Not sure if I’ve mentioned this on the blog, but I do bring it up on The Recurring Bosscast a lot. I’m a huge Taylor Swift fan. I own all of her albums, loudly sing her songs when she comes on the radio and am not ashamed to admit my fandom for her music. A few days after starting Rocksmith, I set myself a personal goal that I would one day learn how to play one of her songs. However, two things got in the way of that goal:
1) Most of her songs require a capo, which I don’t own. This is a relatively easy fix.
2) I just started learning how to play guitar and everything about it was hard.
Just over 3 months ago, I got Rocksmith as a Christmas present from Steff. My initial impressions of it were generally positive, though something like this really takes time to pass judgment. Have I made any progress since?
The best girlfriend ever got me the Rocksmith guitar bundle for Christmas. Since then, I’ve been shredding the six string in hopes of someday not sucking at guitar. If you have ambitions of learning, this might be worth looking into. Head over to Splitkick to read the full post!
After hours of waiting patiently at our seats, the lights shut off at the Air Canada Centre. From the darkness, an instrumental interlude can be heard emanating from the stage. This alone is enough to send the crowd into a frenzy. I’ve been waiting my whole life for the moment to see Jay-Z and/or Kanye West live in concert, and here I was, seconds away from getting to see them both at the same time. As the lights come on, we see Kanye West and Jay-Z, facing each other from opposing platforms. As their platforms slowly rise, the beat to H.A.M. blares through the sound system. As the crowd cheers in approval, I mutter to myself, “Of all their songs they could have started with, they had to start with the one I hate the most.”
Would that statement be indicative of my feelings towards the rest of the show? Thankfully, no. I watched the throne, and it was a beautiful sight to see.
Of all the Kinect games to have hit the market prior to the release of Dance Central 2, only its predecessor has been able to justify the existence of the peripheral to me. The implementation of real-life dancing as a gameplay mechanic was not only revolutionary from a technology perspective, but wildly fun for gamers and financially successful for Harmonix.
Though I reviewed the original Dance Central favourably for the most part when it first came out, it was not without fault. It’s biggest failings were that it didn’t make for a great multiplayer game and that its feature set was paper-thin, which is often a problem with launch games. Does the sequel build on its predecessor to provide a more complete dancing game experience?
Music might be the most overlooked aspect of video games by game creators and game players alike. Unless its the star of the show in a music game, music is often perceived as audio wallpaper. Game makers generally aren’t as successful in implementing music as they are with other elements of their products, such as graphics and gameplay. Nowadays, licensed music and slapped-in “Hollywood-like” orchestral scores are the norm. With the advent of voice chat, custom soundtracks and other diversions, game players in general I think are paying less attention to game music than ever before, too.
I’m still paying attention though. I grew up in an era where video game music had its own distinct sound due to technological limitations. An era when the Super Mario theme was still hot and new. Where the awesome work of game composers shone through the primitive beeps and bloops. Game music has evolved dramatically over the years, but we as gamers have had our ears blessed with some truly great music.
I wanted to take the time out to write about some of my favourite pieces of video game music in a series of posts. There are some amazing tunes that have not only had an impact on my gaming, but my life as well in some way or another. There were more obvious choices I could have gone with to start this series, but I wanted to give credit to a game that has recently eaten up a lot of my time (and my brains). Besides being super fun to play, it has some of the best video game music I’ve heard in a while.
In Third Person 