After Steve Vai left Alcatrazz, he was replaced by some nobody by the name of Danny Johnson, who was only known for having a brief stint with Alice Cooper. With him, they came up with what is possibly the worst album the band has ever made, and that's the nicest way of putting it! It's totally cheesy, but it's the rotten kind of cheese that is hazardous to your health if consumed. Gone is any sort of dignity that anybody would have for Alcatrazz, and even their diehard fans would be disgusted.
Without more experienced guitarists like Ygwie J. Malmsteen and Steve Vai to shred away, we get riffs that are generally weak and pathetic. Danny Johnson's riffs are pretty basic in nature cos they're mostly dependent on bluesy pentatonic scales. One example of this kind of riff is in "It's My Life", which sounds exactly like every blues song you've ever heard. This makes them incredibly unskilled, but unskilled riffs were all that The Outfield needed in order to sell records. Alcatrazz tried the same trick they did, but the obviously failed. And the solos? Well, they're not much better, either. All you need to hear is his solo in "Blue Boar", and you'll get the idea on how inexperienced Johnson sounds when he plays. He doesn't play really fast like his predecessors, and that means no sweep picking and no insanely speedy arpeggios. All we get for the solo of "Blue Boar" is little melody, and that's pretty much it. Where's the shredding in that? Oh, there's a little bit of sweep picking to be found on some parts of the album, but they're brief, as if Johnson felt that sweep picking was a little too hard for him (wimp!).
Possibly the main reason as to why we get little to no oomph on the guitar playing is that Alcatrazz lets the synthesizers do the talking. It's obviously not a good sign if there's more synthesizers than guitars, cos that means that the band wants be super-famous with stadium gigs. Because of this, we get such asinine abominations such as "Undercover" and "Ohayo Tokyo". The latter, in particular is a horrid, pop-like song in which the synthesizers create a peppy and upbeat sound. Sure, it's Alcatrazz, but still, it's stupider than anything you'd think they'd create! Don't expect "Double Man" to be an improvement of the music, either. While the guitar can be heard more easily, you just can't seem to overlook the synthesizers. They generate a dumb hook that apparently is supposed to be eerie and mysterious, but ends up sounding incredibly awkward. Judging by the lyrics, the song is about a doppelganger or something, but when listening to the synthesizers, you'd think it's actually about UFOs!
The guitar isn't the only thing to be watered down on this album, the time signatures suffer as well. While "Disturbing the Peace" was truly a bad album, at least it had a couple of songs on there that had fast tempos, like "God Blessed Video". Any trace of speedy tempos on "Dangerous Games"? Nope, none. Absolutely none. Not one single song that's fast-paced, eliminating any hope of this album sounding at least better than the preceding one. The closest we get to having a faster song is "No Imagination", and by speed metal standards, that's incredibly slow. Speaking of slow, there's the band's cover of the Marbles song, "Only One Woman", and man, is it plodding! Not only that, but it's also pretty weepy and syrupy, too. That's cos it's a ballad, something that Alcatrazz barely looked into throughout their career.
Don't even get me started on the band's choice of lyrics. They're so goofy and insipid, that they're an insult to the intelligence of anybody that dares to listen. Perhaps the worst of the lyrics are in "Ohayo Tokyo", which contains; "sons of the samurai wait at the terminal, aim their cameras and fire". Okay, not only is that "sons of the samurai" line gut-wrenchingly bad on its own, but the comparison of cameras to guns in the lyrics will eat away your sanity like a parasitic worm. If you even had enough courage to go through the entire album, the last track is "Night of the Shooting Star", a song that has no guitars, only Graham Bonnet's voice and backing vocals. Bonnet sings, "this night is forever (twice), this is forever, the sight is mine". How unimaginitive and pretentious. Oh, and there's the backing vocals singing "oohs" and "aahs", only adding to the song sounding like a rejected barbershop quartet number. Thankfully, though, it's mercifully short, only clocking in at one minute.
That last minute, though, is all you'd need to curl up in a fetal position and cry knowing that you wasted precious money on this pile of elephant dung. By releasing "Dangerous Games", Alcatrazz had fizzled out like a dying star in outer space, and a short time later, they split up. Unsurprising, seeing as though this album would make a better cake pan than a record to listen to. It's beyond painful, and should be avoided at all costs for the sake of preserving your sanity. If you want Alcatrazz, you'd be better off with the album that's got Yngwie on it.