Game – Diablo III – May 15th
Sitting snugly alongside StarCraft and Warcraft in Blizzard’s massively popular (and massively profitable) holy trinity of IPs, the Diablo series is one of the true untouchables of gaming. There are have been plenty of pre-release fears from protective fans that ‘too much has changed!’, but the core dungeon crawling gameplay and gloriously demonic aesthetic look set to keep the fans happy.
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Game – Max Payne III – May 18th
‘I looked around the dingy hell-hole of the room, spat my cigarette on the blood-stained floor. When you’re a cop from NYC, every god forsaken room is a dingy hell-hole. How did I end up here? We have to go back three years. I took a slow motion flight out to São Paulo after the failure of my 2008 film. Grew a beard. That was when the pain started.’
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Game – Ratchet and Clank HD Trilogy – May 18th
Ratchet and Clank was always going to be an obvious candidate for HD remakes of classic PS2 games. And you can guarantee that the HD will not be wasted here, as the original games were some of the most exploder-ific firework-taculars ever to grace a console. Both first time players and current fans would be wise to pick this up, if only for the ridiculous weapons (Qwack-O-Ray, anyone?).
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Album – Regina Spektor, What We Saw from the Cheap Seats – May 29th
She may be loved the world over for being the ‘most adorable person in pop music’, but she started life as an experimental and straight-up weird singer-songwriter. Cheap Seats is a collection of new material and unreleased older songs, so hopefully we can expect less of the sickly-sweet songwriting and over-production that plagued her last album, and more brilliantly bizarre jazz piano freakouts.
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Album – Fixers, We’ll be the Moon – May 21st
When an album comes along with a title like ‘We’ll be the Moon’, you expect it to sound like someone has just poured a mixture of LSD and sherbet powder down your ear canal. And Fixers aren’t set to disappoint! If their run of sun soaked psych-pop singles and EPs is anything to go by, this will be an early-summer highlight.
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Book – Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies – May 10th
Bring Up the Bodies is the long awaited sequel to Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, which traced the early life of a young Thomas Cromwell from humble blacksmith’s son to bestest of buddies with King Henry VIII. But things slowly turn awry for the minister, and Bodies charts the start of his downfall, the death of Anne Boleyn and the King’s marriage to Jane Seymour. This is set to be another engrossing work of historical fiction from Mantel.
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