New York Comic Con! Baby Boba Fett with a tiny red lightsaber! Unabashed anime love! Sexy Asian Mario with big boobs! Hispanic Captain America! Comic Con, where we nerds come to roost! I wandered the floor on Thursday and Friday drinking in the sights and sounds and playing video games.
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Rockstar Games never skimps on a soundtrack and L.A. Noire is no exception. The game features the music of Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Thelonious Monk — a suitable backdrop for a detective thriller set in 1947 Los Angeles. In addition, Rockstar partnered with Verve Records for L.A. Noire: Remixed, an EP of remixes of jazz standards by the likes of Dave Sitek and DJ Premier. Premo turned Louis Jordan’s “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens” into an undeniable head-nodder. Rockstar sure knows how to please hip-hop heads.
L.A. Noire is out now. Watch the launch trailer below and listen to the rest of L.A. Noire: Remixed here
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Last Wednesday, Nintendo hosted a preview event in New York to showoff the Nintendo 3DS and announce its release date and price (March 27, 2011, $249.99). I showed up too late to partake of the muffins and yogurt, but I did get to try the thing out with a bunch of different games.
The 3DS is Nintendo’s new handheld and the successor to the DS — it’s not a redesign, but a new device with new games. The top screen displays images in 3D without any special glasses. You can adjust the 3D effect with the slider right next to the top screen. You can turn it up and down or turn it off completely.
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Sphere: Related ContentYeah, I like Madden. I’m not a big video game dude though but I like Madden. I be too high to play video games sometimes.
Halo: Reach is out today and ML (with some special help from GameStop) is giving away three posters. The first three readers to send us an email with their full name and “Reach Poster” in the subject will each receive a brand new poster. Direct all emails here:
And if you email us in the next five minutes, DJ01 will ghost tweet for you for the next six months. Trust me, he’s good.
Update: That’s all folks! The lucky winners have been contacted. Until next time!
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The next time there’s long stretch of time when I don’t post anything on ML, you can blame Halo: Reach. Even though I’ve sworn all kinds of unbreakable oaths to the deity known as Nintendo, Halo has dominated most of my gaming time since Halo 3 came out in 2007.
The next entry in the series, Halo: Reach, comes out September 14 and it promises to be as big of a blockbuster as ever. While you’re waiting to empty a clip in a friend, you can check out HaloFest over at GameStop, where they have videos, contests, and giveaways. One of those life-size statues would go great with the life-size Wu-Tang tapestry I’m trying to commission for my living room (artists, holler).
Check back soon for our thoughts on the game when we get our review copy AND a special Metal Lungies giveaway.
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OK so let’s talk about Robot Unicorn Attack.
I got a link from my friend last night who just told me, “play it. beautiful music.”
I didn’t follow the link right away because I was reading a book. I know, I’m lame. But tonight, I noticed two of my roommates were playing this flash game with extreme interest.
Simply put, Robot Unicorn Attack is the next big thing.
In the game, you play as a robot unicorn who jumps over floating pink cliffs, collects rainbow butterflies, and avoids giant metallic stars.You have three tries or “wishes” to go as far as you can. The further you go and the more rainbow butterflies you get, the higher your score.
While all of this is happening, “Always” by the British synthpop duo Erasure loops in the background. This really sets the tone and defines the game’s character. The endless chorus of “Always, I wanna be with you / And make believe with you / And live in harmony, / harmony oh love” while you’re jumping around as a rainbow-shooting robot unicorn (did I mention the rainbows?) is pretty mesmerizing. Half of the discussion about this game is about the music.
Then there are the dolphins. Yes, dolphins. Conversations like this are happening between college kids right now.
Guy 1: Have you gotten to the dolphins yet?
Guy 2: No?
Guy 1: Man up.
The dolphins appear every time you get 5,000 points. Some people have been trying to figure out what the dolphins do, but as one user on the Adult Swim discussion board put it, “they don’t mean anything, just that you are awesome.”
So just to recap: unicorns, stars, butterflies, and dolphins. And everything is pink and baby blue and sparkling all over.
OK. The presentation is stellar and the gameplay is addicting, but what is it about Robot Unicorn Attack that’s eliciting this kind of response from people? The game has been played 1.6 million times and there are endless comments about how “amazing” and “incredible” it is. One person wrote on Facebook, “Robot Unicorn Attack completed my life. Ive never played a game so simple yet so amazing. Everything is so rainbow its great. Live on Robot Unicorn Attack!” Something about this game has struck a cord with young Americans right now.
There’s a layer of darkness underneath the game’s cheery exterior. Before you start, you get messages like “A fiery death awaits you” and “Persistence is futile.” When you lose, the unicorn explodes and you see its severed head with wires sticking out and tears streaming down its cheek.
Maybe there was a unicron on some girl’s binder in second grade. A cute girl. A lost love, perhaps. A robot is an emotionless husk that doesn’t dare to feel or think for itself. Meanwhile, there are butterflies and rainbows everywhere and a voice sings, “Am I here in vain? / Hold on to the night / There will be no shame.”
Put all of that together, and you’ve got the mind frame of the 21 year old who is about to graduate from college into this bleak economy.
Robot Unicron Attack is the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” of my generation. Play it. Feel it.
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Screw hip-hop for a second. A group called Zelda Reorchestrated spent the last six years recreating the soundtrack to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to sound like it was recorded by live musicians. Ocarina is possibly the greatest game of all time and the soundtrack is freaking timeless.
Zelda Reorchestrated almost realizes the dream of a fully orchestrated Ocarina soundtrack – the project uses a virtual orchestra, which sounds good, but isn’t entirely convincing. We’ll have to wait until another day for the real deal.
via Joystiq
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Rockstar has shown time and time again that it has good taste in music. DJ Premier and DJ Green Lantern hosted two of GTA4’s radio stations; Oh No, MF Doom and Ghostface did the title track for Chinatown Wars; and Statik Selektah did the soundtrack for The Lost and Damned as well as a banger for Midnight Club: L.A.
So their collaboration with Timbaland on a music game should come as no surprise. Beaterator, which came out last week, is Rockstar’s first big foray into the music genre.
Rockstar is quick to point out that Beaterator isn’t a game in the traditional sense in that it doesn’t have goals and challenges like Rock Band or Guitar Hero. With Beaterator, Rockstar aimed to create a portable, powerful, user-friendly music creation suite.
Continued after the jump
Sphere: Related ContentMy other passion in life is video games. E3 (the Electronic Entertainment Expo) takes place this week in Los Angeles which means video game companies are making major announcements. The most fun part of game announcements (aside from actually playing said games) is the shiny new trailers. AaronM gave you a taste yesterday, but here’s the blowout. And I’m keeping it strictly Nintendo because that’s how I roll.
No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle. Game designer/auteur Suda 51’s , over the top, stylish action game. Jidaigeki meets punk rock meets miscellaneous American pop culture references. It’s OK to be a little confused.
I put the rest after the jump because it’s an assload of videos.
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