Blake Recommends: April Fool's edition

Oh, man. It's time to get caught up on some gaming action. This was originally the 'Valentine's Day edition,' given the timing of when I played all these things, but then school came along and decided to get all evil for a month and change.

Now I'm back to a reasonable everyday schedule, so it's time to share my thoughts on some games and music. I want to get on to new things, so I'll be making this quick.

Grand Theft Auto: Ballad of Gay Tony
The best GTA game made. Fascinating characters and a tight (but not short) storyline filled with high-octane action sequences. It's like playing a Michael Mann movie. Or a Michael Bay movie. But good either way. If you play one version of GTA IV, make it this.

Forza Motorsport 3
Truly a great racing game. Even feels good using the Xbox 360 controller, which is odd since it's a controller totally set up for action games. I think the great racing games are less about moving around the track and more about diving headlong into car culture. In this regard, Forza and DiRT have both been great recent games in the genre. I have to confess, though: I'm still a Gran Turismo man, and the only reason I haven't poured 100 hours into FM3 is that I know I'll put more than that into GT5. If Forza finally let its players revel in gearhead culture, GT5 will be the damned Smithsonian of car culture by comparison.

Brace yourselves for this one
I put a few hours into World of Warcraft.

Yes. I, the blakerson, played WoW.

The economics of this game are very different from my last foray into the game several years ago. Basically, back then it was "I'm paying for this punishment?" and then Blizzard spent years tweaking the psychology of leveling and loot accumulation and then gave me a year's subscription for free. So now, my experience was "Hey, this ain't bad.. where my friends at?"

To answer the requisite questions: Blood Elf Rogue, got to somewhere around 16-18 before play tapered off.

Perfect Dark
This one's a last-second addition. A wonderous HD port of the game was released on Xbox Live Arcade, finally sating the innate needs of former Goldeneye players who needed a re-release ever since games started getting re-released.

Good news: It's a 60fps, 1080p, re-textured redux of the original game, with tons of local and online multiplayer options including co-op and deathmatch modes.
It's got a throwback mode, which lets you play on the game's three redone Goldeneye maps using just Goldeneye weapons. It's still addictive well over a decade on.

Bad news: It's not Goldeneye. Between the rights to the game (which lie with Nintendo), the assets (which live with Rare, now owned by Nintendo's rival Microsoft) and the James Bond franchise (Activision), it'll never get re-released. You don't get to go back and run through the Dam and the Facility and so on in single-player, repeating all those missions that drove you nuts when you were thirteen. There are only three familiar multiplayer maps.

Still, well worth $10.

OK, time for some music.

Specifics - Lonely City and II
Two white guys from Toronto who've got their hip-hop down. I think I've heard "Take Me Back" a thousand times and it's still smooth.

Funky DL - The 4th Quarter
A brother with American-sounding rhymes from London's East Side.

Utada - This Is the One
A J-pop star tries to make it in the US. She's been huge in Japan since her youth, but like many Asian pop stars the transition hasn't been easy despite her native English. Going full-blown slut on her first English-language album didn't seem to work, so she hunkered down and tried harder and came away with something better the second time around. She's coming on my Internet radio pretty frequently, and I can't seem to turn her off. Honestly, who can say no to a line like "chemistry like apple and cinnamon"?

Hey, want to share some music?
Join Dropbox and let me know you've joined.

RIP Nujabes :(

I randomly checked Twitter two weeks ago to find that Nujabes was a trending topic worldwide.

Upon checking it out, it was an explosion of posts in Japanese - not surprising, considering the hip-hop producer born Jun Seba is big in Japan. But the odd short post in English - 'RIP Nujabes' - hit me harder than the wall of Japanese condolences.

Nujabes, to the American audience, is best known as the mastermind of the super-popular Samurai Champloo soundtrack. I found him that way too. But I quickly branched into his releases from his label and found some of his best stuff.

That was 2006. I'm still listening to Nujabes' tunes and those of his collaborators, ranging from jazz musicians like Uyama Hiroto to Western MCs including Substantial, Fat Jon, and Funky DL.

Nujabes' tracks kept my blood pressure down through a hellacious senior year of college. They comforted me as I went to and from Japan and adjusted to cultures twice. And even today they're my best background music when I'm working away.

Seba died in a high-speed car crash as the clock struck his 36th birthday. He had a long and prolific career ahead of him, as evidenced by mountains and mountains of messages left by his collaborators around the world. His fans, likewise, have left a pile of comments 250-deep as I write this.
 
I think that as we grow, our tastes in music change. I've grown up, and as such I'm no longer listening to The Offspring and Blink-182. But Nujabes and his family were something closer to constant in my life. I feel like my growth will always be, in some little way, stunted with a stunted body of work from someone who tapped into my musical soul so well.

If any friends in Japan are reading and are as disappointed as I am, please search out his record store Tribe in Shibuya and let me know what comes of it.

Photo: Koji Ohta

Super-late photos: Sir Paul

This is the fourth activity I referenced after my London trip.

Sir Paul McCartney. Fifth-row seats.

The man can play a show. An entire section of seating was set aside for his friends and family (it was the last stop on his tour, and the only one in England). Two-and-a-half-hours-plus with no breaks. So much heart.

As excited as I was to see the legend in the flesh, I was more excited for my mom. She is to The Beatles as I am to games. She knows every factoid, every detail, every ounce of their personal history. She spent her youth following them from the great Internet-less distance of rural Oklahoma. She never saw a Beatles concert, but I was going to make damn sure she saw the closest possible thing during her lifetime.

And she did. That box got a big, fat check mark put in it. For her and for me.

As miserable as the rest of the trip was (Mom + jetlag + British food = not fun), she was beaming for a solid 48 hours (before she caught swine flu on the way home and became more miserable). "We saw Pauuuuuul," she'd coo. During those 48 hours, miserable British food, or having to ride the Tube, or the weather became non-factors. We did what we went there to do, and it felt great to do it.

Indeed, we did it. We saw Pauuuuuul.

Blake Recommends: Winter Edition

It's been a while since I've done a round of recommendations for stuff I'm consuming. Let's fix that!

Stuff I love:

-Last.fm: If you use Pandora, switch to Last.fm now. They've really developed their ad-supported streaming radio service, and it's pretty solid. It's great for being exposed to new artists without falling into the Pandora trap of super-specialized stations that play the same 5 awesome songs over and over. My favorite feature is the presence of international music, so I have stations for J-pop artists like m-flo and Crazy Ken Band that play new tracks from them and their musical cousins. It's also a new feature on the Xbox 360, and I'm pretty sure I have it on non-stop while I'm studying at home. I've especially fallen in love with...

-Crystal Kay: Japanese-born, halfie, bilingual R&B. All the catchiness of Japanese pop music with some seriously solid vocals on top. Lots of fun to listen to, even if you don't speak Japanese.

-DJ Hero: I understand the complaints about DJ Hero. But I don't care. Even if what I'm doing in this game isn't actually what DJs do, it's a fun enough facsimile. There are enough tracks that completely kick ass to make up for the weak ones. And I really don't care about the reportedly blah multiplayer modes. I just want to do cool DJ things, and I get to do that. The art direction is cool and the game is good. DJ Hero is, honestly, what I've wanted ever since Guitar Hero came about. I wanted a game built around an instrument I care about more than guitar, and I got that. I paid the stupidly high price for this game and don't regret it. It's pretty rare that I enjoy a game that isn't critically acclaimed, at least outside the presence of diamond-in-the-rough-seeker John Martone, but this is one such rare moment. I'm going to revel in it, even if no one else does.

-Left 4 Dead 2: I have a little clique of Left 4 Dead playing buddies, and we've really enjoyed the last 6 or so months playing together. We had mixed feelings on whether L4D2 would mess that up, but after a week with the game we're all on the same page. And it's the page I wrote a few months back: It's more Left 4 Dead. How can this be a bad thing?

Stuff I just can't bring it upon myself recommend:

-Modern Warfare 2: It unfortunately fit with the trend in Infinity Ward games: an amazing, innovative, emotionally investing game gets followed up with a solid, but relatively not boundary-pushing, sequel. See: Call of Duty 1&2, Modern Warfare 1&2. 

Warning: spoilers. Skip down to Mos Def to avoid.
Clearly IW was trying to break the pattern with the infamous airport scene, but this was a hugely blown opportunity. The setup was this: you're an undercover agent sent in to root out an evil, evil former Soviet dude. So you're supposed to fall in with him, build his trust, and eventually bring down his whole empire. All of that should have been playable, in-game narrative instead of dropping you in this story's climax at the start of level fucking two. What the player gets instead is a paper-thin context from a load-screen briefing and a command: open fire on these innocent people, and go on a terroristic rampage. And when it's done, you get shot in the head and die. You play as a specific character for one level and then you're capped in the face. How much more disposable can your own in-game avatar be?

Compare that to the heaviest moment in the first Modern Warfare: halfway through the game, after you've followed this American soldier through to a climax in the Middle East, you die. You die. It was the biggest moment in gaming in 2007, and the biggest moment in 2009 is the bungled result of a very difficult development schedule dropped on IW. There wasn't time to make the player gain the trust of the evil Soviet guy, but IW couldn't spare the game this seriously heavy moment. Thanks for the mix-up, Activision. Now when anyone wants to explore the 24-esque theme of "doing horrible things to save more people," gamers will have this disappointing precedent to look back to. When will the core game publishers realize that short-term schedules impact the long-run quality of their product and their industry?

-Mos Def, The Ecstatic: I admit, I haven't given it an honest listen yet, but it's every bit as odd as other Mos Def albums. Maybe a little too out there.

-John Mayer, Battle Studies: Mayer's at his best when he's singing about things other people don't think about or can't put into words easily. His first and third albums were great for this reason, not because they were good music. So now he's adopted the most common theme of all, love, and done an entire album around it. It just seems like a waste of talent. At least two songs borrow their structures from tracks from Continuum. And what is Taylor Swift doing in my John Mayer?

PS: The cover of Crossroads is seriously lame. If Mayer is a young Eric Clapton in terms of guitar virtuosity, why isn't he showing it off here?

Dear West Coast...

[this post is best read to the tune of Ice Cube's "Today Was A Good Day"]

So here I am in sunny San Diego,
Thinkin' 'bout when I'll be on that payroll

And here every other car's a Ferrari
It makes you start thinkin' that money's so godly

And you'd be forgiven to think
That life's just bling and bitches and weed

So please don't shoot me ('cause your gangstas are hard)
But your coast's own hip-hop is really sub-par.