When I first heard Master of Puppets I thought it the greatest metal album I’d ever heard. Eight years later and I think so still. This album has not yet been topped.

The quality is fractal. How deep do you want to go? The songs are great. The riffs are great. The individual sound waves are great. There’s no filler, no stupid ideas, just an octet of songs that stand as templates on how to write heavy metal. From Pantera to Trivium to Five Finger Death Punch, everyone and their brother attempts to rip off this album. Nobody ever succeeds. If you want another Master of Puppets, you have no choice but to go to a record store and get a second copy.

The songwriting is dense and intricate, but catchy and memorable. After five listens you will remember Master of Puppets note for note. While it’s not as heavy as most thrash albums (even compared to Ride the Lightning, Metallica eases back on the trigger a bit), it features an unlikely savior: more clean sections. Five of the eight songs feature clean guitar (or unaccompanied bass) sections. While Metallica’s contemporaries mostly used clean guitar parts either as musical jokes (“Evil Never Dies” – Overkill) or as deceptive segments that sounded completely different to the rest of the song (“No Love” – Exodus), Metallica preferred to integrate them as cohesive parts of the song. James Hetfield realised that rather than participating in the “heavier heavier HEAVIER” arms race that leads invariably to self parody, heaviness can be obtained by another method: contrast. Light and shade. Loud and quiet. Punches, and periods to recover from the punches. Yes, it sounds obvious. No, very few bands get it right.

“Battery” and “Damage Inc” are quite fast, with Lars Ulrich making one hell of a racket behind the kit. “The Thing that Should Not Be” is a crushing homage to HP Lovecraft doesn’t move so much as…evolve. Section follows section like a fish sprouting legs. “Disposable Heroes” is long and harrowing. “Orion” is a very unboring progressive metal song with a set of amazing riffs.

Every song on Master is full of memorable ideas and exciting moments, but the title track towers above the rest. “Master of Puppets” is a completely amazing heavy metal classic that rivals “Iron Man” and “Kashmir”. Three classic hall-of-fame-worthy riffs in the intro alone. The song mostly listens like a merging of “Ride the Lightning” and “Creeping Death” but is far more elaborate, with an Iron Maiden-esque dual guitar section.

Flemming Rasmussen’s production is superb, trading in Ride’s muddy NWOBHM inspired sound for a pulverising metal attack so sharp and crisp that the tracks seem to arrive in your eardrums via vaccuum-sealed bags. The album finds all four members of their band at their peak as musicians, or close enough, an extremely tight and focused four-piece unit.

Ultimately though it’s the songs that make Master of Puppets (and Metallica) great. No matter how hard or often they fuck up, Metallica is still a great band thanks to this album. Remember Sir Edmund Percival Hillary? Does it matter that he could no longer climb Mt Everest at age eighty? No. You only need to do something great once. Metallica’s like that…no matter how many hipster art rock albums they release, they always have this in their back catalogue.

Still, though, guys…retirement. Think about it.

One of the spawn from Nintendo’s ill-fated deal with Philips Electronics, Hotel Mario frequently holds court on “Worst Games Ever” lists. I played it expecting it to be a huge parking lot full of dinosaur shit. Instead, I found a tolerable, slightly below average game.

The cutscenes are hilarious. I can’t get enough of them. I think they outsourced the animation to a head injury ward in Djibouti. Mario and Luigi have been invited by Princess Peach to a dick-lick (maybe it was “picnic” in the script but I’ll be damned if that isn’t what Mario’s voice actor says), only to discover she’s been kidnapped by Bowser. Mario and Gay Luigi (or maybe it’s “Hey, Luigi!”…the dubious voice actor strikes again) journey to Bowser’s hotels to rescue the princess and ensure that there will be further Princess-enabled picnics/dick-licks in the Mushroom Kingdom.

Hotel Mario is simple to play. Each of the seven hotels contains 10 stages. To clear a stage, you have to shut all the doors. You can use elevators to ride from one floor to the next, and also to avoid enemies. All of Mario’s usual bête noires – Goombas, Koopas, and so forth – are out in force, and they can be fought either by jumping on them or by killing them with fireballs. Mario titles are usually platformers but this one verges on being an outright puzzle game at times.

The backgrounds (designed by Trici Venola) are colorful and fun, and drive home the visual theme for each hotel. The animation works well for this sort of game, and there’s enough of it to make the levels seem “alive” instead of just a collection of tile graphics (a common fault in these games). The final boss fight is fun. If they’d kept up that level of imagination and intensity throughout the entire game, we might have really had something (where “something” is defined as Claw, Gruntz, or Jazz Jackrabbit, to be precise).

The downside? The controls suck, the music sucks, the level design is repetitive, gameplay is not so hot, and I don’t understand how shutting doors in a hotel helps you rescue the Princess.

Seriously, what the fuck is up with those fucking cutscenes? Who signed off on them, and why didn’t he bring his seeing-eye dog into work? They look horrible. It’s like someone inked them with a projectile vomiting toddler instead of a brush.

I wonder if Nintendo’s bad experiences with the Philips CD-i is the reason they shied away from CD-based platforms in the mid 90s. It’s an interesting thought. This tiny obscure game might be the reason why you spent your early teens blowing on N64 cartridges like a retard.

Then again, that might be too interesting a backstory for this very uninteresting game.

Tucker Max retired from his lifestyle, and gave us this final book of adventures as a parting gift.

Sloppy Seconds collects all the Tucker Max “backwash”, all the little bits and pieces that weren’t good enough for the first three Tucker Max books. You’ll recognise some stories from his site. Others have already appeared in other books. As for the rest…well, Tucker himself admits that the signal to noise ratio is a bit spotty. Obviously these stories were left out of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell et al for a reason.

Still, I had fun. Unlike the women in the stories.

The Great:

— The Duke Campout story…this is amazing, one of the best things he’s written. Favourine line: “She was the type who would cockblock endangered pandas at the zoo.”

— The buttsex story, an old classic. Tucker gets a girl to agree to anal sex, and he tries to covertly film it for posterity (posteriority?). This comes from Tucker’s early twenties, when he claims he was perhaps the worst person in the world.

— The Slingblade movie reviews. Holy shit, these were funny. I need a whole book of them.

— “Fuck the fucking headboard”… this one killed me. Tucker is railing some chick on a cheap hotel bed, she breaks off the headboard by accident, and she won’t stop obsessing about it. I feel like I’m being given a crash course in female psychology.

— A fair few “sexting” stories. Some of them are funny…

The Okay

— …some of them just go on too long and overstay their welcome. Tucker goes for surreal Kaufmanesque humour, with mixed results. By the end I was thinking “thanks, I get the point, let’s move on.”

— Some stories from Tucker’s childhood are found here. Not always funny, but they are interesting. He has never spoken much about his childhood except to say that it sucked so this is a side to Tucker you don’t often see.

— The Junior stories. Junior was one of the more memorable characters from IHTSBIH, along with Slingblade, and here he gets some more prime time in the spotlight. “Junior’s Marriage” was just…woah…

The Retarded

— A detailed description of how Tucker learned to masturbate.

— Some completely unfunny stories that amount to “I’m getting a blowjob while writing this”

— No, Tucker, I don’t care about your dog.

Sloppy Seconds is definitely a fun collection of some rare and hard to find Tucker Max material. It’s value is a little questionable as the two big stories, Campout and Buttsex, have already been published (and are still available for free on Tucker’s site.) Definitely something to get once you own I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, Assholes Finish First, and Hilarity Ensues.