A Music Themed Game I Would Play

I consider the music themed game, Rock Star, Guitar Hero, DJ Hero, etc..., to be a bastardization of all I consider to be good and true about video games. I fail to see the point in playing a game that doesn't let me kill something, and I thoroughly detest games that represent something that I could actually be doing in real life. Why would I play a football, soccer, or hockey game? I could easily do these things myself outside my home, along with skateboarding, snowboarding, not to mention life simulators like The Sims; play a game that requires me to do all the things I'm playing a game to avoid? No thanks, I'm happier being terminally socially awkward.

And as for the music games, seriously, you're time is better off spent learning to play a real instrument, at least you're accomplishing something. Prince actually refused his own music game, Rock Star or Guitar Hero, I can't remember which, for that very reason, he'd rather see kids learning to actually play instruments. If you can't respect Prince, who can you respect, right Darcy?

But, like it or not, the music game seems to be here to stay. That's why in an effort to try and live with society's mistakes in general I've come up with a theme for a music game I would be willing to play: R0ck Star Zombies

Think about it, playing with all the late greats, Richie Valens, Jimmi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, John Lennon and too many others to mention right now; you could even throw in the arm of the drummer from Def Leopard, I'm sure it could crawl around the drum set or something. Apparently Kurt Cobain wouldn't be able to make it since he's apparently the musical equivalent to Jesus or some damned thing, but who cares, the dude wasn't worth including anyway.

The idea is that the better you play the better your chances of avoiding a bullet in the head, which would end your "new" career, and getting closer to the tasty brains in the audience. The other side of the coin, the song ends with your rotting skull being emptied on the stage behind you.

A bad idea? Yes, probably, but then so is the entire music themed game genre. At least my way guarantees something dies, thus making it a real video game!

The Yip-Yips

Anyone else remember them, those aliens on Sesame Street who were amazed and befuddled by stuff? I loved them bastards as a kid and miss getting a laugh out of them. Don't quite know why, but I started thinking about them today and ran across this clip; on a side note, it never fails to amaze me what a single Google search is capable of returning.

This also would have appealed to my inner child that died while doing phone tech support. I swear to the almighty ever loving god that this is exactly what was happening on the other end of the phone conversation on at least 3 different occasions. But then maybe it was my fault for asking cryptic questions like "What operating system are you using?"

The Cleveland Show

You may remember some months back I wrote about the demise of King of the Hill and lamented it's replacement with The Cleveland Show.

The Cleveland show came on TV a few weeks back and, as the faithful animation addict I am, I've been watching it; I figured, what the hell, I always watch cartoons on Sunday night so I may as well check it out. 4 episodes later I think I have a good feeling of the show.

I may have been a tad bit hasty on my prejudgement, it's actually not a bad show all in all. Of course, again all in all, it's basically the The Family Guy with a black family so it's not like they have anything new to create and perfect, just use a small child to set up a series of largely non-sequiter cut scenes and have a talking animal for the moral guidance. It delivers that, although, after so many years of The Family Guy I think we may be running a bit short on this style of humors lifespan. When I made my earlier judgement I was thinking of the Family Guy pre-cancellation, late 90's Cleveland who had all the personality of stale sliced bread, but I failed to notice that they had managed to breathe some life in him over the last couple of years, giving him at least some of the qualities needed to run his own show.

I guess it boils down to this, if you like the Family Guy you'll like this, and, to be perfectly honest, you may like this better. Let's face it, the Stewie-Brian stories were an interesting sideline on the Peter oriented stories, but they were never worth enough to dedicate so many episodes to them alone. I think the Family Guy has run it's course, and, if Fox is smart enough, which we know they're not, The Cleveland Show can act to gently segway into a retirement of Peter and his family.

Long story short, 3.5 stars out of 5; not a waste of time to watch, but if you don't already watch the Fox Animation Domination on Sunday nights, this isn't going to get you started.

You Should Familiarize Yourself with Stephen Lynch

Sometimes when one puts his iTunes on shuffle you discover some awesome shit your forgot about. If you've never heard of Stephen Lynch and are open to some raunchy musical humor I suggest you look into the man. The following are some of my favorites.





and one that fits this blog a bit more

Whatever Happened to Deee-Lite

All right I have no intention of ever buying or playing this game but my god this trailer brings back memories of my youth living young wild and free on a matress in my buddies pantry.



It also bring back memories of a great David Spade movie, Lost & Found. Here's live performance from that golden time.

9 - Not Directed by Tim Burton

Well last night I went to one of the movies I was excited about, 9, and once again fell for the marketing technique of pushing the famous producers name over the relatively less famous directors when hyping the movie. I like Tim Burton's work, well all of it short of Edward Scissorhands so was pretty excited about seeing 9 but it turned out that it was produced my Tim Burton not directed. It was directed by Shane Acker and he's no Tim Burton.

9 is a story about a set of little robots that 1, 2, 3, .... 9 in a post-apocalyptic world that was destroyed by a war between humans and robots ... hmmm that sounds a bit like another franchise. Anyway, the AI responsible for the human/machine war is re-activated by 9 who apparently is an idiot and the little robots need to stop the evil AI robot from absorbing their souls and making more machines to destroy an already destroyed world. You see the AI or evil robot is evil because the inventor gave it his intellect and not his soul. He however, split his soul up among the little robots for some reason that isn't entirely clear to me. I guess souls can make it rain or something. Anyway it was pretty cliche with 1 being a scared poor leader type and 8 being his dumb ass bigger little robot goon and 7 being a ninja like awesome fighting robot who was the only female robot and yet another example Hollywood is trying to make up for decades of cool male characters by making the male characters clumsy wimps or goons and having the female character be the only cool smooth character. Anyway the movie could have worked despite the cliches (it was a PG movie after all) if the evil AI robot actually came off as evil instead it just seemed to be a machine doing what it was meant to do, not evil. Yes they tried to make it seem evil with some flash backs but it didn't work. For a movie like that to be good it must have a cool scary ass villain.

I guess this wasn't the worse move I've seen but it was definitely a let down from what I was hoping. I'd give it maybe 5 stars out of 10 at most.