there they contacted a friend who would bring them enough cash to save their lives: $40,000. This third man, Thanh Voong, was beaten and robbed when he arrived with the money. The three were driven to Fairmount Park along Kelly Drive where the two thieves had their throats slit and bodies dumped in the Schuykill, weighed down with buckets of cement attached to their feet.Voong, who was also thrown in the river, was stabbed but not weighed down. Voong played dead and managed to crawl out of the river and walk down Kelly Drive, where he was spotted by a police officer.