Armchair Diplomat

So last night was our trip to see Dethballet, by the Brutal Ballet Company.

Let me tell you, it sure was brutal.

The 11.mov … err, story of the piece would have us believe that six ballerinas were kidnapped, emprisoned (behind what appeared to be a primary school fence), beaten and forced to rehearse a ballet set to the music of Metalocalypse’s DethKlok. At least I assume that was the story, it was projected onto a large drop-down screen with three minutes of black silence either side. The theatre-head inside me was cringing at the AV elements. There were also inserts of DVD extras too which made little sense to the narrative, leaving the audience pondering their inclusion. And the ballet itself?

Let’s just say that the ballet was not good. The six ballerinas were actually what appeared to be five proficient ballerinas and a stilted, frightened girl who’s main job was to twirl her hair. Oh, and her secondary job was to pull the focus of any scene she was in by being so strangely out of place. Tell the truth, that kind of wrapped the performance up for me. The rest of the ballerinas danced fine (not amazingly, but well enough certainly), but no-one really seemed to be paying them much attention because they were watching the other girl. I lost my composure a bit in the second half and found that I couldn’t help laughing at the pure awkwardness of the situation.

So the ballet part of the evening, not so great.

However the cover band, KlokBlok, were worth the price of admission alone. They produced very good covers of the majority of tracks from the DethAlbum and were beloved of the crowd of metal fans. The singer’s voice held together fairly well with the constant gutteral growl, and the solo’s were proficiently pulled off (maybe with a little help from Skwisgaar Skwigelf’s Advanced Hand Finger Wizard Mater Class). Both drums and bass were terrific, even if the bass player didn’t give the crowd a “bass solo”.

Mark left at interval to explore other avenues, that would encapsulate his review of the show …

So in the end, great music and odd floorshow was all that could be concluded from the night. I enjoyed myself, but not for the reasons I would have originally assumed.

GH: Aerosmith it ain't

Either you like their music or you don’t. That’s kind of the theme of this game. If you like Metallica, then you’re guaranteed a solidly built game that will probably constantly get dragged out for a bit an afternoon thrash. If you don’t like Metallica, but enjoy Guitar Hero, then this game is great fun for super fast licks and chunky, heavy chord progressions. If you don’t like Metallica, or Guitar Hero, well I’m not sure why you’re even looking at this page. Seriously, why? A friend put you up to it? What a jerk. You should tumble dry all their cotton t-shirts.

I love Metallica, one of the more favourable byproducts of growing up with a metal-head brother. And you have to admire (if nothing else) the band’s knowledge of their fans. This game is built for Metallica fans. Need proof? Check the track listing:

• Total number of Metallica songs: 28
• Songs from questionably received albums released after “Load“: About 5 or so

This game is for the fans of classic Metallica tunes, Black Album and earlier pretty much. The selection is fantastic. They probably couldn’t release a Best Of collection that does as much justice to their earlier work. Read more

Chalk and cheese could taste fantastic, you never know

Tomorrow the crew is off to see Dethballet, performed by the Brutal Ballet Company.  What is it, you may well ask?  Well it’s a ballet performance set to the music of Metalocalypse’s DethKlok.

And I’m not sure on a scale of one to win where it’s going to fall.  I’d guess at least a nine.  Definetely some amount of win anyway.

Promotional posters first caught our eye one day when we were wandering with a friend in St Kilda looking for a peri-peri chicken dispensary.  After a short “WTF?” moment, I vowed that we would see this bizarre combination of the arts and death metal.  And sure enough, tomorrow night is the night.

I’ll post my thoughts tomorrow on the result!

So earlier today I made a quick, exclusive review on Twitter for Guitar Hero: Metallica.

And now I have a follower who specialises in treatment of people in auto accidents.

Why?

Because *dugadugadugadugadugadugadugaduga* WHIPLASH.

Is this seriously how people work on Twitter?  Just search a word you’re interested in and add everyone you find despite it’s context?  Because if that were true, we’d probably have to add a shitload of furniture supply accounts!

GH: Metallica is great, by the way, look out for a review probably this Friday, and a Rock Band 2 one soon…

Metaphorically, of course

As it turns out, only a day after complaining about how long it was taking online, Rock Band 2 arrived in my mailbox today. I haven’t had a solid chance to give it a spin yet (I have a previous engagement at a Mexican restraunt to get quite drunk tonight), I’ll be sure to give you my impressions soon.

Mark also promises to get in on the action.

For now all I can tell you is that the game runs fine on an Australian system, and Xbox Live has no problems recognising the disc. My original Rock Band tracks exported just fine (after the 400MP licencing fee), no problems there. So if any of you fine Australians were wondering if it was a feasable option or not, I can say it is.

My only real problem now lies in the fact that Guitar Hero: Metallica is due for pick-up tomorrow. And while I’m at the games shop I’ll probably end up buying something else (pays to be efficient, you know!) to try out. But it looks like it’ll be a stint of music games for the next little while.

Oh well, what are days off work for? I just hope Infinite Undiscovery gets my apology note for having consistently put it aside.

Some time ago it begain plain to Australian gamers that EA Music and MTV Games doesn’t really have much ambition when it comes to our wide brown land. Harmonix’s superbly crafted music game Rock Band was released way back in the mists of yester-year, or the end of 2007 to be more precise, in the US. It then took around a year for a higgelty-piggelty release to reach Australia, and even then it would be with limited stock.

This came as an upset to some, as after getting their hands on the game it could be said that Harmonix had obviously been the inventive half of the team in the early Guitar Hero games. Rock Band took the basics of Guitar Hero and built interesting, useful variations to improve on the basic formula. Some variations, I might add, that Guitar Hero is only just getting around to copying (if the slowly filling star ranking gauge in GH: Metallica is anything to go by).

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As a long time fan of the Guitar Hero/Rock Band franchises, I dutifully pre-ordered my copy of Guitar Hero: Metallica yesterday so I can be playing it as soon as possible. I love Metallica’s music, so I’m looking forward to what the demo presented as quite a compitent addition to the Guitar Hero series. Rock Band: The Beatles is also slated for release this year, and I’ll probably grab that too. Adding to the already published RB: AC/DC Live and GH: Aerosmith, it’s obvious that publishers have found a new, cheap and easy way of expanding their music titles (even though some may argue that the quality of a music release is often in it’s range of different musical tastes).

Band tie-in games are obviously an untapped gold mine for developers, and to prove my point, I give to you 8 band branded music games that I’m sure we’d all like to see: Read more

It’s only 9am, and already I’ve promised to do something stupid all day.  I encourage our readers to join me too.

If you yawn today, yawn in a downwards scale and then when you’re done, make a “pchew!” explosion noise.

Yup, all Saturday.  And I’m hungover too! Oh my ….

Even Hello Kitty thought this design was cutesy

On starting this site there were a few games that I figured I’d drag back out of my collection to review, if simply because, at the time, they actually managed to have enough of an effect on the frontal lobes to warrant a mention.

Eternal Sonata is one such game. I purchased it originally while looking for some extra RPG titles for the 360. The cover looks a bit kidsy and the story is beyond the ability of a short blurb to encapsulate, but it was cheap and definately an RPG, so I bought it. The other deciding factor was that the game advertises co-op (more on that later), so I figured it’d be good for a laugh. It turns out to be one of the strangest little titles I’ve seen in a long time, and with an oddly mature theme for a game soaked in a cutesy-manga visuals.

OK, where to start on the plot on this one…

This game’s world is set (perhaps, the game could get a bit metaphysical on this one) in the dreams of 19th century classical composer Frederic Francois Chopin. In the “real world” he’s on his death bed, being watched over by his mother, his sister and a doctor.

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Man up Matthew, don’t let the readers see you cry …

True to my word, I went out trawling today after work to find myself some Thief.  It didn’t actually prove as difficult as I perhaps thought it would have been.  The very first store I wandered into had a double-DVD pack of both Thief 2 and Deadly Shadows. And sure enough, it’s only $20AU.

“Splendid!” I think, “A pity they don’t have Thief: Gold, but this will suit me admirably” (apparently I’m more verbose in my thoughts than I am in real life)

So I get home, slide the laptop out and get to installing Thief 2 (I played Deadly Shadows a while back, so I thought I’d begin with 2).  Installation’s fine, up and running in no time.  Let’s start …

… Huh, that’s odd, where was the intro video? Strange.  Oh well, the menu is up, I’ll start the game …

… OK, now the mission brief doesn’t play and I’m skipped right to the start of the mission.  Something must be wrong with the FMV. Oh well, I’ll fix it later, for now let’s go for a …

… System freeze, eh?

And thus it goes.  Perhaps I should have done a little internet trawling before game trawling, because as I now find out, getting Thief 1 or 2 to work on a modern computer is a challenge.  A challenge requiring the patience of a stone and the luck of the devil.

After repeated re-installations, patches, 3rd party patches, driver upgrades, driver downgrades, several very nice similarly minded FAQs and a compatibility test, I’m now fairly certain that I’m doomed not to play Thief 2.  At least, not on this computer, or not without some basic HEX editing.  The best setup I could arrive at so far was a working game, no FMV, and undithered textures.  Which means that even if I run that set-up, all the textures are going to look 8-bit and gamma adjustment isn’t going to help the shadows.  The shadows being, you know, where you’re supposed to spend the whole game.

Still, it shows the dedication of the fans of these games that there is such an abundance of FAQ material out there, suggesting fixes and even making their own patches.  There was even a patch to make Thief 2 widescreen, which looked like an impressive endeavour.

Oh well, Deadly Shadows does work on a modern system, but it irks me to think that I now own one of the original games and I can’t play it because my workstation laptop is too advanced! *sigh*