Scraps: All revved up and no place to go (9/17/2008)

This is probably going to further label me as being old and out of touch with what the kids are into, but I really love Jim Steinman. You’d probably know him best as the guy who wrote every good song that Meat Loaf ever recorded (with the possible exception of his cover of Tear Me Down, originally from the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch).

The dude writes really amazing, operatic rock songs but I think the biggest draw I have to his music are the titles for his songs. There’s almost nothing I like better than a cliche. Things like Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad, Objects in the Rear View Mirror and You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth always seem to put a wry sort of smile on my face. Plus, he’s frequently been referred to as the “God of Excess.” How can you not be intrigued by that?

I hope his stuff never winds up in Rock Band. Consoles around the world would start exploding from the sheer magnitude of awesome contained in them. Speaking of awesome, here are some stories that weren’t awesome enough for us to post today:

• The “technical issue” that kept WipeOut HD from releasing soonerhas been revealed to be a failure of an epilepsy screening procedure. I had no idea such a thing existed. Isn’t that what the little warning is supposed to exonerate developers for? [Eurogamer]
• ECA President, Hal Halpin, claims that the DRM in Spore has resulted in the conversion of perfectly honest gaming consumers into filthy, swashbuckling pirates. [GamePolitics]
• FreeRadical is holding a poll to see what platforms gamers would be interested in seeing Timesplitters 4 on. Wii is currently leading the pack, big time. [Kotaku]
• Sony and David Jaffe are being sued for copyright infringement. The plaintiff, an author, claims that characters and relationships were lifted from his series of novels. Call me crazy, but I would have thought Greek mythology to be pretty firmly in the public domain space. [GamePolitics]