Music: Acute - Hardcore Punk from Japan

ACUTE were one of those bands that feel like they shouldn’t even exist outside of a photocopied zine or a tape traded through five hands. Mid-80s, cold Hokkaido nights, everything recorded like the equipment was held together with duct tape and anger. That’s the charm. That’s the whole point.

Their tracks on “Nothing Action, Nothing Have” hit like a brick — raw Sapporo pulse, that northern distortion that always sounds a bit hungrier, a bit more cornered. Early ACUTE leans into that blown-out UK-82 chaos: Disorder through a cracked amp, sped up because winter’s coming and nobody has time to slow down. Later stuff? Pure Japanese thrash attack. They get faster, tighter, meaner. Like they figured out exactly what they wanted to scream and just kept sharpening the knife.

What I love about them is the bluntness. Anti-war, anti-authority, anti-fake-anything. No cryptic poetry, no layers to decode — just “here’s what’s wrong, here’s how it feels, now hold on while we hit the accelerator.” You look at their flyers and it’s the same vibe: handmade fury, black marker on grey paper, photocopied into oblivion.

The FOAD reissue (“Who Wants War”) basically preserves everything: studio takes, rehearsals, that unhinged Bessie Hall live set where the crowd sounds like they’re vibrating. It’s all cracked edges and speed and sincerity. A time capsule from a scene that didn’t care about legacy — they cared about getting the sound out of their systems before the cops or adulthood or winter shut them up.

Put it on late at night. Volume stupidly high. Let it sound like it’s tearing through the walls a bit. That’s how is supposed to be— not curated, not preserved, just alive and loud and gone again.

Fun fact, there's another hardcore punk band from Japan - founded in 2006 - that also plays hardcore punk and is called Acute.

Game Review: Dread Delusion

The world is broken. Its surface seethes with an undead curse, while humanity clings to flying continents in the sky. From mushroom forests to undead mausoleums, strange places and people await you. But will you find a way to heal this world - or seek power and profit for yourself?

 

My Take:

This one is a pretty special game for me. Dread Delusion is the title that pulled me back into gaming after a long break, and it reminded me why I ever loved wandering around strange, handmade worlds in the first place. It’s got that magic of indie-ish development — scrappy, imaginative, not afraid to be weird — and it hit me hard enough that I actually finished it. That’s rare for me; usually, once I feel I’m close to the end of a game, I drift away. But here it was different.

You can tackle challenges in ways that suit your character: fighting, sure, but also persuasion, lockpicking, or diving into forbidden knowledge. That freedom makes the world feel alive — you’re never just pushing through enemies, you’re shaping your own little path through this broken sky-realm. 

There’s also a solid progression system that goes beyond stats. Smithing and Alchemy let you tinker with your gear -

What really sold it for me, though, is the atmosphere. The world is full of oddball characters, half-ruined landscapes, factions with their own agendas, and plenty of little treasures tucked away. The retro 3D aesthetic isn’t just nostalgia bait — it builds this eerie, dreamlike vibe that makes exploration feel like stumbling through someone’s vivid memory.

If you grew up on classic RPGs from the early 2000s - i didn't - , this feels like the best possible continuation of that spirit: familiar enough to be comforting, but strange enough to feel fresh. For me, it wasn’t just a fun game — it was a reminder of why I like games in the first place.

 

Ode to gaming and other bits that make me cry

Growing up in a small town — like very small — in the 90s was kinda weird.

Most afternoons were made of dust, sunlight, and the sound of bicycle chains. I’d be zooming around on my trashy old bike, going up and down the same hills with no real plan — just me and a few classmates from elementary school. People I didn’t necessarily like, but we hung out because there wasn’t really anyone else. That’s just how it was.

Even back then, I felt like an outsider — and not just in the quiet, dreamy way. I got bullied a lot. Nothing cinematic, just that slow, grinding kind of bullying that wears you down bit by bit. Kids can be cruel in small towns; they notice difference like it’s a stain. Maybe it was my clothes, my family, the way I talked or thought — I still don’t really know. I just remember feeling out of place, like everyone else was playing a game I didn’t know the rules to.

My family was (and still is) poor, so I never had the shiny things some of the other kids had. But one day, I somehow convinced my grandparents to get me a Game Boy Color with Pokémon Yellow. That little grey-and-yellow screen basically burned itself into my eyes — but it also opened a door. It was my first real contact with videogames, and it felt like touching another world.

Then my dad came home one day with a Sega Mega Drive, and that was it. I was gone. Sonic, After Burner II, Jurassic Park — all those frustrating, beautiful worlds. I’d sit cross-legged in front of the TV, eyes glued to the screen while outside the mountains turned orange with sunset. The Mega Drive was already ancient by then — the PS1 had been out for years — but I didn’t care. It was mine.
I got my first PS1 years later, around 2013, as a hand-me-down from a cousin who’d outgrown it. It came with only one game: Colin McRae Rally. I played that thing for years. Same tracks, same turns, again and again.

And then there was my dad’s old PC — a yellowed monolith running Windows 98, humming like an old fridge. No internet, no upgrades, just this mysterious world of files and folders I didn’t really understand. I’d spend all my pocket money on PC magazines just to get the demo CDs inside. Jagged Alliance 2 (Demoville!), Doom, Age of Empires — all those tiny digital windows into something bigger. Later, my dad and I played Delta Force 2 and Half-Life together. Those moments were rare, and I still remember them clearly. With almost a tear forming.

Looking back, all of that feels impossibly far away — like someone else’s life. But it’s still there, buried under all the noise.
This post wasn’t meant to get emotional, but I guess it did. I just wanted to write about how much I owe to games — not just as entertainment, but as something that helped me connect, dream, and escape.

Movies will always be my first love, and comics probably saved my life. But videogames… they were my secret door out of that small town. They gave me a space where I wasn’t the weird kid, where I could win sometimes, where the rules actually made sense.

And I still think games deserve more than the noise around them — more than angry nerds shouting online. They’re art, just like cinema once was when it was finding its language. A mix of storytelling, sound, and movement — fragile and brilliant at the same time.

Recently, a game that reminded me of all that was Disco Elysium. It hit me in ways I didn’t expect — the writing, the mood, the loneliness of it. Then finding a community of people online who felt the same… even discovering two friends among them who I never thought played games at all. It made me realize that connection is still there — just a little more digital now.Maybe that’s what I’ve been chasing since then — connection, through any medium that could carry it.And in a way, I think that kid from the small town is still inside me somewhere, looking for that.

Maybe that’s why I keep finding comfort in strange games — worlds that feel the way I always have: a little out of place, quietly standing at the edge.

Game Review: PSYCHO PATROL R

 

Some games just get it. Psycho Patrol R looks and feels like it crawled out of a busted PlayStation dev kit and decided not to clean itself up. It’s all flicker, static, rust, and brain noise — a mech sim wrapped in bureaucratic despair. That’s exactly why I love it.

You’re piloting the V-Stalker, stomping through the dying guts of Pan-Europa, working for a police force that’s half-administration, half-religion. Every mission feels like a fever dream of propaganda, psychic viruses, and paperwork. The game doesn’t care if you understand what’s going on — it just dumps you in and lets the world rot around you.

The aesthetic hits like a brick. Harsh lighting, low-poly geometry, and menus that look like they’ve been photocopied one too many times. No fake nostalgia, no slick filters — just raw visual noise. It’s that perfect kind of ugliness that feels real, like someone actually bled over the interface. It’s not “retro.” It’s lived-in.

I’m not here grinding for unlocks or hunting for collectibles. I’m here because it looks like a nightmare I’d design myself — mechanical, claustrophobic, full of personality. It reminds me why I still get attached to games that don’t care about market polish or accessibility.

The devs, Consumer Softproducts, don’t make games. They build systems of controlled chaos. Their site reads like a fevered company memo from another timeline

They already proved their philosophy with Cruelty Squad: bright, grotesque, mean-spirited, and brilliant. Psycho Patrol R takes that same energy and channels it into something colder, heavier, more bureaucratic — a dystopia with paperwork and mech grease. It’s corporate hell as interactive art.

There’s no pretense of fun here, and that’s the point. It’s about mood. It’s about design as resistance. You either tune into it or you don’t.

Psycho Patrol R doesn’t want your approval. It’s a wall of static that hums at the exact frequency I like. The more it confuses, the more it feels right. It’s punk software — a broken mirror of everything AAA forgot how to be.

I don’t play it to win. I play it to stare at it and remember that not all games need to behave.

Troma - “Make your own damn movie.”

Troma is what happens when you give misfits a camera and tell them no one’s watching anyway, so do whatever the hell you want.

Founded in 1974 by Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz, this New York-based madhouse is the oldest truly independent film studio still running — not because it ever fit in, but because it never tried. While everyone else was polishing scripts and chasing Sundance clout, Troma was shooting exploding cows, mutant janitors, and anti-corporate rants on film stock that probably had someone’s lunch stuck to it.

If Hollywood is Coca-Cola, Troma is a half-broken bottle filled with radioactive piss — and it’s beautiful.

On the surface, sure, it’s gore, boobs, and slime. But under that is something that’s more punk than most punk bands ever managed to be.

• DIY to the bone. No budgets, no studios, no safety nets. Just people making movies because they have to.

• Anti-authority in its DNA. Politicians, cops, CEOs — they’re all villains.

• Community over industry. Troma opened its doors to anyone willing to bleed for art.

• Radical honesty. No pretending to be tasteful or clever. Just pure chaos with meaning hiding underneath.

I’ve always found Troma to be one of the few honest ways to make films. There’s no marketing pitch behind it, no focus groups, no sanitized “vision.” It’s raw, ugly, sincere — and that makes it feel real.

Fuck Hollywood. Long live Troma.

If you’re new to the cult, start here — or better, dive blind and regret it later:

• The Toxic Avenger (1984) – The janitor who becomes a radioactive vigilante. Gory, stupid, and perfect.

• Class of Nuke ’Em High (1986) – Toxic high school, exploding teenagers, the American Dream.

• Tromeo and Juliet (1996) – James Gunn’s first script. Shakespeare, incest, and Kaufman screaming through the edit.

• Terror Firmer (1999) – A film about making a Troma film. Meta, loud, full of bodily fluids.

• Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006) – A fast-food musical about zombie chickens and consumerism. You can’t make this up.
  
  
  

Everything in Troma looks and feels wrong — and that’s exactly why it works.

• Overexposed, oversaturated, overeverything. The world as seen through a hangover.

• Editing like a panic attack. No rhythm, no mercy.

• Practical gore, fake blood, real madness. Every splatter feels personal.

• Acting that’s either genius or a crime. Sometimes both in the same scene.

It’s the film equivalent of photocopied punk zines — no polish, no perfection, all pulse.

In a world where even “independent” cinema has PR agents and strategy decks, Troma remains the last honest space for cinematic anarchy. Kaufman’s whole deal — “Make your own damn movie” — isn’t a slogan. It’s a battle cry.

Troma showed that filmmaking doesn’t belong to the gatekeepers. You don’t need their money or their permission. You just need something to say and the nerve to say it badly but truthfully.

That’s real punk cinema. That’s why it lasts.

Troma isn’t trash — it’s freedom. It’s proof that cinema doesn’t have to be respectable to be meaningful.

It’s messy, offensive, political, dumb, smart, human, and completely alive.

So yeah — fuck Hollywood. Long live Troma. Long live bad taste.

You can find Troma here: https://www.troma.com/

Game Review: Signalis

Disclaimer: I love this game so much this is not a review but me fangirling. 

As I first saw this, I was incredibly excited—the aesthetic alone already hit me like a train.

Signalis is not some glossy, overproduced horror flick; it’s grimy, tight, and absolutely sure of itself. I went in with some of the aforementioned hype for the visuals and came out floored.

The first thing that hits you is the look. The graphics are moody in the best possible way—blocky, raw, and bleeding with one-bit shadows and red tones that feel burned into the screen. SIGNALIS doesn’t just copy retro aesthetics; it weaponizes them. It’s not nostalgia—it’s intent.

Playing it is pure tension. Inventory’s always full, ammo’s never enough, and every corner feels like a question. You don’t rush through rooms—you decide how to move. Sometimes you have to abandon something useful because your pockets are just too damn small. The puzzles, too, actually respect you; they’re clever without wasting your time, reminiscent of the classics.

There's some Dead Space, some Silent Hill, some Resident Evil, and some more in there.

On the technical side, it’s solid. Clean, functional—the game runs smooth—even on older rigs. It feels stripped down but deliberate, like a machine built for one purpose and nothing else.

But what really burrowed under my skin is the atmosphere. Low drones. Radio static. Silence that feels alive. Every corridor feels like the ruins of a dystopian state; some first-person sections are so lonely you actually end up wanting a hug. The story doesn’t spoon-feed you either—it trusts you to find meaning in fragments. That kind of restraint is rare.

I don’t even know how much of SIGNALIS I’ve truly seen—maybe a fraction—but it already left a mark. It’s sci-fi horror done right: slow, deliberate, and confident enough to let you feel lost. The world-building leads you into a world where you can actually feel like it—lost. 

I loved every second of it. Played first on my PC, then bought it for Switch (I do not own one, but my girlfriend does), and it's always an awesome experience.

Signalis is a psychological survival horror set in a dystopian future where you play as a technician Replika named Elster searching for her lost partner and uncovering cosmic horror secrets- here's the link - yes I learned how to embed steam links. 

Decker

Sometimes you find a tool that just clicks—not the slick, frictionless click of another walled-garden app, but the crooked, off-tempo click you hear on worn-out cassette tapes. That’s Decker. You open it in the browser, no install, and suddenly you’re back in an alternate ‘90s, building E-Zines or brutalist pixel adventures with nothing but one-bit anti-aliased lines, ghostly dithers, and enough DIY charm to fill a dead mall.

I’m in love with its look—black and white, but not clean. The anti-aliased jagginess pushes me into a visual space I’ve always wanted to claim. All the stuff I try in Photoshop and Procreate just ends up too modern, too slick.

Decker drops me in the gutter with style. It’s like painting in the back of an alley or hacking together zines on borrowed hardware. Suddenly, all those scratched pixels and high-contrast vibes aren’t bugs, they’re the point.

Decker makes me work differently. There’s no bloat. No tracking, analytics, or nag-boxes. You boot it up, and you’re the boss. You can use it for notes, tiny games, decks of weird stuff—hell, you can just doodle. If you care about your privacy or creativity, it’s a full-on breath of fresh air after all those subscription shortcuts companies try to sell you. I’m using it at maybe 1% power, just sketching and stashing decks like some digital packrat, but I still get that tingle—this thing wants you to break it, bend it, push it.

Other tools are “potential” in the market-speak sense. Decker’s potential feels real. You want to add sound, hypertext, scripting? Sure. Want to keep it barebones and brutally simple? It invites you. It’s gritty, welcoming, and a little bit haunted.

Decker isn’t for everyone. But if you want software that doesn’t just let you create but dares you to get dirty, dig weird, and never apologize for it? Try it. Love it. Tell your friends. Make stuff that doesn’t care about likes.

Gorby no Pipeline Daisakusen – Gorbachev’s Cold War Plumbing Simulator

Gorby no Pipeline Daisakusen – Gorbachev’s Cold War Plumbing Simulator

 

You ever stumble upon a game so weirdly specific it could only exist in Japan during the late ‘80s? Gorby no Pipeline Daisakusen (1991) is exactly that — a Soviet–Japanese goodwill puzzle game starring none other than Mikhail Gorbachev himself, fully licensed and everything. Yeah, the actual Gorbachev.

Developed by Compile (the same studio behind Puyo Puyo), the game came out on the MSX2, Famicom, and FM Towns. The idea is… oddly diplomatic: you’re building a water pipeline from Moscow to Tokyo to “strengthen international relations.” In practice, it plays like a mashup of Pipe Dream and Tetris — pipe segments fall from the top, you rotate and fit them, and when water flows through, the pipeline disappears for points. Miss the connection and the leftover bits crumble under gravity. It’s surprisingly tight and stressful in that ‘90s puzzle way.

But the real kicker is the context. This was 1991, peak Gorbachev era — glasnost, perestroika, all that. The Japanese publisher Tokuma Shoten actually licensed his image through the Soviet Embassy. The cover art (by Takamasa Shimaura) has Gorbachev posing in front of the Buran space shuttle, because apparently nothing says “international friendship” like space plumbing.

Then the USSR collapsed later that same year. The whole “Moscow to Tokyo” optimism evaporated overnight, turning Gorby no Pipeline Daisakusen into an accidental time capsule — a relic of that brief, hopeful window when everyone thought cooperation was the future.

Sega even jumped on the bandwagon with Ganbare Gorby! for the Game Gear, another short-lived experiment in turning a world leader into a mascot. By the time the Soviet flag came down, both games already felt like fossils.

Interestingly, the Famicom version was re-released digitally years later (on iOS and PC), but all references to Gorbachev got scrubbed. Just pipes now — no politics. sad.

It’s a strange little game, but that’s what makes it worth remembering: a mix of Cold War optimism, economic diplomacy, and genuinely solid puzzle design — all wrapped up in one of the most unexpected crossovers in gaming history.

Game Review: Pigface

 

You wake up bleeding on a concrete floor, head ringing, body wrecked. A phone buzzes in the dark. Pick it up: they’ve drilled a bomb into your skull, and you’re not leaving until you’ve done what they want.

Welcome to Pigface.

This thing is the bastard child of Manhunt and Hotline Miami—raised on VHS static, soaked in blood, and set loose in an abandoned warehouse at 3AM. Gameplay is stripped down to the bone, but every second hits with weight. No filler, no fat. Just violence, grit, and the ugly satisfaction of smashing your way through hell.

Weapons don’t just feel different—they sound different, they carry different weight in your hands. Going in melee is a filthy thrill, and the missing aiming reticle forces you into this weird sweet spot between instinct, muscle memory, and dumb luck. Every fight feels half-skill, half-chaos, and that chaos is addictive.

The masks give you extra perks, yeah—it’s a wink at Hotline Miami—but right now they’re more flavor than game-changer. I’m betting they’ll evolve with updates. Still, even in Early Access, Pigface already has enough teeth to bite down hard.

My Take

Pigface rules because it owns its aesthetic. That lo-fi VHS grime, the blown-out colors, the distorted edges—it’s not just decoration. It’s a mood. It crawls under your skin and makes every fight feel dirtier, meaner, more personal.

The sound design slaps, the music drives, and the weapons are a joy to play with. Guns crack, bats crunch, headshots go splatttt—it’s all feedback, all payoff. You can smash through missions like a wild animal or try to play it with some precision, but either way, the game pushes you forward with this relentless, ugly energy.

It’s violent, it’s raw, it’s nasty. Pigface doesn’t want to be clean. It wants to be effective. And I loved every second of it - 

The dev's X account is here https://x.com/titolovesyou

Kaze no NOTAM (風のノータム) (PlayStation, 1997)

 

Artdink — the masters of weird, niche experiments (A-Train, Aquanaut’s Holiday, Mr. Domino) — once made a hot air balloon simulator. Kaze no NOTAM asks a single question on the box: “Did you luxuriate in the wind?” That’s the entire game distilled. Not action. Not score-chasing. Just the quiet chaos of floating wherever the air decides to take you.

Controls are stripped to the bone: a burner to climb, a flap to adjust, and the rest is up to shifting winds. There are two ways to play — Try Task, where you set up custom scenarios like beanbag target drops, and Round, a string of nine levels built from those templates. Every flight plays out differently because the wind won’t sit still. That unpredictability is the game.

The box art comes from Hiroshi Nagai (famous for his city pop album covers), setting the tone before you even boot up. Inside, you get mid-’90s 3D visuals with some subtle flourishes — night burners flickering against the dark — plus a soundtrack of smooth, Weather Channel-style jazz fusion that makes drifting feel timeless.

Kaze no NOTAM isn’t for twitch reflexes. It’s a meditative PlayStation oddity, a slow-burn experiment about surrendering control and enjoying the ride. Not a game for everyone — but for the right player, it’s a strangely beautiful hidden gem.

Blame! by Tsutomu Nihei

I never really know how to start when talking about Blame!.

It’s probably the single most influential comic (manga) for my personal art journey. Every time I see an image from it online, I can’t help but freeze and stare like an idiot for a full minute — which, by internet standards, is an eternity.

The story itself is messy, fragmented, and often hard to follow, but that’s not what hooked me. What hits like a truck is the art style: unapologetic lines, massive brutalist structures, and architecture that completely ignores any notion of human comfort. It’s raw, harsh, and indifferent to the people wandering inside it.

Corridors, staircases, walkways, and endless rooms stretching into infinity — that’s the stuff that gets under my skin. Tsutomu Nihei has made it a signature element. Even in his newer works, the obsession with impossibly large, non-Euclidean spaces remains central. It’s like the backrooms mythos, but not as a meme or creepypasta — here it’s part of the DNA of the story itself. In Blame!, humanity doesn’t just live in these spaces; it’s shaped by them. Nihei builds what you could call “anti-human architecture” — structures designed not for people, but for the indifference of infinity.

And here’s the dark twist: the world itself outlives humanity. The Megastructure keeps expanding without restraint, to the point where unmodified humans are no longer suited to survive inside it. People become fragile, “old,” outdated. The environment itself pushes evolution — not in a biological sense, but in a cybernetic one. Survival demands upgrades, mutations, or total replacement. In Nihei’s vision, the future doesn’t belong to us; it belongs to synthetic beings, silicon creatures, and AIs that can thrive where humans can’t.

That concept hit me so hard it bled into my own work. For my graduation project in Italy (where you actually have to create a full body of work around a chosen theme), I ended up building everything — a book, a short film, an illustrated collection, and even a photographic set — around the same idea: humanity trapped inside overwhelming structures, dwarfed by the very spaces it inhabits.

Nihei’s vision isn’t just about scale — it’s about perspective. It forces you to confront how small we are against the infinite, how fragile in the face of things that don’t care whether we exist or not. His work reads like architectural horror: spaces that reject us, a sublime immensity that reduces humanity to background noise. And that’s exactly why I keep coming back to it.

Tsutomu Nihei is a Japanese manga artist born on February 26, 1971. He was awarded the Jiro Taniguchi Special Prize in 1995 for his submission, Blame. Nihei has worked on several notable series, including Wolverine: Snikt!, Blame, Knights of Sidonia and Biomega.