Pages

Saturday 30 April 2011

Recommendation: Video Games Live

            Video Games Live is a concert consisting solely of music from video games.  There is an orchestra and a choir which are fantastic and play music from games like Zelda and Halo live while a massive screen shows videos that they have put together of the games.  Tommy Tallarico who some of you probably know from his time as co-host of The Electric Playground and Judgement Day/Reviews on the Run is the creator of the show which has been around since 2005 and has since become a massive sensation.  Tommy also hosts and helps preform certain songs on his guitar and does a great job.  Video Games Live has around 80 segments in its repertoire but they are only able to perform 18-20 per night.  This means that if you go to see the show multiple times you will experience an almost totally different show each time. 

The music is fantastically performed and brings back lots of great nostalgia.  Hearing songs from Halo, Final Fantasy, Mario and Zelda bring back wonderful memories but it also shows how far the video game industry has come, that I would rather listen to these songs than I would most songs made by famous bands and singers goes a long way to silence all those people who think that video games are just for kids.  There is also a number of interesting parts outside of the performances; there was also a series of video game vs. clips with stuff like Sonic vs. Pacman where Sonic sprints through a Pacman level in seconds and many more funny mash-ups. They even had lists of the worst titles and the worst voice acting/dialogue in video games which were really funny and I promise you haven’t heard them all before, in fact I didn’t even know most of them were games, if you had told me to check out some of those games I would have said you were making them up.  Also there are crowd interaction segments where members of the audience face over in a game to win prizes (I saw two guys compete in a round of Frogger).

The show was fantastic and I can’t wait to see it again.  If you’re a fan of video games (which you should be because that’s what this blog is mostly about) you’re going to love Video Games Live.  You get to relive some great memories, hear beautifully performed music and maybe discover some great pieces that you hadn’t heard before.  Also while the show is very much for gamers (Tommy tells some jokes and talks a bit about the industry and why he made the show) you can totally bring people who don’t know much about video games to show them just how amazing they truly are.   

No comments:

Post a Comment

Batman: Arkham Knight Critique - Joker Story

The most compelling aspect of the story in “Batman: Arkham Knight” for me was Batman’s ongoing hallucinations of The Joker. I had heard...