Video Games Live

I must once more apologize for my time off blogging. I have been very busy with various events and was unable to commit some time to the scribbles. It doesn’t help that I have several things that I would like to make posts about. Some of these topics include Watchmen, Braid, and Clannad After Story. I have decided to make a series of posts discussing all of the above in reverse chronological order. Therefore, I will begin with Video Games Live!

Video Games Live was glorious. I was accompanied by Wyatt and Justin to this amazing event. We drove up to Kitchener on Saturday evening so that we could listen to a symphony playing our favorite video game music. Overall, it is an experience that any video game lover should take part in at least once. I will now describe the highlights of the event for me.

It all began with a very cute into video of Pac Man. It was then followed with Metal Gear Solid music. I have never played much of the MGS games, but I have, like everyone else, heard much praise of the series and the music sounded fantastic. Shortly after came what we had all been waiting for. Baba Yetu, the opening theme of Civilization IV. I thought that the choir did a perfect job. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for the lead singer. I found him too silent and lacking in the accent.

One of the very notable portions of the night was the performance of the Video Game Pianist. For those of you who don’t know, he used to play video game music (mainly Final Fantasy) blind-folded. He was absolutely exhilarating and his performance brought everyone in the audience to their feet.

Then we all got a dose of the heavy hitting songs from Final Fantasy, Halo, and the Chrono series. There was a very nice segment for Mario as well. All in all, they were all done very well and entirely enjoyable. Another notable portion for me was Hikari. I found that it was very well-done. However, I was not impressed with the Disney video that played along with it. I thought that this song could have only been improved if Utada Hikaru was there performing live at the time.

Now if you thought that the entire event was simply a symphony orchestra, that is incorrect. There were quite a few little goodies sandwiched between the songs. Videos of composers would be displayed as  they introduced their songs. Also, we had the pleasure of video chatting with one of Blizzard’s composers on Skype (and yes, it was laggy). On top of all of this, there was some stuff for the audience to take part as well. A volunteer was brought to the stage in order to play Space Invaders while the symphony played in the background.

Prior to the concert, a Guitar Hero competition took place in the lobby of the theatre. The winner of the competition was brought up on stage to play Emotion with Tommy Tollarico playing the song along with the entire symphony. He was heavily embarrassed since he failed on expert rather early. I did not want to be that guy.

I do have some complaints however. They mostly surround Tommy Tollarico. I understand that he is the reason this event takes place in the first place. However, I feel that he ruined the Halo and Final Fantasy segments with the electric guitar. He insisted that the show was about him, when it was really about video game music and the symphony.

After the show, Justin, Wyatt and I went back to the lobby to see what the Meet & Greet was all about. After Justin was man-handled by Tommy Tollarico’s bodyguard, we realized that it was basically a long lineup to worship Tommy. We decided that (as Wyatt clearly puts it), we don’t really /like/ Tommy so we headed home afterwards.

All in all, I’d say that was the best spent $20 for me in a while. I would like to catch this show once more at the very least. It is definitely a treat and I highly recommend it to you all.

Macworld 2009 Keynote

It was always clear that this year’s Macworld was not going to be nearly as amazing as other keynotes. Steve Jobs was too busy taking a vacation or perhaps losing another 10 pounds this year. We were instead greeted by Philip Schiller who is not as charismatic as Steve Jobs nor is he nearly as much of a dick.

The keynote introduced three products:

1. iLife 09
2. iWork 09
3. 17” Macbook Pro

iLife 09 introduces “Faces” and “Places” in iPhoto. Using GPS chips in cameras, iPhoto can decode the geo-tag that accompanies photos taken by GPS-enabled cameras and adds another dimension to organizing photos. Added as another bonus, we now have better integration between Facebook and Flickr and iPhoto.

In addition to iPhoto, some of the new features of iMovie were demonstrated. There is the usual bells and whistles, new effects and themes added there. I am not much for video-editing, so I was not impressed much there.

Of course, what is iLife without Garage Band? Yes, there are new additions to Garage Band. The highlight of this is training videos. Yes! Go Apple! Only Apple can add videos to a piece of software and charge people for it. Now you only get basic training videos with your precious copy of Garage Band. If you want more, you will have to pay around $5 per video. On the upside, if you are a Sting fan, you can have him teach you how to play Roxanne… which I’m sure you can find on YouTube if you are that interested.

Nothing exciting on iWork 09 either. We seem to now have a number of new animations for Keynote and a few new themes for graphs. The only interesting here in this segment was when Philip introduced the Swing Vote animation for Keynote. It basically had Bush written on a slide, and the word “swings” quickly to become Obama. “Read whatever you want in to it,” Philip says after the animation is demonstrated.

Lastly, we now have a 17” MBP which looks identical to all the other ones. The only thing worth mentioning here is the increased battery life by using a non-removable battery and the option of a glare-free screen. To be honest, this is nothing that impresses me either.

All in all, as you can clearly see… Macworld is not nearly as good without Steve Jobs around. This has started everybody thinking about the prospects of Apple after Steve Jobs says good-bye and follows Bill Gates in to retirement.