22 Mar 2007
This last Friday I caught Bitter Sweet at the Triple Door. I first heard the band up on Zune Arts, which if you haven’t seen yet you should totally check out - there are a lot of cool animations up there. Bitter Sweet’s debut album, The Mating Game, is really solid; varied, yet cohesive. I wasn’t surprised at all when I heard that one of the Bitter Sweet duo was also one of the founding members of Supreme Beings of Leisure. There’s a lot of similarities in the grand instrumentation and the quality of the vocals (although it’s a different singer).
Anyway, when I spotted the poster that said Bitter Sweet would be at the Triple Door, I was pretty excited. The Triple Door is a great venue: super classy with excellent food. It’s a great place to go if you’re really interested in listening and won’t mind not being able to dance. Bitter Sweet has a lot of funk in them, so they didn’t really fit into that “sit and listen” bucket most of the time, but I was busy munching on tasty schezwan green beans so I didn’t really mind.
I had a good time at the show, but I have to say that Bitter Sweet is a lot better in the studio. The actual band is only two people. This performance had six people. The actual required instrumentation of most of their songs is more on the order of ten or more. It’s hard to get into a performance where almost half of what you’re hearing is prerecorded. Which you would think would keep the integrity of the songs up to the quality of the studio recordings, but it didn’t. The show had a very rough start with the levels being way off and the tempo being rushed. They found their stride a couple songs in, but it never quite had the impact of their fine tuned studio recordings. You may just think I’m a stickler for production, but generally I actually prefer the grit of live performances. I spent a lot of the show watching the added musicians to try and figure out what they were actually contributing to what I was hearing. I never did figure that out, partially because the show was just so darn short. Bitter Sweet really needs to cough up another album to fill out their sets. I may sound pretty critical of the performance here, but I was happy to support the band and I’d snatch up any second album in a heartbeat.
Apparently I would have been better off never having heard that debut album before coming to the show. A friend that we (the already initiated) invited to the show had never heard the band before. And she promptly bought the album the next day. So if you had never heard how good the band was in the studio, apparently that show rocked.
16 Mar 2007
Played on PC
I held it off as long as possible, but at last I have hit level 70 in World of Warcraft (TBC reviews: GameSpot, GameSpy). I had no interest in rushing the journey from 60 to 70 because I knew that the returns diminish pretty dramatically after you hit the level cap. It’s likely that Blizzard has handled it better this time around, but it’s a fundamental limitation of this kind of game that at some point the content thins out and they have to string you along with a decreasing time/value proposition. So I’ve absolutely taken my time to smell all the flowers as I’ve strolled through The Burning Crusade.
The quality of content added in this expansion is undeniably of a higher quality than what was previously available. The quests are more interesting, the zones flow better, the rewards are more diversified, the instances are more streamlined… everything’s just plain better. This is true not just of the new Outland 60 to 70 content, but also of the new 1 to 20 content for the two new races: blood elves and draenei. Leveling a new character through the first two zones is a much deeper experience than it used to be. Unfortunately then you get dumped off in the old stuff for the next 40 levels. Which leaves sitting here with a level 20 blood elf, thinking “do I really want to go through all that again?”
Meanwhile back in Outland, my level 70 druid has a similar dilemma: how do I want to spend my time at the level cap? For me the game is all about the locations. So in the meantime the answer to my question is easy, as that of the seven zones in Outland I’ve only really cleared out five and a half of them. Plus there are fifteen instances on your way to 70, and I’ve only visited six of those. On top of that there are the more hardcore ones that require uber gear, but I recognize that I’ll likely never see those. So from where I am now I’m just going to keep doing what I have been doing: solo questing through the zones, grouping up to do an instance every now and then, and occasionally doing commando style solo runs on the instances that previously owned me so that I can convince myself that I’m a badass.
I don’t feel like I’ve hit the wall yet, and I’m optimistic that when I do I’ll realize it and have the self control to just stop and go play another game or something. My achievement point addiction and WoW addiction will continue to battle it out, striking some sort of tenuous balance. And then when my crack-riddled psyche needs some rest I can flail around like a crazy person with my Wii. Problem solved.
12 Mar 2007
Played on Wii
Warioware: Smooth Moves (GameSpy, GameSpot, GameFly) is my fourth contact with the Warioware series. And it feels like all the previous iterations were just building up to this one. It arrived on the GBA. Multiplayer was added when it was ported to the GameCube. When it hit the DS it brought a more intuitive set of controls. And then it revisited the GBA to experiment with motion controls (which is the one title I missed). And now it’s here on the Wii, and the Wiimote makes it the best yet.
Warioware has always been crazy, and there’s a group of people that have always found it appealing. But bringing the whole experience to life with the motion controller makes it far more approachable. Seeing some ambiguous one-word explanation and being expected to press a button or do something on the D-pad just wasn’t that intuitive. But physically shaking that banana or turning that key is obvious. In the past, multiplayer with Warioware was a brutal matchup of those who knew the games and those who didn’t. But the gap is much narrower with Smooth Moves, making party style multiplayer viable after only a quick introduction.
I’ve said before that I want my games to be more exciting than reality. Warioware shows the exception to this rule. The microgames are generally the most mundane tasks imaginable (like vacuuming or sharpening a pencil). But throwing a set of these tasks at you in disorienting rapid succession somehow makes that all okay. And mixing those in with more fantastic tasks like throwing shurikens at impeding ninjas or lasering down giant monsters can’t help but make you smile.
The one complaint I have with Warioware is that although the controls are more intuitive they’re decidedly more flakey. There are times when you tweak out the sensor and miss a round even though you were doing the right thing. And if the game were less fun this would be really aggravating. But before you have a chance to really get mad a new game is coming your way and you’ve forgotten all about it.