I used to listen to Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive" ALL THE TIME and sing along with it ALL THE TIME. You might know the song better as "The credits song from the end of Portal" or "That Portal Song", Portal, of course, being the greatest game of 2007. I also used to quote the many memorable quotes from that game LIKE CRAZY!

After a couple of months after the game came out (and after beating it a couple dozen times (and I am NOT exaggerating)), I got really tired of the song (and quoting. I also got tired of hearing other people quote the game). And then it came out on the Rock Band music store for free.

Then I moved onto enjoying and singing and playing along once more.

I haven't heard the song in a while, knowing that I was probably sick of it by now. But this video proved me wrong.

The Gifford Children's Choir performs "Still Alive" by Jonathan Coulton from the credits of the video game Portal. Soloist is in an el-wire dress. We are hoping to shoot a better video soon. A few choir members had played the game before the concert. The director is a VG addict that fell off the wagon to play Portal. The kids understood the words. The piece was chosen because it is an excellent piece of music with just the right timbre for the choir.





And to steal the words from a Joystiq commenter (because this is EXACTLY how I felt)

Kids: "...what are we singing?"

Parents: "......what the hell are they singing?"

Teacher: "...I'm going to lose my job for this, but it's -so- worth it."


It's a shame they sang to such a quick tempo, but impressive, nonetheless.

XD

P.S. In case you were wondering, I was singing along with the children in the video as well. >_< Now I can't WAIT for Portal 2 Portal 2 Portal 2 Portal 2 Portal 2 Portal TWOOOOO!!!!!!!

Heavy Rain is a different kind of game. I don't think I've ever played a game quite like it. Not even Indigo Prophecy is close to what this game is. That's the first challenge.

The second challenge is trying to play the game without spoiling anything. And even if I didn't want to spoil anything, the game is so personal that everyone will experience the game differently.

The third challenge is that the mechanics of the game outside of the story telling are very simple is that there isn't more than maybe two paragraphs to be written about them. You also can't talk about the mechanics without going into the story.

If I wanted to talk about my experience with the game and my opinion about the game, that would be easy. But trying to do that without spoiling anything, that is hard. The main statement I would like to say about Heavy Rain is that "Even if you and someone else who had played the game had made almost all the same choices, that game can play out VERY differently."

This review is going to be HARD to write...

Heavy Rain...damn!

Posted by Anonymous Saturday, March 20, 2010 0 comments

I'm only a couple of hours into the greatness that is Heavy Rain. I've heard awesome things about it, and today, one of my friends had just beat the game at the library. The game seems short, but apparently the ending he got was way different from the ending that our resident gamer librarian got. I'm excited to see what kind of ending I get!
If anyone remembers the review I did for Call of Duty 4 I did about two years back, I said it was one of the greatest interactive movies ever. Playing Heavy Rain, this game is so far and beyond CoD as an interactive movie, I look back and I think,"I had some pretty low standards, huh!" I think Indigo Prophecy was a much better interactive movie than Call of Duty was.
I think one of the main appeals to the game and one of the things that make this game so good is how tense it makes you. You have to go into the game thinking and knowing that at any point, your character can die. This game gives you a lot of chances to think that it's over. The game also gives you very small reaction time for quick-time events. You could be doing everything fine and smoothly, but once you make that one mistake, you go from tense to off-of-your seat.
The other most appealing part of the game to me is that small choices DO affect how your story is played. I know that many games claim to do the same thing, but not at the same scale that Heavy Rain does it. Games that claim this usually change the events to the game, but they all lead up to the same last choice which is the only one that seems to matter. In Heavy Rain, anything you do can change how the story flows dramatically. As I told you earlier, one of my friends, Dane, had beaten the game and had gotten a completely different ending from what the librarian, Taylor, got. I haven't beaten the game, but apparently I had already proceeded to do things very differently from how she got through the levels, resulting in the death of an important character who didin't die on her save, probably throwing the game into a completely different direction. I just admire that a lot about this game.
The last thing I want to mention good about the game is how pretty the game looks. All the enviroments and characters seemed to have been worked very hard on, it takes you in. That's practically my main point about this game (and probably something I'll use as the sub-title for my upcoming review), "If you allow it to, Heavy Rain immerses you into a fantastic concept for a new generation of games". Sounds ambitious, right? But that's basically what I think. If you allow yourself to become connected withe characters, you will experience all the emotion and tension that they are feeling, which is something that many games that focus on story should do but fail to do.
I'm going to stop myself right here so I can save all my thoughts for the actual review, which will come out very soon after I finish the game. All I have to say right now though is, this game is a must-play! My contender for Game of the Year so far!

The end of Flash Flash Revolution...or is it?

Posted by Anonymous Wednesday, March 10, 2010 5 comments

About half a year ago, Flash Flash Revolution mysteriously disappeared from the internets. One of the sites main moderators posted something about the disappearance of the deeply loved flash game on his personal website.

First, I still have no idea what is going on with the site or if it’ll ever be back. I talked to Synth about 5 weeks ago when he reached out to me in regards to a last ditch effort to sell the site. I did some initial inquiries to some old and new contacts, but after 2 days Synth stopped responding to me, so I stopped pursuing it. It was about 10 days after that that the site went down and has been down ever since. I haven’t talked to him since, nor do I really care anymore whether or not the site comes back. (Tasselfoot)
A couple of months before he posted this news (or lack of), he posted about the problems the site was having concerning money, which started around 2006-2008. I recommend you read this. It's very interesting and reveals a lot about how the site was really doing behind the scenes. I also reveals the story behind him and the site's actual moderator, Synthlight. He reveals in the post that he really never new much about how much money, and that after they all the core FFR staff left LA, they all stopped getting paid even after they continued working there. To me, the thing that pisses me off the most is that Synth had never bothered to speak to any of the team members about anything. By 2008, Synth had become completely inactive on the site and Tass had strongly suggested they sell the site, but nothing ever happened. People were actually offering six-figure amounts of funding, but since Synth never bothered to even return Tass' calls, nothing ever came to fruition. It seriously is a very interesting story. Click here to read his view. I don't doubt that there is another side to this, and even Tass says he is a pretty nice guy to talk to, but if someone stops paying people without any reason, or at least, response with a reason, wouldn't you get pissed? (apparently, Synth owes Tass an estimated $10,000).

Well, as he said in his "last post about FFR", people had been releasing torrents for an offline version of the game after the site had died with some "leaked code". But only until recently, thanks to a Facebook fan page about FFR, one of the old moderators for the website had made a website that currently hosts the game. It also provides a link to the "closest-thing-to-official" forum for the game. The best part about this is that it is a version of the game that was never released to the public and only probably available to the paid-subscribers on the old website. It has a great new look, the song lists are sorted differently, there are more mods, and the best part? All the songs that were ever in the game are available for play without having to unlock them (that's right, even Vertex BETA vrofl).

I'm very happy that this is out, and I would love to see the site having a rebirth (I spent so much time of my life on that website, I had some pretty great memories...), but if this is all that can be brought back, that would be okay.

(The video embedded is an old video of the game back from when the website was still online. This video is for the people who have no idea why I had said that you could play (or a more exact word, attempt) Vertex BETA vrofl. I attempted it at the library today and I couldn't even beat it with friend playing two of the buttons!)




Ahh, good times. Good times...

I've recently been having loads of fun with Borderlands, something I probably wouldn't have thought I would say when I first started playing this game. Working my Soldier from level 1 to 10, I had a really boring time and so did my friend that I was playing with, Stanley. I decided that I may have chosen the wrong class, as I heard from many of my friends and a couple of podcasts that I listened to said that the only good classes to play were the Hunter and Siren. The Soldier's special ability is very useless, even after enhancing it a couple of levels. So Stanley and I started completely new characters, me a Siren, him a Hunter. We still got bored throughout the first couple of levels, but we pushed forward, and after a while (approx. around levels 12-14), we started to have loads of fun. It may have been all the enhancements our characters were starting to get, and we got much more incentive to level up and be better than each other. Then some other guys who I knew started competing with us to who had the best character (I'm still winning by a lot! XP). I'm having a lot of fun with Borderlands, and I plan on playing it a lot more now!


Sorry if this post feels like filler. I might have to post as much as I can with the little time I have now. Once I get a stable internet connection back, I'm going to overload this website with as much as possible. Please stay, anybody that may still read this! I would gladly appreciate it!

Sorry I haven't been posting recently. I'm not dead, guys. I've lost internet connection and I'm currently using my mother's laptop. I also haven't posted the episodes of podcast, but don't worry. The fourth episode was so terrible, I don't want to even hear it again. I can't find a way to download the original third episode, but you can listen to it on the official YouMedia Library of Games website. Oh well. I personally think this is the best episode by far. If you want to start somewhere, start here! Enjoy!

[Download Here]

HOSTED BY PATRICK HERMANN, KAILLIF AMMEN (Gamertag: Gloqwi), STANLEY NG (Gamertag: Battlestorm132), AND TAYLOR BAYLESS with special guest AARON FRANK and CHRISTOPHER THAI
Here are the websites we (and always will be) plugged at the end of the show:

Gloqwi (duh, right here!)
Pat's Website (and Twitter) (the website that inspired me to change the face of this website!)
azndudedowndastreet's YouTube page (my friend's Yu-Gi-Oh channel. These guys take this children card game seriously!)

Intro, Break, and Outro Music: "Echoplex" by Nine Inch Nails.

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