​Slayer gets people riled. Araya and company been kicking out the malevolently parodic jams for over a quarter century now, defining the future of extreme metal or thrash metal or death metal or whatever qualifier you like metal and playing cartographers to those who wonder about being world-famous and retaining their integrity.

Until now?

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​Don't mind the robots-- Daft Punk goes incognito.

We're not hard to offend here at Gimme Noise. But even we have to admit that watching Kurt Cobain's eerie digital avatar performing Bon Jovi songs makes us a little squeamish.

But the announcement that Activision's next music game enterprise will feature digital recreations of Daft Punk comes with much less attendant controversy. And as hard as it is for us to imagine exactly what a game like DJ Hero will play like, and as strong as our suspicions are that techno DJs don't actually do anything when they play live (sorry, Ms. Boyles!), the prospect of playing as the fully robotted french duo is enticing. Well, at least enticing enough to warrant a blog post.

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Ssh-- it's thinking.

10 years ago at this very hour, Sega's fans lined up in legion outside video game stores nation wide. They had folding chairs and cases of soda. They had a year's worth of Game Informer under arm to keep them company during the long wait. They had bedrolls and pillows and blankets and portable T.V.s and Stratego boards.

And what they also had was a fistful of cash and high hopes. Because at this very hour a decade ago, Sega was preparing to go nova with the Dreamcast, its valiant last stand in the console battle.
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Goichi Suda is – well, I wouldn't go so far as to say crazy, but he's the kind of visionary that tends to baffle the crap out of people, and that type of personality is pretty easily mistaken for craziness. As the head of video game development house Grasshopper Manufacture, he's probably best known as SUDA51 ("Goichi" = "five one" in Japanese), the luchadore mask-sporting cinephile and former undertaker who broke into the industry by writing a storyline for a pro wrestling game where the hero commits suicide. His most infamous game as of last year, the GameCube/PS2 title killer7, is easily one of the most bizarre titles released this decade: it became notorious for its disorienting, somewhat awkward trapped-on-rails gameplay, weirdly-colored, cel-shaded pulp-comic graphics, bizarrely stylized violence and a storyline that mixed David Lynch surrealism with Takashi Miike horror to deliver some heavy ruminations on the relationship between Japanese and American culture. Like many of his games, it sold poorly on both sides of the Pacific, so there’s a good chance his new Wii title No More Heroes only got greenlit thanks to one magic, unit-shifting phrase in the pitch: "Grand Theft Auto with a lightsaber."

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Go to the GameFAQs review site for Burnout 3: Takedown – widely regarded as the best entry in the critically acclaimed go-fast-and-crash racing series – and note the number of laudatory writeups in both the PS2 and Xbox versions’ player review sections that say something like “I typically hate racing games, but…” or “this is the only racing game I’ve really liked”. (I hate to make you do the legwork there, but I personally gave up after about ten, not including the misguided soul who claimed to hate “realistic racers like Project Gotham” – apparently “you need to brake” is too strenuous a demand.) I tend to have a pretty uncharitable view of that whole outlook: usually when someone says something’s [x] for people who don’t like [x], 9 times out of 10 the people who really do like [x] will find out that there’s not a lot of substance for them beneath all the mass-appeal diluting. I try not to be one of those people that always gripes about the “sheep” who keep buying Halo and Madden titles, but as a racing game aficionado -- and by “aficionado” I mean “insufferable snob” -- Burnout is my one weakness: if it’s the only racing game you’ve ever made it a point to enjoy, all I can say is you’re missing out on a hell of a lot. Did you know that Forza Motorsport 2 lets you drop an all-wheel-drive Nissan Skyline drivetrain into a ’69 Datsun Z? How is that not awesome?

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