How the Hell is it September Already?

In my last post I wrote how I was listening to two great progressive rock albums by Steely Dan and Supertramp. Continuing in that tradition I’m now listening to Closer to the Edge by Yes. Wikipedia says that this album is considered by many to be the high point of the prog movement. It certainly is out there. The title track is 18 minutes long, and has recordings of birds. It’s not as lame as it sounds though. Maybe by the end of this post I’ll be able to give you a full impression.

Soooooo, lets see, what’s happened since August 19th? Shit. Let me distil this into micro sound bytes:

Devil May Cry, Sins of a Solar Empire, FIFA ’08, Gears of War, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, Ghost in the Shell.

Mmmm, that was fun.

The big surprise of the last few weeks has been my quality assurance class. I thought it was going to be pretty easy, and I suppose it is, but our homework has consisted of finding bugs in games. These are existing games, not games in development. This is actually really hard. For the first assignment I was able to find five bugs in Fallout 3. I didn’t find them after the fact, I knew about them before hand. Some of them I had experienced only a couple of times and only knew about only because I had logged well over 200 hours in the game. The second assignment tasked us with finding 10 glitches in a different game. I managed to find only three in Marvel Ultimate Alliance. Regardless of what grade I get at least I was reminded of what a fun game it is. I think I’ll try to beat it this weekend.

The real cool surprise is that my teacher may be getting us “field trips” to play test real games at local game companies. Some of these will be companies you would have heard of, and games you are anxiously waiting to play. When I heard this news I kept it cool of course but inside I squealed like a girl. An excited young girl.

So here we are at the end of the post and I haven’t finished the album because my wife started watching Lost. I didn’t want to interfere with her experience, so I’ll let you know how it is next time.

Stowing Away the Time

Maybe it's the fatigue but I've been extra responsive to music tonight. Physically responsive. Goosebumps, hairs on end, shivers, eyelids drooping.

Listening to Supertramp's Breakfast in America, followed by Steely Dan's Can't Buy a Thrill. I got both albums back in February and they have yet to wear out their welcome, in fact they seem to get better every time I listen to them. While I'm not the type of person who likes to hear things over and over within a short period of time, I find that if I give an album about three good listens and then put it a way for a while, when I come back to it the music is much better. Maybe my brain is just set to receive it. I need time to grow the appropriate neuron receptors.

I've been feeling very creative too. I think the stronger my ADD symptoms the more I'm able to find the muse, and lately I've been a scatter-brained mess so the creative juices are certainly flowing. I've been writing lyrics, something I've not felt like doing in over a year. I've dabbled with songs all my life but never felt like I could find my lyrical voice. I think maybe I need to determine what kind of music I'm keyed to writing for. I may have been trying to hard to write for hard rock, when I should have cultivated a move progressive, even pop mindset. Another possibility is that I just haven't worked hard enough at it.

You know, let me better express how awesome Breakfast in America is. I'm giving it an early nomination for my favorite of 2010. It really is an amazing album.

Compulsion

I bought Blacklight again goddammit.

They got my money. They got my money twice. Curse this affliction of a hobby!



I also bought Preemptive Strike by DJ Shadow. I got it for the song Organ Donor which had been teasing my brain cells since I first heard it on Pandora. I can't stress enough how utterly fucking mind-blowing this song is. It's why we have techno. It's what Willis was talking about. You're listening to it and right away you think, "this is a cool song" and then it stops fucking around and throws 26 layers of incredible on your eardrums and you think... nothing because the part of you that listens to things is busy visiting the holy land.

Reasonably I thought that the rest of the album would be just as stellar. I had heard of DJ Shadow but hadn't really heard him before this song. If that was the kind of quality song I could expect I would gladly pay $9.99 for an album. I'm not going to say the album is bad, or even disappointing, it's just not what I expected. It's sort of a chillout album, very low-key and loungy. Organ Donor is the black sheep here. I imagine if you had not heard it and listened to the album all the way through, that when you got to Organ Donor (the last song) it would have an even greater impact. A sonic-ninja-skullfuck kind of impact. The rest of the album lulls you into a false sense of security before the kung-fu-grip-happy-ending you didn't know the Chinese lady already charged you for.

The Price of War

I beat Modern Warfare 2 on veteran yesterday, leaving me with just Fallout 3 to finish before I feel ready for Final Fantasy XIII. It was a satisfying win to be sure but I was surprised that it was not as difficult as I thought it would be. There were certainly some really hard levels. I mentioned Takedown in the last post and I feel I must bring up Contingency and Loose Ends as well. These three levels are exercises in pain. In a lower difficulty Contingency isn't that bad but on veteran you have to finish a certain part in a 3 minute time limit. This negates the essential strategy for beating veteran which is to go slow and take your time. For a level like Takedown it's a strategy you must employ but in Contingency you have to run through as fast as you can and I found myself doing something that bordered on trial and error, running through it 20+ times trying something a little different each time. Loose Ends is a level that just pisses me off, there's no other way to put it. It was a pain in the ass on regular and it was a rage inducing shit-fest on veteran. The whole level is a paper cut and lemon juice festival but the last segment is just one big kick-in-the-balls-cake with a big fuck-you-cherry on top. I'm not going to spoil it for you, if you've played it you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't be prepared. I'm not kidding, the game literally gives you a big fuck-you at the end as a special thanks for playing.

Those three levels aside, it wasn't that hard. My basis for comparison is Call of Duty 2 in which every level is agonizing on hardened and up. I really like MW2 though. It may be the best shooter I've ever played. You feel like you are in a summer blockbuster, every second is a fantastic set-piece battle. Having gone through it twice I was still eager to go back and find all the intel items, which I did on recruit. Let me tell you, recruit is an entirely different game. Parts that on veteran would take you 30 minutes to slog through take 30 seconds as you execute a brisk walk through a raging firefight. The difficulty levels in a Call of Duty game are kind of like a spectrum ranging from arcade to simulation only instead of arcade having more enemies it has less which makes it not as fun. That's what they need for the next game, a mode with recruit level damage but a veteran or more level of enemies. I'd play it.

On a bitter-sweet note I just got 10 great cds for 30 bucks. The bitter sweet part is that it was from a going out of business sale for my favorite used cd store. Damn this recession, damn this recession to hell!

PAX Music

So I didn't get to see Metroid Metal live at PAX because I was volunteering in another part of the con. I heard they killed everyone and then brought them back to life with nothing but sonic manipulation. Oh well. I did get to stop by their booth and pick up their album, Varia Suite though. I asked the guy at the table if he was in the band. He told me no, he was their producer or something. Poor guy must have been asked that constantly. The sucky part was that I didn't bring anything capable of playing CDs with me and neither did any of my friends. So I had to wait until I got home to listen to it. I have since listened to it about 10 times. This is significant because I don't usually listen to something twice in such short a span of time. With MM I can't help it. It gets stuck in my head (it is game music after all) and I must play the album in order to exorcise the daemons. So far my favorite song is "Item Room". I wasn't expecting that to be very cool, but they do this odd time signature thing with a staccato riff that hits to the core. THE MOTHER EFFIN CORE BABY!!! ::clears throat:: So if you like game music and/or instrumental mental then please give these guys a try. MetroidMetal.com


On a much less game-related aside, I ran into a guy standing outside the entrance to the convention center. He asked me if I had heard of Sir Mix-a-lot. I replied in the affirmative. He explained that just like Sir Mix-a-lot he was a rap artist from Seattle trying to make it big. He handed me his latest album and said they were giving them out in exchange for "donations", whatever I felt like I could give. Now I'm not really a fan of rap music. I have a select few groups that I like to listen to and it's mostly white-people-friendly rap like the Roots. But I do have a soft spot for a: sales people (having been in sales myself) and b: people trying to make it (also being in that position myself). I told him I'd give him 2 dollars. He said "OK but we are asking for 5". I gave him 2.
So I gave it a listen when I got home. Again I'm not a big rap person. I mostly find it hard to relate to the subject matter. I didn't grow up in "the hood", I never shot nobody, I'm not gangsta. I find that most rap is just the rapper telling everyone how much better at rapping he is than everyone else. It's this kind of circular self awareness that just seams sort of masturbatory. I feel like I'm watching clothes in a dryer. Anyway I'm getting off track. The album was pretty good. Like I said, I had a hard time with the lyrics but in the words of American Bandstand it had a beat and I could dance to it. The words are delivered in a rapid fire style that I found pleasing to the ear. I can see this guy getting pretty big in the next few years. The production quality was high and they seem to have a sense for the single.
Oh yeah, I never said who I was talking about! The guys name is Juga Hill and the album is called One Way (Pre-Album Chapter 3). I'm guessing there are Chapters 1 and 2 out there somewhere. JugaHill.com will take you to his myspace page which has a good selection of his work.

Seattle Bound

So this week I'm traveling to Seattle for the 2009 Penny Arcade Expo. This will be my first time in the state of Washington and my first "con". I know it's an "expo" but con is pretty accurate. Nerd con to be exact. I don't know if there is a more general purpose meeting place for all things nerd. The primary theme is video games of course, but just like the comic for which it is named PAX is about more than that. It's about our culture (nerd culture). I mean it grew out of a COMIC so there is another nerd cornerstone right there.

Anyway I'm going and it's going to be fun. I had hoped to bring a working demo of a game to show people but laziness prevailed and I haven't gotten much done on it. I'll will be working as an Enforcer, the volunteer army that runs the show. I'm hoping it will help me make some new friends and gain some industry contacts.

Speaking of PAX I've heard some new music recently. Penny Arcade shared this link in their latest post: http://2playerproductions.bandcamp.com/ It's an album from the 2008 Blip Festival which is all about using unconventional hardware to make music. Hardware like the Gameboy. There are 32 songs and I listened to about 10 or so. It's worth a look. Also search for "Gameboy music" on YouTube to see some neat-o videos about the making of such things. So then later I was checking out Nuklearpower.com and he had a link to these guys: http://metroidmetal.bandcamp.com/album/varia-suite. Checking out THEIR site I saw that low and behold they would be playing at PAX! This is cool because as I discovered from listening to those three tracks, these guys rock my ASS!! I'm thinking of ordering the album because like Austin Powers, that sort of thing really IS my bag baby.

Radio

Been listening to a lot of on line radio lately. I have an iPod with every album I own (and some that I don't heh heh) on it which is a lot of music. But I've been opting for internet radio because of the opportunity to discover tons of new music. Usually I listen to Pandora, and I have about 12 finely tuned stations made that I would link to here if I could figure out how to maintain my secret identity. Anyway, tonight I was in the mood for game music which Pandora does not do well. In the process of looking for a site that just streams game music I came across one that's probably even better. StreamingSoundtracks.com plays soundtracks from both movies and games. I find that as movies and games are representative of journeys so too is listening to this station. You would think that that all the different sounds and themes mashed together would be jarring but so far it works quite well. I started out hearing the dramatic main theme from Dante's Peak, then on to an impressive all drum piece from Drumline, then on to Macross Plus. How's that for range? Next up was the intro to Alien Resurrection and then the ending to Final Fantasy VIII. The transition between the two songs was so seamless (their ending and beginning so similar) I didn't realize it had happened. Kind of eerie. Anyway check it out.

Cough Drop

It occurs to me that the Brian Eno - David Bowie collaborations are like a cough drop. Eno is like the liquid medicine center, soothing relief but hard to swallow by itself. Bowie is like the menthol sweet candy shell, hard, chewy, and a little sticky, but tasty and head-clearing. You don't want to take one every day, only when you need it.