The Sound of Tumult

Kerfuffles and malefactors.

Indiscretions and perfidies.

And of course, supercilious c-bombs.

Those are words. These are songs: on Spotify or Youtube

Pretty Graphics

If it's true that the cutscenes of the current generation of videogames give a pretty good idea of what the in-game graphics of the next will look like, then it seems we'll be hitting proper photorealism a little earlier than you might have thought:



Slightly astonishing, no? And if you're sceptical about the theory, here's the once jaw-dropping intro to Resident Evil: Code Veronica (released on Dreamcast and PS2), which could now easily be mistaken for an average-looking 360 or PS3 game.

Nathan Fake - You Are Here (FortDax Remix)

Generally if I'm writing I have to do it in silence. If I put some music on and it's any good then I won't be able to concentrate on what I'm saying, because my attention is all too easily stolen by a good tune. And if the music is rubbish, then, well, why would I bother listening to it in the first place?

Here though, is one of very few exceptions.



Brooker-tastic.

The Sounds of the SNES

It's been said that contraints often liberate rather than limit creativity. Give a musician a state of the art recording studio and he'll come back to you with an over-produced and boring piece of music. Give him the SNES's sound chip and he'll write some of the greatest melodies of all time.

Koji Kondo - A slightly sinister looking genius

Hit the break for a walk down memory lane, and maybe feel a little despair that videogame music today isn't quite what it used to be.

Goodbye

I'll be away for the next week. Perhaps you should take this opportunity to brush up on your maths:

The Golden Age of Video

by Ricardo Autobahn

This is what the Internet's best at: beautiful, ridiculous, novelty nonsense.

"I like girls... but now, it's about Justice"

This "Top 50 Worst Videogame Voice Acting" is quite chucklesome, although it's disappointing that they've re-used some games more than once. There are also a few where I'd say the script is more at fault than the voice-acting, such as the brilliant line from Castle Shikigami 2 that makes up the title of this post.

Art Brut - DC Comics & Chocolate Milkshakes

And to think I ever doubted they'd make a second album. Brilliant stuff.

Project Natal

Wow! Project Natal. It's incredibly exciting. It's like looking into the future. It's like Tom Cruise waving his hands about on the Star Trek holodeck while munching on virtual candy floss he stole from a Tamagotchi baby.

Yeah, I don't know what that means either, but here's the promotional video in case you missed it:



The most important part of that trailer is right at the start, where it says "product vision: actual features and functionality may vary". In other words, it's a load of pie-in-the-sky nonsense. And aside from the technological difficulties, I don't imagine Microsoft encouraging young kids to try karate kicks in their living rooms after the trouble Nintendo had with just their wrist straps.

Far more interesting is the feedback coming from those journalists who actually managed to try out the technology. Giving Time magazine the exclusive first look at the Wii did wonders for Nintendo, so it was no great surprise to see Microsoft pulling exactly the same trick. They will undoubtedly be pleased with the write-up, and even just the headline "Microsoft Whacks the Wii" must have put a big smile on Bill Gates' face.

The specialist press seem equally impressed. Here's the mostly trustworthy Ellie Gibson, giving Microsoft some quotes they'll love while writing for Eurogamer:

"There's no denying this technology works."

"Even an ancient game seems new and fresh when you graph Project Natal on top."

"In fact, I don't realise quite how much I'm getting into it until I hear [a Microsoft employee] warning a bloke behind me to stand back."

Now, perhaps it's because I've been playing too much Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games recently, but the whole throwing myself around to play a game thing isn't the part of Project Natal that gets my juices flowing. For me, Peter Molyneux's prototype character Milo is the most intriguing thing of all, even if poor old Pete sounds even more deranged than usual while introducing it:



Now, Peter Molyneux is the king of the over-statement, and you'd have to be very naive not to realise that a lot of that conversation was scripted. Yet Milo talked to a load of journalists too, and while he wasn't so good at answering questions, his ability to read the emotional intonations of someone speaking, intentionally make and lose eye contact, and repeat back a name he's just been told in his own voice is impressive. You might worry what kind of creepy world we'll be living in when people are making friends with their xbox, but as forums all over the videogame world were quick to realise, at the very least this could be an exciting new era for pornography.

Peter Doherty @ Proud

22nd April 2009

Penned into the stables at the Proud Gallery in Camden, boys in skinny jeans were asking girls in polka dot dresses, “why can’t we go in the main room?”

Pete Doherty was there.


For hours we waited. While making-do with Proud’s adequate but unadventurous playlist, the patience of the pretty poser girls and the anaemic indie kids was thoroughly tested. They stood about outside, restlessly chaining their umpteenth cigarette of the evening, until finally word got around: the doors had opened.

We poured through. There were some guys in skinny jeans on stage, but no-one recognised them. “Are they his backing band?” asked a too-tall man standing too-far forward.

No. They were ‘Vaults’, one of those bands who tediously refuse to put the definite article before their name even though it’s crying out for it.

Maybe ‘Vaults’ were excellent. Maybe they weren’t mediocre hitless me-too’ers. Maybe they sounded adequate and unadventurous because we hungered only for most the evocative lyrics of our generation.

Whatever. Vaults weren’t Pete Doherty.

So we trooped back outside. We smoked our umpteenth-plus-one cigarette. Some were heard cursing that they might miss their last train.

But when finally cigarettes, Vaults, and frantic phone calls to Transport For London were over, it almost took you by surprise. It began with screams, then came “PETE!” swaggering onto the stage, and before you could elbow past too-tall man standing too-far forward, a belting (but perhaps most importantly, unironic) performance of ‘What a Waster’ was over.

Doherty was on fine, crowd-pleasing form, smashing through his greatest hits while treating us to a total of six Libertines tunes. The pace was almost business-like, and he barely uttered a word between songs, save for one moment early on when he started to complain about the quality of the lighting.

“It’s so dark out there I can barely see you! Err, can anyone see a Graham Coxon in the house?”

And to the delight of all, up strolled a sheepish-looking Graham Coxon to the stage. He looked nervous, maybe from being so unusually close to the hungry mob, or maybe because of Doherty’s liberal attitude to tempo. Songs would race forward at twice their usual speed before he’d suddenly slam on the brakes and do the final chorus at a canter. Regardless, the two shared a cockle-warming chemistry, even (or especially) when things around the edges got a little rough.

Yet after a couple of songs Coxon was gone and Doherty was alone, although still amply filling the stage all by himself. And “alone” must surely be a poor word to describe a man with four hundred people screaming his songs back at him. In these intimate surroundings, with Pete at his effortlessly entertaining best, there can’t have been a soul in the room who felt alone.

That said, the soul-less were there too, watching the whole set through the viewfinder of their cheap camera-phone, fantasising no doubt about the number of hits their grainy pictures might get on Youtube. Too-tall man standing too-far forward was one of them, leaning over the row ahead of him with arms fully out-stretched, grinning smugly at the good-looking but awful-sounding footage he was recording. Where did this cult of joyless camera-phone people come from? Are they perhaps descended from the losers that read all their album sleeves nine times over in order to learn lyrics?

Was it really worth it?

Whatever. Someone please take them away and do something horrible to them.

Yet in spite of nuisance support acts, and nuisance camera phones, Doherty was great. When stripped down to just the man and his guitar, his brilliance as a song writer is indisputable. He enraptured the crowd, as they sang along loudly to the songs they knew, and listened respectfully to those they didn’t. He remains a living legend, and everyone needs to hear the web of sound he spins when he picks up a guitar.

A decent tv show about games?

I'm excited. There's every chance that Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe will be mind-blowingly awesome. Here's an old episode of Screenwipe to remind you why:

Close Range

"It's completely open-ended. You can shoot people in the ear, but you can also shoot them in the eye."

The Onion offers definitive proof that the Americans can be pretty damn good at satire.

Hot New Video Game Consists Solely Of Shooting People Point-Blank In The Face

"You ain't (or maybe have) heard it played like that before..." #2

I launched this "monthly"feature in January 2009, and we're now in April. Oops. Let's call it a quarterly feature shall we?

I also said that it would include covers by "relatively obscure bands". Tori Amos is not exactly obscure, and this cover probably isn't the world's best kept secret. So yes, you guessed right, this is little more than a lazy "filler" Youtube post, and you may claim your five pounds.

Anyway, here's Tori Amos doing Smells Like Teen Spirit:



And even though everyone's already heard it a few thousand times too many already, here's the Nirvana original for the sake of completeness:

Funeral Song

"What song would you want played at your funeral?" was perhaps the first conversational 'starter for ten' question I learnt. I've genuinely lost count of the number times I've discussed it with different friends and acquaintances over the course of my life. This says a lot about my inability to maintain sensible conversation for long periods of time, but I'm not posting this to beat myself up about how bad I am at talking to people. No, I'm posting this here because I quite genuinely want this monstrosity/beauty from William Shatner to be playing when my corpse one day gets lowered into the furnace.



Yes, REALLY.

Three Weeks Wait for a Youtube Clip

So I've stolen this very directly from UK:Resistance, it's perhaps the geekiest thing I've posted on here yet (which is saying quite something), and it's probably the most pathetic way possible to return from not posting for three weeks. But I promise I'll explain (in try-too-hard words) why February has been such a slow month for blog updates in a forthcoming episode. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy Dan Bull's Generation Gaming:

"You ain't heard it played like that before..."

This is the first in a new feature I hope to run more-or-less every month, where I'll try to bring you a popular song covered in an unusual way, by a relatively obscure band. The inspiration came from hearing 6ix Toys' version of Voodoo People on Craig Charles' radio show last Saturday, and I dare you not to enjoy it:



Here's the Prodigy original (along with its brilliantly disturbing video) for the sake of comparison:

The Guild

Videogame based humour has a pretty bad track record. Even the mostly entertaining Yahtzee, who many would consider a beacon of genuinely amusing videogame commentary, is starting to show signs that his recent success has clouded his judgement.

It's not surprising really, because as we all know, the kind of people who bother to play videogames in the first place are unfunny, anti-social freaks who have retreated to fantasy videogame worlds to escape the shame and humiliation of interacting in the real world and telling jokes that people don't laugh at. Aren't they?

The Guild, a sit-com based around six players of an unnamed online Role Playing Game, suggests that even though game-playing nerds may themselves struggle to be funny (and I include myself in that group), there's a large reserve of previously untapped comedy potential in the stereotype that surrounds them. The first series, which is freely available on Youtube, is astutely observed and ought to ring true for anyone who's ever found themself becoming obsessive about a videogame.

Honestly, it's better than this picture might suggest

That first series was so popular that now Microsoft have started throwing money at it, and as a result the second series is a lot more polished. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is debatable, as I'd say both the dialogue and the acting feel more self-concious than when the show relied solely on paypal donations for funding. But it's still blazing a trail by demonstrating how 'videogame culture' can hope to drag itself out of the gutter, and there remains some hope that the remaining episodes in the series will build to a satisfying climax that will justify some of the unfunnier moments in the opening episodes.

Funnier than I could hope to be

A couple of old Youtube clips is not the most auspicious way for this fledgling blog to start the new year, but I'm too hungover from the nerd-tastic New Year's Eve party I was at last night to write much more than this slightly too-long sentence. Even if you've never seen Richard & Judy's Channel 4 evening time TV show, the following by Adam Buxton is really quite brilliant.



His alternate Obama victory speech is well worth a look too: