You can find the post here, if you’re so inclined. Stuff will actually happen here in the next little bit, honest – just as soon as I work out how much of my morning to spend Wii Fit-ing verus how much to spend trying to be clever, we should be good to go.

So where are the cover versions of games? I’m not talking about remakes – those are a dime a dozen, clogging smaller game channels like the 360’s Live Arcade with scrolling shooters that are more xeroxes than new works – or games built on mechanics first proven by another title, I mean actually covering an older game, building it from the ground up as shot through your own personal filters. Take, for instance, the difference between the original version of ‘Walk Away Renee’ by the Left Banke and this cover by Billy Bragg. As amazing as the original’s teen romance gone wrong is, the cover personalizes it, exploring the same territory through Bragg’s particular brand of urban folk/heartbroken city kid storytelling. It’s not a remake or standing on the Four Tops’ collective shoulders; the song is its own creature, every bit as powerful but for different reasons. So why not take the same approach to games?

There are plenty of obvious reasons why it’s not very practical – games are hard to make, for one, typically taking longer and costing more to produce than Ted Leo blending ‘Since U Been Gone’ and ‘Maps’ to fantastic effect. It’s also a young medium, compared to the likes of music, and very much still fighting for cultural acceptance and significance while still lacking a clear idea of where its boundaries are. Why look back where there’s still so much new to explore?

Because of the paths not taken by the original designers. Because of the chance to learn from their work by breaking these games down to their component pieces to see how they work. Because it’s fun. And with the resurgence of smaller, individually developed games on the PC (such as experimental-game-a-month developer and winner of the Seamus McNally prize at IGF this year Petri Purho), it’s much more of a realistic notion than you might think. Imagine Super Mario Bros. covered by the kids at thatgamecompany, or a puzzle game like Tetris or Bejeweled as seen through the eyes of the bunch at the Kokoromi Collective. It’s the sort of thing that fills me with with the burning need to make something and my own frustrations at not having the time, energy, or single ounce of programming knowledge necessary to create games all on my own. Quick, dirty covers of older games both famous and obscure, like an alternate history of the medium. Why not?

Edit: Turns out the Four Tops covered ‘Walk Away Renee’ as well, and the original was by the Left Banke. Thanks Patrick for the correction.

The opening lines alone just kill me. Everything past that is gravy. And every video should have at some point a boy handing a girl a guitar in the snow, because MAN.

Slightly drunk. Slightly late. Signing off now, for the betterment of all man kind.

The Dead Trees were decidedly middle of the road, with the best thing going for them being the short and screechy lead singer girl with the good sense to wear tall boots and cut offs and jump around and yell a lot. Maybe once they figure out that they’re not actually good enough to attempt playing both the rockabilly and alt-country cards and settle on one we’ll talk again, but whatever. The Dead Trees don’t matter. They were one of a few other bands that were not Los Campesinos!, and were therefore not what we had come for.

Lucky for us that Los Campesinos! finally came on and were pretty much completely ace.

It’s hard to describe the band and the tunes as two separate things, so I’m not sure I’ll even try. Everything about the Los Camps! just oozes charaisma, from lead singer girl Aleksandra’s shy smile while being pulled into an impromptu dance number by the rest of the band to lead singer boy Gareth insisting on climbing the drum kit by the third song and constantly gushing over how nice everybody in New York has been to them. Their set leaped from song to song, barely pausing in between long enough to shuffle stage positions and maybe sort of starting to explain something about the song before packing it in in favor of just playing the thing. The combination of the the two leads playing off each other – or rather, of Gareth spasming and rebounding off Aleksandra’s unshakably dignified demeanor – and the songs themselves just pulls you in to the point that you find yourself dancing out of pure need. New York audiences, I’ve found, don’t like to dance. Particularly at smaller venues like the Mercury. Tonight, half the crowd were pulling shapes before they hit the first chorus of the first song.

So yes, I danced. To pretty much everything. I’ve wanted to dance to ‘We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives’ since first hearing the song a month or so ago, and it was just as wonderful as I’d hoped. That said, nothing quite came close to the wonder of ‘You! Me! Dancing!’, rising out of its humble strings beginnings to erupt over the crowd in a swell of noise and bass drum kicks. Just perfect.

Rock music! Man! Now falling down.

i) have at long last gotten around to beating the original Guitar Hero, making Stevie Ray Vaughn my bitch while barely surviving Ozzy.

ii) am 2/3′s of the way towards drunk, having declared war on a bottled of wine following…

iii) finally, along with the rest of my team at work, posted the bastard goddamn Alpha version of the bastard goddamn game we’re working on. A week late and several nights’ sleep late, it’s in. Tomorrow we start talking seriously about what happens for the next build, and there’s a whole new set of problems to worry about, but for now? For now it’s done, and all that matters is listening to Shy Child* as loud as possible and racing exhaustion to the bottom of a bottle. All in all I’d rather be out dancing, but it’s too early in the week and too late at night for that sort of thing. So deafness via pop music it is, then.

*Special thanks to Gillen for the introduction.

Summer, oh how she is here. Memorial day weekend + girl out of town + work able to carry on with me just checking me email every few hours = three days with nothing to do outside of play video games, catch up on reading, and listen to loads of music while slowly melting into the couch cushions. Video games are more than covered, as I finished up the first Ratchet & Clank and dove straight into the second, only to discover that they’d fixed all the things that annoyed me while adding a host of new features that largely blend in seemlessly with the core game (the aggravating and dumb space combat sequences aside). As for books, I tore through a good chunk of the graphic novels that were pilling up on my bookshelves and started J.G. Ballard’s harrowing Concrete Island, a book that feels very much like the car wreck that kicks things off in that while you can see where things are headed, you’re powerless to stop them and have no idea how bad they’ll get before it ends. Less than a quarter of the way in and I already want more of his work, which tends to be a good sign. And music? Other than a surprisingly good electro…something or another album from Pantha du Prince, I’ve actually spent all weekend listening to ‘Thin Line’ from Jurrassic 5 and LCD Soundsystem’s new album Sound of Silver. Specifically, ‘Someone Great’.

If LCD’s self-titled debut from a few years ago was all dancing, all the time (with the exception of ‘Tribulations’ paranoid march pointing at what was to come later and…maybe another song that I can’t remember at the moment), detailing the last kicks of a club kid just realizing it was maybe time to retire to the DJ booth permanently, then Sound of Silver is that same kid years down the road, not grown up but getting there. It’s a much more personal album, reaching it’s peak with the one-two punch of ‘Something Great’ and ‘All My Friends’. But where the latter is the reminisces and regrets that come with ten years of being poor and dumb in New York, the former isolates one of those moments in particular, moving back and forth between the good then and the fallout now as if no time has passed while still getting to grips with the loads of it that has.

‘All My Friends’ might be the better song. That hardly matters when there’s no escape from the humidity, the outside world smells like plant death and Eurotrash, and there’s nothing to do but stare at the speakers while James Murphy walks in to adulthood on your stereo.

It’s a simple enough song – once there was a girlfriend and now there isn’t, and that transition is too much for the relationship to bear. It’s once you’ve heard it for the third or fourth time in a row though that you start to realize it’s only simple because you’re coming into the story without context, and that the only way to get that sort of understanding is to put it together yourself. This isn’t being told a story, it’s evesdropping, and listening in means you take what you can get.

First off, it’s pretty clear she’s not just an ex-girlfriend. She’s an ex The Girl with years of misremembering and idealizing adding to the weight that already carries with it. The first line of the song sets up all the awkwardness you could ever want – “I wish that we could talk about it, but there lies the problem” – before walking us through the (again, context-free) break up and inevitable meeting years down the road. Nothing Earth shattering here, no fresh ground being covered, but as with most of Murphy’s more meaningful moments on the record, it’s the little moments that just dig the hooks in and demand jumping the CD back one more time. The wistful recollection of arguing over nothing. The dread over an over morning phone call and the weather’s utter refusal to match the mood of the resulting break up over coffee. The quietly devestating “You’re smaller than my wife imagined/Surprised you were human” towards the end. She was The Girl and now she’s not, and the memory of that is too strong to allow anything more than the most casual involvement in each other’s lives. ‘Someone Great’ is the act of accepting what’s been lost and coming to terms with it, and it just kills. Listen to it at LCD Soundsystem’s MySpace and then go find the album proper.

“Complex” is the word to pay attention to above. Each song off Mirrored’s is pure stratum, just layer upon layer of rhythms building to something so dense it practically has its own gravity. Trying to pick this bit here apart from that bit there can be so distracting that you often don’t notice the horror of what Battles are doing with most of these songs until a minute or so in – they’re speeding up. And just as they start scraping Wall of Noise territory, threatening to to turn your headphones into some sort of aural centerfuge, they break hard to the left and down a bit to soar funkwards for no other reason than it’s a place to go that doesn’t mean crashing and burning. It shouldn’t work. It does. Try not to think about it too hard.

I never bothered learning what Math Rock meant exactly, perferring my own assumption to any inevitably tedious definition available out there. Mirrored is that assumption – the end result of sleepless nights spent solving equations too long for the board to hold to create chord progressions man was never meant to tamper with. Song writing via black arithmetic, creating rock music through dark pacts with profane sequencing programs. All hail Battles.

But to the point: Summer, and the happenings what are all up in it.

1. Need to look at neighborhoods to move to. Need to look at apartments to then move in to. And finally, at long last, need to physically move. At this point I’m having trouble visualizing the various actions that needs be accomplished for those three things to happen – in my mind, I am already moved in and waiting for Girl to get home so I can properly explain why it was vitally important I buy a 360 right then and there.

2. Need to steer The Game at work through the various milestones over the next few months: Alpha, Alpha 2, Beta…and whatever comes after that. Need to not freak out.

3. Need to sit down and spend a day with Scratch, the potentially amazing new tool from a bunch of MIT kids. Scratch takes the programming end of creating cartoons, stories, and games on a computer and simplifies them by presenting code as a bunch of colorful blocks to be snapped together however you want. The possiblities, while maybe not endless, are such that it could be the best proof of concept tool ever for trying out little game ideas to see if there’s any real promise to them. The biggest problem, of course, is coming up with the free time to explore it properly. Maybe over Memorial Day weekend, provided work and Ratchet & Clank don’t get in the way.

4. Need to come up with some ideas for Gallaher’s Comics Writing Workshop this Saturday. Writing comics is very different from any sort of fiction I’ve written in years (that is, games), and something I haven’t thought about in a rather long time. That said, this sounds like a fun way to spend a Saturday night and can only lead to good things or nothing at all. Of course, I need some ideas before then, or else I won’t really have anything to say. Or an idea. Half an idea. Anything, please.

Need to see the Long Blondes at Bowery in June. Tickets are secured for me and Girl, so all that remains now is to not vibrate myself to pieces in excitement. I’ll probably write something long and gasping about the band shortly after the show – I tried recently, only to realize that my best line was actually mentally hijacked from Miss Amp’s wonderful breakdown of their lyrics. Go and read, and then find and listen (the album’s not out in the States just yet, but you’re on the internet, for God’s sake. Figure something out). Kate Jackson, lead vocal and wearer of scarves, is having none of your bloodless pining away over somebody who doesn’t know you exist. She’s out there right now, breaking down your signifigant other’s resolve pose by perfectly crafted pose. Don’t try to stop her. Your weapons are useless.

6. Need to start thinking in terms of game design. Yesterday’s work snag left me wistfully thinking back to when I was a Game Designer rather than a Producer, and while what I’m doing is fun and rewarding and totally worthwhile, I don’t think I’ll last very long without a new outlet for making shit up again. If that means scheduling time each week to sit down in front of an empty notebook (or the aforementioned Scratch) and poke at things until they click together, so be it.

7. Keep up with the twenty lines a day, genius or not.

8. Keep running in the mornings. Oh god, keep running.

9. Need to amass gigantic collection of board games to compliment ever-growing collection of video games. Apples to Apples, Labyrinth, and a second-hand copy of Trivial Pursuit do not a collection make. At some point once moving and various other expenditures are taken care of, I will descend upon the board game store like a plague of locusts, seeking copies Powergrid and Ticket to Ride for nourishment rather than Egyptian crops. It will be glorious.

10. Finish video games before starting/buying new ones. I’m halfway through something like ten games while other sit completely untouched. I blame the utter horror that was Spider-Man 3 on the Wii for pushing me back in to the loving embrace of Spider-Man 2 for the PS2. Inching through the awesome Prince of Persia: Sands of Time can wait until I’ve scratch my web-swinging itch.

11. Not die. Really.