I attended Video Games Live, a concert, last night at the Hollywood Bowl with some co-workers. In fact, I saw both sets of co-workers last night: my new ones from PG, and my old ones from T2. The weird thing was that I didn’t know my old co-workers were going to be there; I just ran into them in the parking lot. There was some confusion and my current boss thought I was just incredibly popular or had some strange fan club because we kept bumping into people I knew, but it was only because a whole bunch of people from T2 decided to go together.

The concert was pretty poorly organized, in my opinion. No one knew until about 2 hours before the start of the concert that there was going to be a pre-show where the audience could mingle with some of the game developers/designers/composers in a picnic area. I missed that part because of traffic and work, but at least I arrived on time for the concert. Things were just a little too unprofessional for me. There were so many things that went wrong or could be done better about the concert.

One of the MC’s, Tommy Tallarico, was incredibly obnoxious. Not as obnoxious as he is on his TV show, which I won’t mention here because it’s terrible, but still fairly obnoxious. That’s not the part that bothers me though. I’ve dealt with annoying MC’s and DJ’s before, but the thing that really bothered me about him and this concert is that because he’s executive producer, he also included the music for one of his recent games, Advent Rising. What the hell?! Advent Rising is a terrible game and it should not be included in a performance which features great games like Mario Brothers, Legend of Zelda, and Pong! Self indulgence must be Tommy Tallarico’s middle name.

Tommy wasn’t the only one using his producing powers to foul up the concert. The other co-creator and MC was Jack Wall. He must have pulled a few strings because not only was his wife doing solo vocals in the concert, but his young daughter was also. They were both bad. His wife was off-key, didn’t match the original vocals for the music, was way too dramatic in her hand gestures (which were not needed), and did I mention she was off key? His daughter wasn’t as bad. I have to give her credit because it must be insanely difficult to stand in front of such a large audience at any age. However, I still think they could have gotten someone more experienced to sing. His daughter wavered a bit on a few notes, but not as badly as her mother did.

Another gripe I had about the concert was the Medal of Honor music tribute. Each musical tribute included a full orchestra and choir doing the music as well as three giant screens displaying clips from the respective games. During the part for Medal of Honor, the MC’s said something like, “Video games get a bad reputation for being too violent. Instead of showing clips of the game, we’re going to do something different. We’re going to show you clips of the real World War II.” Does that even make sense? They might as well say something like, “Video games are too violent, so we’re going to show you real violence.” Luckily, they didn’t show direct violence on the screen. Instead, they showed clips of the devastation of war: crying children, sorrowful soldiers, sobbing wives, etc. The whole video was out of place and put a huge dampner on the crowd, I think.

I was surprised they did not save the Mario Brothers song for the finale. It’s a song that almost everyone recognizes, so it would make sense to save it for the end. Unfortunately, the rendition of the Mario Brothers song didn’t have enough ‘oomph’ behind it, I think. The whole thing was too mellow, compared to the other action-packed music which came before it in the concert. I thought they could have added more bass and percussion to the whole theme overall. The music that end up being the finale was the theme to Halo. While I do think the Halo soundtrack is good, I don’t think it should beat Mario Brothers out of the ending spot, but I guess the producers put it last because it’s what most people went to the concert to hear.

Unfortunately, the Halo theme was a huge flop. MasterChief would have curled up in the corner and cried if he had been there. They had Steve Vai (the guy who plays the guitar parts in the song) there in person, and it was still a failure. Something went wrong with the audio and Steve’s guitar amp was mute for 99% of the concert. We only heard 3 notes from his guitar and it was at the end and one of them was deafeningly loud. Imagine Halo without any guitar parts to it and that’s what we had to sit through at the end. The screen also cut to a red screen like something crashed. The MCs tried to play it off and told everyone the concert was over, but I think everyone could tell someone fucked up big time.

I saved the biggest complaint for the end. It’s not a complaint about the actual concert this time. It’s a complaint about the idiots sitting behind me. For lack of a nicer term, I’ll call them Gamer N00bs. I think Halo was the first and only game they ever played because through-out the whole concert, they kept saying, “I want to hear Halo! Halo! Halo!” as well as singing the Gregorian chant part over all the other music which was played. I would have expected that kind of behavior from an 11 year old, but these guys were well into their mid 20s. They were so incredibly n00b because of these wonderful nuggets of information which came out of their mouths when the game clips were being shown on screen. These are words from the guy sitting right behind me, who I guess thought he was the l33t gamer of the bunch:

When a clip of the Nintendo version of Castlevania was shown: OMG Mario! I played that! You get a whip and you whip things!
When the PS2 clip of Castlevania was shown: That one was first. It was on the Nintendo. It was sooo good.
When Myst was shown: Oh my god guys. That game was SOOOO bloody! I played it a long time ago on the Playstation. The original one. Playstation 1.
When World of Warcraft was shown: Hey that’s the game I was playing when you called me, Kirk. What? You don’t remember? Yeah, I was shooting a bunch of monsters when you called.
When Advent Rising was shown: That game’s gonna be like the next Everquest or Warcraft. It’s gonna be GOOD.

Enough of the bad stuff though. Despite all the negatives, I did enjoy the concert. My favorite part was probably either One Winged Angel from Final Fantasy (being played by that interweb-famous guy who plays all sorts of video game music on the piano) or God of War. One Winged Angel was beautiful, while God of War was powerful and got my blood pumping. I was psyched to go home and play the game after hearing the segment for God of War. I definitely recommend everyone who loves video games and/or music to attend this event. They’re touring at a couple major cities and tickets weren’t that expensive. I got some fairly decent seats for only $16 + $5 (ticket master rape-me “convenience” fees).

This entry was posted on Friday, July 8th, 2005 at 12:11 am and is filed under Geek-out, Video Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.