Tonight! I have a show in St Pete, FL at Cafe Bohemia. I'll be playing again with Joey Hopkins, and Skiffle, and This is an Adventure will be playing too. I think it will be a slightly shorter set than last time but I will be debuting my "Sensual Seduction" cover and you don't want to fucking miss that :D It's 21+ again, but I'll be one of the openers for Yo Majesty's cd release party in Ybor on the 24th and that will be 18+.
So my 1st show was last night and it was awesome! I was a little crippled by nervousness so I wasn't nearly as animated as I wanted to be but people were actually dancing and seemed to be having a good time. People even started singing along to the last song I played (a new one called “Bad Connection”) which surprised the hell out of me! I had a little bit of feedback trouble and I forgot a couple lyrics here and there but it was fun as hell.
I played with Joey Hopkins and Skiffle who were both awesome as well. Joey Hopkins played a glitch-tech-ish chiptunes set with an Atari 2600 set up as well as some other stuff with midi controllers and a laptop. This is what it looked like:
Skiffle (who actually set up the show) played after me and he has this crazy set up where he puts snare drums in front of this huge 5 ft amp and plays bass through it. So the bass through the amp starts sort of playing the snares at the same time he's playing. Crazy stuff.
The best part though was the Dtoiders who came out. Snaileb came out and both Kryptonite and Nademagnet drove all the way down from Orlando (which is like 2 ½ hours from me, though NadeMagnet somehow made it in an hour!). I really appreciated that especially since both of them had to work in the morning the next day (in Orlando). I love this damn community.
Snaileb, Kryptonite, NadeMagnet
Also Snaileb was definitely Mr Hype-Man last night and helped me focus and get into it as he screamed back the whole set (which was fucking hilarious). It also helped that he was completely wasted the whole time :p We all ended up eating across the street after the show and were going to head back to my place for some Rock band but it was already super late so we'll have to wait for the FL NARP.
So yeah, it went well. I actually have another show set up with This Is An Adventure and possibly Castles for the 8th next month in St Pete which I THINK will be 18 and up (don't quote me on that yet though). Here's the set list I played last night:
*Princess P *My Final Fantasy *Your Last Life *3D Lover *These Streets of Rage *What Would JT Do? *Blocks in the Sky *Bad Connection (new song)
I also had enough people ask me if I was playing I'm A Shark to convince me to put it in my next set.
Check out the gallery below for all the pics and I should have some video to show soon too (my friend recorded my whole set). Thanks again to everyone who came out. Hope to see more of you guys next time!
That's right! My first I KILL PXLS show EVAH is Thursday if you're in the Sarasota area. I'll be playing with two other bands Joey Hopkins Midget Factory and Skiffle. There's no cover charge but it is 21+ since it's a bar.
I'll be playing another show on the 20th of next month in Sarasota too if you can't make it to this one (and I'm sure some more shows after that). So make it out if you can! I'll probably forget the words to all my songs and it will be hilarious(ly awkward)!
Ok. There's been a lot of talk today about racism in games and I feel like I need to comment on some of the insane-o reactions to these stories. I originally was going to write this blog about a story on Kotaku that quoted Morgan Gray (the Senior Producer at Crystal Dynamics) about his feelings on black stereotypes in games, but then over here Gameboi posted about a quote from N'Gai (En-Guy) Croal pertaining to the Resident Evil 5 trailer. So I'm going to give you a 2-for-1 and talk about each separately. Strap yourselves in kids because this is going to be a long one.
First, a little background on me:
I'm the product of a white dad and a black mom. I don't really identify myself as either as I am no more one than the other, and I never even gave it that much thought until someone pointed it out to me at the age of 10. Being of mixed decent, I've had the unique opportunity of being able to see both sides of the proverbial fence. I have really rich white relatives who live in the same neighborhood as Oprah's father, really rich black relatives who could afford to buy my cousin literally a walk in closet full of toys and send him to law school, and poor black relatives who live in the heart of the ghetto where crack houses are just down the road and people shoot guns in the air on the street on New Years.
Despite the fact that my Dad is a religious right wing white guy, he raised me on NWA, 2 Live Crew, and Wu-Tang and used to blast "Fuck the Police” when the cops came to our house late at night to tell us to turn the music down (on more than one occasion). I myself tended to relate and hang out with white people more (while my little brother related more to black people), but I had plenty of black friends as well since the schools I went to had a good mix of races. My point is that I come from a pretty diverse/crazy background.
Because of my ability to blend into both racial groups (people mistake me as hispanic, arabian, and asian(?) on a constant basis), I've seen racism from all sides. I've also been the victim of racism a few times as I seem to attract white girls with extremely racist fathers. But I'm not easily offended at all, I'm not a big fan of political correctness, and I tend to laugh most racist stuff off.
But enough about me.
Let's talk about the Kotaku article first. This is the quote that Kotaku pulled from Morgan Gray's interview:
“Here's the thing: Cole Train on his own, no harm no foul. But what is Cole Train? ColeTrain is basically like every other effin' black character in a video game. Like here comesthe urban stereotype. Where is this 1990's — not even 2000 — black slang, wheredoes this fit in this futuristic world that doesn't even take place on Earth? They goreally far to do a lot of fictional justifications for this culture that they've built, andthey go right back to this urban stereotype for the black character.
I'm not knocking Epic; the game was fun and gorgeous. But it's just a lack of thought, right?All it does is reinforce dumb stereotypes and it sort of reinforces casual racism.”
Now over on Kotaku, the main reaction to this was along the lines of “All football players are like that. It wouldn't make sense if he was a scrawny white guy.” which totally misses the point. Now let's make a few things clear.
*First of all, I think Cole is the most awesomest character in Gears. The dude is hilarious and lightens up the mood when he's around.
*Second, Gears of War isn't the pinnacle of character development. Pretty much everyone in the game is a stereotype of some kind.
*Third, from what I heard, Cole was inspired and voiced by Terry Tate or more specifically, those awesome “Terrible Terry Tate: Office Linebacker” commercials. Epic saw those and thought it would be cool if you could play a character like that in a game.
All that said, is Cole Train a negative black stereotype? Hell yes. He's the stereotypical loud mouth, cocky, football playin, simple minded, out dated gangsta slang spoutin black guy. He's extremely entertaining and again, I love the guy, but this is still true so Morgan used Cole Train as an example.
But within the context of the full original article, you can see that his point wasn't about how Cole is a negative stereotype, or even that it's not ok to have a character like that every now and then, it was the fact that more often than not when black people (or most minorities) are portrayed in games, they turn out to be a character like Cole Train. This loud mouth, attitude having, stereotypical black guy. I can't stress this point enough since so many people missed it over there so I'll say it again.
His point is that 9 times out of 10, the minority is portrayed as a negative stereotype.
Morgan isn't saying there's no place for a character like that, only that he'd like to see a more balanced portrayal of minorities in games.
Now about this N'Gai quote.
A LOT of people are reading the quote and mis-interpreting it as him saying that Resident Evil 5 is racist. THIS IS NOT WHAT HE'S SAYING AT ALL. He was merely pointing out how the trailer could be mis-interpreted (ironic huh?) as being racist and how the marketing team might want to be a little more careful about it. He was explaining how as a black man, the images of a white guy shooting up a village full of crazy black people could be a little jarring ESPECIALLY out of context.
Now, when I first saw the trailer, my first reaction like most people here was “ZOMG ALMIGHTY! Look at the GraphiX!!”. Ok, actually it was “What kind of super-roids has Chris been taking?”, but while watching it I thought the same thing N'Gai did. “Oh shit. Al Sharpton is going to have a field day with this.” If you didn't then good for you. You're cookie is in the mail. But you have to understand that we as gamers know that RE is about shooting zombies so that's what we see, but imagine you have no idea what RE is or even the basic concept. Imagine you're a black person who is old enough to remember segregation and MLK being assassinated, and stories about black people being lynched or drug behind trucks and the white people who got away with it because of all white juries. Now imagine you're watching TV and the RE5 trailer pops up as a commercial. HOPEFULLY you can understand what the reaction to that might be like.
Now again we have the argument of “But no one complained about the Spanish zombies in RE4! Why are you complaining now?”. Well if you saw the “zombies” in RE4 in a quick 30 second commercial on TV would you automatically think “Hey. Why is that white guy shooting all those Spanish people?”? No because the zombies in RE4 looked pretty fucked up already and you don't really identify them as Spanish until they start talking (at least I didn't). The black zombies in RE5 don't even really look like zombies. They just look like a bunch of crazy black people. Hell, one of them is using a megaphone with his stunna shades on.
People keep saying “Well if you look for racism all the time, of course you'll find it.” or “If you keep pointing out racism, you're only perpetuating racism” which is not only retarded it's again, missing the point. If you read N'Gai's quote again, he keeps stressing the imagery and context in the trailer. That's because as a black person in America, you have this historical context of violence and oppression against blacks. For a lot of people, who grew up with this and were able to see it happen before their eyes, when this imagery of a white guy shooting up all these scary black people is presented to them with no context, they can't help but be reminded of those events. Again, N'Gai isn't saying RE5 is racist, he's only suggesting that the marketing team provide CONTEXT for the imagerywhen they present it to the uninformed, lest they want a shit-storm upon their doors.
This is ALL he's fucking saying.
There are some other points I'd like to make but this blog is already too long. Hopefully this will help some of you understand where these guys are coming from. I also recommend you watch or listen to Barack Obama's recent speech about racism. No matter what you're political affiliation is, he explains the issue we're talking about here pretty well. That's it. I'm out.
I already basically wrote this but I figured I'd make it more prominent here to help people out.
The trick is to be persistent and patient. If it gives you an error just keep trying over and over. EVENTUALLY you'll get it to work. This goes for every step of the process (accessing the page, purchasing points, buying the maps, etc). It fucking sucks and it's going to take you a while probably but eventually it works.
I'm currently at 60% in downloading the maps now and it's not giving me any trouble at the moment. The only thing I'm worried about is the update part once CoD4 is booted up since it's going to take longer to retry the download.
Via Kotaku I found out about an article from Wired's Game | Life detailing the DLC for the Square-Enix WiiWare game Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King. Here's the basic rundown:
Three Races Pack (800 points): All three new races in one slightly discounted set.
Lilty House, Selkie House, Yuke House (300 points each): Houses that produce new adventurers of the other three races in the Crystal Chronicles world.
King's Change of Clothes (100 points): Crazy eyepatch pirate outfit for the King.
Chime's Dress-Up (100 points): A new outfit for your assistant Chime.
Sacred Shrine (200 points): A shrine that lets warriors temporarily buff themselves up.
Gorgeous House (100 points): A big house that many different people can live in.
So as I feared originally, each race will cost 300 points ($3) EACH or you can get all 3 for 800 points ($8) on top of the $15 that the base game costs. When you're buying these races, this is just to have them populate your world and if you don't buy them, you'll only have one race of humans around.
Now that's not really the bad part though as I read further in the article:
"Note that it actually lists the number of memory blocks that each item takes up. And that the file sizes differ based on what you're downloading, which indicates that these are, at least, actual pieces of extra content and not just unlock keys. Well, to a point, anyway: Why does a new outfit for the King take up 3 blocks but an entire new race of people only take up 1?"
That basically confirms that the races are already there on your original download and you're only paying for fucking unlock key. The game already costs $15 and they're going to charge you $8-$9 just to unlock the stuff you've already downloaded? That's bullshit Square-Enix. We do NOT want DLC for the sake of DLC you cunts! When will you understand this!?
Am I being irrational? Does no one else feel like this is a rip-off?
Gametrailers has unleashed the first trailer for the new Hulk game based on the new movie. I was excited for this but after watching it my main reaction is an extreme “MEH!”. I knew it was going to be heavily inspired by the awesomeness that was Hulk: Ultimate Destruction but so far, it looks like a major rip-off of it with a now-gen graphical polish.
Normally I'd still be kind of alright with that but it doesn't even seem to be taking advantage of the hardware. For example, when he does the move from the last game where he rips the car in half, you can tell there aren't any physics going on there. They just swap the car model for two broken parts. Even with that said I'd still probably get it but with Prototype on the horizon (from the original developers of H:UD no less) I just can't get enthused for this. Oh well.
That's right. As of yesterday (Friday) I have 2 songs featured on Audio Surf Radio. The songs are “Unblockable” and “Game Over Man” both of which are from the EP Your Arcade is a Dance Floor. They should be up there until next Friday when some new songs are rotated in. So check them out if you haven't already!
Also, thanks a lot to everyone who donated. You have no idea how much I appreciate that. And thanks to everyone for the support. You guys are awesome. Wu-Tang!
After a whole lot of pixelated blood, sweat, and tears, the first I KILL PXLS album is done and out. As promised, I've decided to release it upon the internet masses for free and you can download it now at the new official site WWW.IKILLPXLS.COM. It's being hosted at a few different sources so hopefully you won't have any trouble getting it but let me know if you do.
At the new website, you'll also find pages with download links for the other releases ("Your Arcade is a Dance Floor" & "LOST LVLS") as well as all of the remixes I've done so far. Pretty soon I'll have a page up for everything else like wallpaper, photos, and lyrics too.
There's also a donate button on the front page if you want to contribute but don't feel obligated to. Most importantly I wanted to get the music out there and that's why it's up for free.
Thanks to everyone at DESTRUCTOID for all your support and feedback and shiz. I really appreciate it. Now go download the album, fire up Audio Surf (or Vib Ribbon if you're cool like me), and enjoy!
Also, Dance BITCHES!
Track list: 1. Mega Love Gun
2. Princess P
3. Your Last Life
4. 3D Lover
5. Mid-Boss
6. My Final Fantasy
7. Blocks in the Sky
8. These Streets of Rage
9. WWJTD?
10. Continue?
11. Destructoid Theme
After a whole lot of pixelated blood, sweat, and tears, the first I KILL PXLS album is done and out. As promised, I've decided to release it upon the internet masses for free and you can download it now at the new official site WWW.IKILLPXLS.COM. It's being hosted at a few different sources so hopefully you won't have any trouble getting it but let me know if you do.
At the new website, you'll also find pages with download links for the other releases ("Your Arcade is a Dance Floor" & "LOST LVLS") as well as all of the remixes I've done so far. Pretty soon I'll have a page up for everything else like wallpaper, photos, and lyrics too.
There's also a donate button on the front page if you want to contribute but don't feel obligated to. Most importantly I wanted to get the music out there and that's why it's up for free.
Thanks to everyone at DESTRUCTOID for all your support and feedback and shiz. I really appreciate it. Now go download the album, fire up Audio Surf (or Vib Ribbon if you're cool like me), and enjoy!
Also, Dance BITCHES!
Track list: 1. Mega Love Gun
2. Princess P
3. Your Last Life
4. 3D Lover
5. Mid-Boss
6. My Final Fantasy
7. Blocks in the Sky
8. These Streets of Rage
9. WWJTD?
10. Continue?
11. Destructoid Theme
