My Heart by Mavado and Wayne Marshall

Go to the Fader and check out this summer JAM!

http://www.thefader.com/2010/06/24/wayne-marshall-f-mavado-my-heart-refix-mp3/

Curren$y

Listening to New Orleans rapper Curren$y, I love the new cool black male persona who's into video games, skateboarding, and other things white people like (also, watch Mr. Chi City on YouTube). Check out Curren$y's album Pilot Talk. Plus, anyone who raps about updated NBA Live rosters on Xbox 360 is okay by me.

Dream Boat

This song by Dream Boat sounds out of control. It's not poorly made, these guys clearly have talent. There's just too much going on. There are some elements of juke in here, some high pitched vocals, and jarring 1/4 bar loops.

It's like when Justice first came out and it sounded like a trash compactor.

oOchre by Dream Boat

I guess it's only natural since the new Usher track sounds like the Night Slugs crew produced it (it was actually produced by Usher's younger brother James Lackey). Gotta keep pushing that bar. Their EP Fevers is available for download here:

Dream Boat - Fevers EP

Sissy Nobby - I'm gone

Found this song on the Gosh Damn blog this evening.

This song has classic drums, and a generic hook that somehow makes the song more powerful. Sissy Nobby always sounds like he's rapping through a McDonald's drive thru microphone. Now that's just raw.

Bluberry Pancakes

Sunday morning. I made blueberry pancakes this morning for my roomates and Eric, who crashed here last night. They were delicious!!! Now, I'm installing Warcraft, I mean, STARCRAFT II. Holler! The installation is spectacular, they captured the nineties feel of installing PC games brilliantly. Bad voice acting, unnecessary back story, images with the blurred transmission aesthetic. and the install takes like 30 minutes. Come to think of it, maybe they didn't do it on purpose. I've been out of the video game loop for so long I thing everyone is on a retro nostalgia tip.

I'll be writing a Starcraft II review along with impressions since I've decided to get Final Boss up and running again.

The music is so hilarious!! it's incredibly anti climatic, they're playing the Star Wars Episode 1 climatic battle music during the whole second half of the 30 minutes.


91 percent complete. 92…almost there.


Yesterday I biked home from the Electronics Boutique along 7th with the game in my hand. How weirdly narcissistic of me that I wanted everyone to see that I had just purchased Starcraft 3 on my bike ride home. Maybe soubconsciouly i was hoping some really cute girl would be like:

"Hey, is that Starcraft II?"

"Yeah? Do you play?"

"Hells yes!"

And then we'd go back to my place and play Starcraft. But I know the world doesn't work that way. I learned my lesson when i tried inviting this beautiful girly girl back to my place to play Goldeneye. She left and found myself playing Goldeneye with her big and very loud guy friend.

Install complete.

Gamer-bros

I've been playing NHL 08 like every day and reading the Hipster Runoff a bunch recently and their take on the whole "alt/authentic/popular/mainstream" complex. Which got me thinking about how video games have become the entertainment option of choice for dudebags over the years.

Video games used to be the domain of nerds (ie. virgins) and little kids (also virgins). They used to be creative, very complex (because you have so much time to master the intricacies of Dalsim when you have very five-to-ten friends, don't go to parties and have never interacted with a non-relative of the opposite sex) and usually pretty creative, but only in the way a 35-year old man child can be creative. In the nineties, as video games became less abstract, they started to appeal to more people (non-virgins) and new genres appeared or became predominant; namely sports, fighting and first person shooters. This is where it all started going downhill.

Mortal Kombat is one of the worst games ever made. And yet it was so popular because it was super simple (rewarding button mashing and repetitive jump-kick attack strategies) and had overly-gratuitous amounts of violence in the tackiest lamest possible way. Then came Madden. Then came Road Rage. And so on and so forth until Call of Duty and Halo (whose sequels were some of the most overated games in history).

around the time of the Xbox (and the Playstation), the average gamer became a drunk, slightly intellectually challenged 25 year old fratboy. This kind of person will not play Fallout 3 or Final Fantasy Tactics, or Nights. He's will play Call of Duty 1 to whatever the fuck they're at or Madden. Developpers can't afford to make good games because they cost more than Hollywood movies. GTA 4 is GTA 3. All first person shooters are identical (except Bioshock and Half Life). I'm not even gonna get into EA Sports and the video game industry wetting themselves because they updated the rosters and managed to not make a worse game.



On a side note, when I was looking for an image to illustrate this post, I typed "frat guys video games" in Google. There was an excessive amount of homoerotic (and straight up New Gay City) pictures.

Point and Click Masterpiece

Watching Blade Runner last night, my head kept flashing back to various scenes and locations of the Blade Runner PC game. Blade Runner was a point and click game developed by Westwood and released in 1997. It ended up disappointing critics for two reasons; it was made by Westwood, whose work work was always eagerly anticipated and expected to be revolutionary, which was aggravated by the fact Westwood announced the game was going the revolutionize adventure games. While the game didn't revolutione gaming mechanics, it still remains a classic for setting an important (and sadly overlooked) new visual and atmospheric benchmark.

The game follows the movie closely enough to draw on its strenghts and please fans, but not so closely that it feels tired. Westwood recreated all of the major sets from the movie with an impressive atttention to detail. The memorable characters are in the game, with the addition of a few new ones. Blade Runner was a visual masterpiece, ahead of its time. For Westwood's adaptation to faithfully recreate a Los Angeles of 2019 on par with Ridley Scott's oeuvre is an impressive feat.

Why do I like this game so much? Blade Runner the movie took the world of Do Androids Drwam of Electric Sheep? and fleshed it out on the big screen. Blade Runner the game lets you live it out. So what if there aren't many puzzles and the game isn't as challenging as others in the genre? You can administer Voigt Kampf tests, use the awesome photo enhancing computer (I am sure it has a name, but I don't remember it) and solve crimes. Westwood took an amazing fantasy world, spent thousands of hours making it interactive and critics spit on it for flaws that would have surely ruined a lesser game, but not this.

I played the game when I was a pre-teen, before watching the movie and before reading the book. Westwood introduced my generation to one of the greatest creations of modern science fiction.