Tonight, for Sharon’s birthday, she and I went to Video Games Live. It was the first concert in their tour where an orchestra plays awesome video game music with video from the games themselves along with the occasional lasers and live action. The first thing that happened involved Sharon’s shirt being videotaped because she was wearing her 1UP mushroom shirt. Maybe her chest will be on TV! The opening piece from Metal Gear Solid was awesome. Hideo Kajima (the creator of the Metal Gear series of games) was there. In addition, there was some live action involving Solid Snake evading a guard (complete with bang [exclamation mark: “!”] over his head), which ended in escaping his detection by hiding in a box! I also really like the music from Metal Gear, so that turned out to be the highlight of the show. The rest of it was awesome and really fun. Some of the other video games they played music from were God of War, Beyond Good and Evil, Zelda, Medal of Honor, Advent, Warcraft, Mario, Castlevania, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, Sonic, Halo, and some others I can’t remember off the top of my head. They added some choral vocals to a few of the songs. Sometimes it worked, other times not so much. Hearing the Los Angeles Philharmonic playing video game music was pretty cool in that instead of playing serious pieces of classical music centuries old, they were playing music to a couple of people playing Frogger on the screen live. Speaking of which, the first person who played, a middle-aged woman, really sucked and got booed when she admitted to never having played a video game before. The other person, a 13-year-old kid, did far better than she and won a laptop from AMD for his efforts. All in all, it was a really fun time had by both of us. It would have been nice to get some programs specific to the event, but for $15, we settled on awesome T-shirts instead.
1UP is w00t!!