PixlBit

Saturday night my wife and I had the opportunity to see Video Games Live, Tommy Tallarico's incredible orchestral game concert series. (Tommy is probably best known for the soundtrack to Earthworm Jim, though he holds the Guinness Book of World Records record for working on more video games than any other person. Over 300!) This was our second time going (our first was about two and a half years ago) and it was just as good this time around. They revisited a few of the same games as the last we saw them but it was mostly new stuff. They had a Phoenix Wright medley! I might have squeaked with delight just a little bit when they started that one. Another favorite of mine was the Mega Man medley. Hearing that Wily 2 music from a live orchestra was moving. There were some expected franchises represented like Mario, Zelda, Sonic, Castlevania, and Final Fantasy, which were all really great (Castlevania was a total rock fest with Tommy himself playing the electric guitar). Last time they played the music to the opening cinematic of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm as the visuals played on the big screen; this time they played Warlords of Draenor. Blizzard sure knows how to do those things! They also played League of Legends, Skyrim, and Resident Evil 5. Even though I've played the game, I was surprised by how much I liked the music from Uncharted 2. Metal Gear Solid, Shadow of the Colosus, Mass Effect, Halo, Street Fighter II, Kingdom Hearts (I can never hear "Hikari" too many times)—so much good stuff!

I decided to dip into the Image Comics ocean recently and bought a couple books. The first one is a new series called Descender. Here, let me grab the blurb from Amazon: "Young Robot boy TIM-21 and his companions struggle to stay alive in a universe where all androids have been outlawed and bounty hunters lurk on every planet. Written by award-winning creator, Jeff Lemire, Descender is a rip-roaring and heart-felt cosmic odyssey. Lemire pits humanity against machine, and world against world, to create a sprawling epic." Apparently there are huge world-destroying robots called Harvesters too. It sounds cool and has great reviews and I'm rather excited to read it.

Circles is very simple. It's a memory game. You start with between two and six hollow circles on the screen. The circles will light up in a sequence and you have to tap the circles to recreate the sequence. After each successful completion the sequence repeats and adds another one at the end.  The game has a series of levels, each with one more circle than the last (from two to six). Complete sixteen rounds of the sequence and you unlock the next level. The last couple levels have lightning bolts and other odd symbols next to them instead of the number of circles, and I'm not sure what's up with that since I didn't unlock that far. But hopefully those levels add some variety to the proceedings; things are a little dry as they are. (There IS a multiplayer for anybody with Game Center friends but I was not able to try it out.) Still, there's nothing wrong with a simple game and if you like testing your memory or are trying to prevent Alzheimer's, this is as good a game as any to try out.

Another comic I've been reading lately is quite old. Batman Chronicles collects all the oldest Batman comics in chronological order. It's really interesting to see where the Dark Knight originally originated from (note: he has yet to be called the Dark Knight). Batman, as it turns out, was pretty different back then. The second issue describes Bruce Wayne as a "bored young socialite" and it's not until the seventh issue ("Batman Wars Against the Dirigible of Doom") that we learn about his parents getting murdered when he was a boy. He also uses a gun on occasion and has purposely killed several bad guys or done things that directly led to their deaths. Egads!

As a dad of two kids under four, I'm very familiar with preschooler toys and shows and something we've really gotten into recently is Thomas minis. You're all familiar with Thomas the Tank Engine, I'm sure, and Thomas minis are basically chibi train engines. They came out last year but seem to have reached mass consciousness only recently (that's when we noticed them). You can buy them together in packs or individually in blind packs. What's cool is that the blind packs have numbers printed on them, so thanks to lists people have compiled on the internet you can actually know what's inside (though we have had a few surprises).