I had the chance to see Rush at Jones Beach Theater over the weekend and just thought I’d share some impressions. Rush is my favorite band and this is not the first time I was seeing them, but I thought the show was enough of a stand out to warrant a little writing.

I cannot quibble with the guys performance. For a band that formed in 1968, these guys still seem to be at the top of their game. I can’t imagine they have many decades left to tour, but I also can’t see them quitting anytime soon either. They rocked the place and the crowd loved it.

On a less positive note, and I’ve seen this mentioned on the boards, there seemed to be sound issues. Before the intermission, I noticed instruments drifting in and out, sonically. They would never go mute, but the levels seemed to be moving up and down a lot, which was very distracting. Also, it seemed like Geddy’s keyboard had even more trouble, I think it was during the song Marathon (but I can’t find a Youtube video to confirm so it could have been another one). Anyway, it got so quiet you almost couldn’t hear it and he seemed really pissed and missed a vocal cue by a few bars, almost as if he was trying to make his crew notice his displeasure. Neil and Alex just kept playing, and I assume, waiting for him to start singing again, which he eventually did.

Later, Alex completely missed one of his vocal cues in the song Subdivisions. You could tell he was embarrassed but totally laughed it off with the guitar techs.

After intermission, they seemed to have fixed whatever sound problems had plagued the first half of the show, and there were no more sound problems. It was still a little too noisy to my liking, but fairly good. Of note was how strong the sub bass signal was, almost like being in a dance club with a really good system. Every bass drum hit or bass guitar pluck hit you squarely in the gut.

There were two major highlights in the show for me. One was the performance of The Camera Eye in its entirety. Since they were playing the entire Moving Pictures album, I knew this would be in the set list and that was a major motivation for me to attend the show. If you are not familiar with this song, it’s very New York and London centric, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been walking around the city when it comes up on the old iPod and I get chills. Anyway, Saturday night, Geddy seemed to put extra emphasis on the words New York and Manhattan and the crowd ate it up. I just settled in for the ride, and was a bit beside myself that they were really playing it after all this time.

The second highlight was the inclusion of La Villa Strangiato in the encore. Again, for those unfamiliar with Rush tunes, it is a super complicated song which they couldn’t even record in the studio the first time without first breaking it into three different takes. It was such a momentous recording, it cause the band to change their whole direction with the following album and lead to the development of the band I like so much. It’s also one of those songs I never expected to hear live, so it was a real treat to see them bring it back.

Neil’s drum solo was great. I didn’t see the Snakes and Arrows tour, so I don’t know if this version is new for the Time Machine tour, or if it’s what he played last time, but it was very different from any of the solos I’ve heard him do before, like he’s evolved it again into a new direction. Same quality as ever, but with a new composition.

As to the crowd, everyone around me was very well behaved. Others have noted the young kid in the second row, and I noticed him too, air drumming in unison with all the adults around him. One can’t imagine he’s had the time in his short life to get so familiar with these old tunes, but clearly he has. I’d love to know his story, but imagine one or both of his parents must be huge fans. Like me, lol.

It was a great show. I didn’t even mention the filmic bits that tied the whole time machine theme together, or the walk-on performances of the rubber chicken man or the Beir Madchen who were ‘moving pitchers’ of beer, or the updated video graphics used throughout the show, because that’s all just icing on the cake. The band played great, reaching deep in their catalog at the same time playing their latest releases and everyone seemed to have a blast, and I was one of them.

I’d like to think Steve Thomas comes off as a professional well-known artist who has worked on many recognizable works of the past, but had decided to “come down to our level” to peddle his downtime works on a simple blog. With most commercial artists, the offbeat personal works are probably better than anything he’s ever made serious money on. My backstory is all speculation though. Steve Thomas is such a common name, my google fu knows not how to narrow down these Steve Thomas biographies. Every artist instance of Steve Thomas says hes died 9 to 120 years ago. Rapper C-Murder of TRU apparently killed them all.

Steve Thomas makes posters. Really good posters. His style reminds me of those old generic Spanish/French/Latin framed quasi-advertisement oil posters that say random words like “Fentaru!” and “Irrradio!” that don’t make much sense to Americans, but “one level above dive bar” bars think it’s classy to keep them around. These posters types are somewhat classy until you end up at a craft store that actually sells them and you come to learn you can pick up seven prints of this nonsense for a dollar.

He has some neatness about beer, Star Wars, Tron, and The Beatles, but his great stuff is his Arcade Game Propaganda collection. I really like this guy because he functions on subtle references. It’s up to the audience to either appreciate the standalone art or understand what he’s talking about. It’s mature. Throwing a big ‘ol “Galaga” logo in the corner takes away from the art like industry does to ruin just about every gaming t-shirt for the past ten years.

Many of these artworks are purchasable for suitable framing. They would sit well with the Shmopera prints.

Have a look around.

Alright, I know the title seems like one of those DS or Wii games we make fun of on Drunken Gamers Radio every week, but you’d be wrong. While looking around the arcade and discovering certain long lost joys, I stumbled on this crazy game.

Brought out by Innovation Concepts in Entertainment, or ICE for short, this is a simple redemption game with a look and feel that really draws in retro sci-fi junkies like myself. Which seems to be this companies thing. Simple redemption games with a little more style than the average. While I’m not a big player of these redemption sytle games, I can get behind a company that wants to up the ante in terms of style. You can check out the ICE website here and peruse their line of products. I’m sure you’ll recognize their money maker, the Deal or No Deal machine. Be warned, the website has a loud advertisement on the front end, so hit hit the mute button before you venture over there.

As far as Rock n’ Moon Rally goes, the whole thing has this neat 1950′s flying-saucer-movie vibe to it with very stylized aliens, a background out of a comic and sound effects out of War of the Worlds. The premise is very simple: two players control their bike riding alien on the moon. The faster the players spin the roller ball, the faster their alien bikes around the track. The winner gets the glory, a victory lap and some tickets.

I guess ICE also had a much larger, four player version of this game called Spacey Racers, so if you really want to get your retro redemption thing on, you can try and track one of these bad boys down. While not being a game I would normally stick any tokens into, Rock n’ Moon Rally’s ultra retro vibe really caught my eye and I had to try it out. It’s fun, simple and really fun to look at in motion and (if nothing else) a nice artistic addition to an arcade full of crap.

My friends, is there anything Carlson over at Mad-Gear can’t do? After reading the excellent Famicom retrospective series by Jeremy Parish and Ray Barnholt over at 1up, I was dying to get my hands on one of the books they referenced: Family Computer 1983 – 1994. Created by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, this book chronicles every single game released for Nintendo’s Famicom in Japan, with photos and descriptions in both Japanese and English. Unfortunately, the book is long out of print making it a struggle to locate if you don’t live in Japan. That is, unless you talk to Carlson. After an exhausting but futile search on eBay, Amazon, Play-Asia, and countless other sites, I shot an email to Carlson asking if there was any possible way he could get his hands on a copy. His response was essentially, “Sure, no problem. Gimme a couple days.” And a few weeks later, the book was waiting for me in my mailbox.

Here’s a quick summary of what’s included:

Contains 20 years of Nintendo Famicom™ history on 199 pages
All content is listed bi-lingual (Japanese/English)
Includes pictures of 1252 Japanese Famicom™ games including name, release date and description (Japanese/English)
Includes interviews with video game developers (Japanse/English)
Includes additional hardware and Nintendo history coverage

As you can see, while locating a copy can be a difficult task, this book is a must-have for hardcore retro enthusiasts. (more…)

The arcade, my friends, is not dead. A bold statement, considering the condition of arcades in places such as GameWorks or Dave & Busters. While those complexes may appear to be arcades, the corporate stench permeates them and the entertainment provided inside is more akin to a roller coaster ride than the arcades of our youth. The truth is, however, those neon lit rooms that rang with the sound of flipper hitting metal ball still exist. They are havens for those needing to spend a few precious minutes or hours dropping quarters into coin slots and challenging physics. They are rare, they are prized and they are sadly known only to a few.

Hiding away in a strip mall in the Minnesota suburb of Hopkins, SS Billiard is just such a place. It’s a room that is almost frozen in time. I had the privilege of visiting SS Billiards for the first time last week and the moment I stepped through the door, it was as if I were back in the arcades I loved as a kid. Pinball machines lined the walls from various generations. There were old favorites that I loved, such as The Addams Family and The Twilight Zone. New Stern pinball games such as The Dark Knight, Spider-Man and The Lord of the Rings stood as the last men standing; champions of a classic genre too long beaten yet still fighting. Even some classic machines such as Eight Ball Deluxe and the rare Capcom machine, Big Bang Bar, were in attendance. Each stood, tempting with classic lights and sounds and the elegant beauty of a wooden surface worn from years of play. While there were a few video games in attendance, they felt strangely out of place in this pinball mecca. It’s as if SS Billiards has one love and video games are simply a token gesture, as if to harken back to the 80′s but not to relive them.
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Reader Brian Pederson sent us a heads up on an article over at Kotaku that he thought we might enjoy. I think we’ll call that an understatement. Far be it from us to report other people’s shit (that’s what the podcast is for) but we thought this one was worth sharing. We’re suckers for all things retro anyway, so we figured you all might be into it as well. So, if you have yet to check out the article and more importantly, the video that is featured inside, then here you go:

Best Damn Video Game Infomercial! AKA: Cool Ass Retro Shit

Enjoy!

There’s a chapter of gaming history in my life that I had completely forgotten about until Moe mentioned the game Karateka on our show a few weeks back. The Apple II was a large part of my childhood that had been overshadowed by my memories of the Turbografx-16. Before the Turbo came along, most of my gaming was done on an “Apple II-compatible” computer that my mom had purchased for me from Sears. It was an archaic machine, even for its time. It had two old-school floppy disc drives, a clunky color monitor, a massive keyboard that was connected to the computer itself, and of course a dot-matrix printer that was constantly running off the tracks. It was bought for the sole purpose of homework and school projects, but I had other ideas. While I did slave over numerous school papers using Bank Street Writer, it was the games that I was most interested in.

Fortunately for me, copying games from floppy-to-floppy was incredibly easy back then, making the dual-floppy drive configuration I had convinced my mom to buy an incredibly sound investment. And since the well of “edutainment” titles like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and The Oregon Trail ran dry, I had trouble convincing my education-centric mother to buy me kick ass arcade games. What I didn’t have trouble convincing her to do was buy me blank floppies so I could “save my homework assignments”. My real scheme, of course, was to harvest the surprisingly massive library of titles found at my school’s library. Hours were spent pirating games like Karateka and Lode Runner. And shortly, the bulky, clumsy machine that I used to toil away with became my primary source of entertainment. The problem was that the games weren’t very well-made or user-friendly. Sometimes you’d have to reboot the disc five or six times just to get it working. Oftentimes they didn’t have joystick support and the keyboard configuration was clumsy as hell. The rules were sometimes hazy, and the difficulty was often unforgiving simply because of the hardware limitations. But at the time, this was all I had. My Atari 2600 had long been sold, and because the of the “crash”, my mom saw gaming as a fad and not something she wanted to invest more money into.

After Moe talked about Karateka, all those memories came rushing back. I couldn’t remember many of the game titles, but I distinctly remembered laboring over those games, milking every ounce of enjoyment out of them that I could. I wanted to find out more about those games, so naturally I headed over to Google. And what I found was nothing short of a jackpot: VirtualApple.org, a website with a complete online archive of all the Apple II games that I loved as a child. The best part is that they’re all playable within your internet browser.

Amazing!

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Greetings lesser mortals. I come to you from the great, vast reaches of Northern Virginia to impart my wisdom, my knowledge, and my irrational hatred of things.  Some of that will come later.  Most of the poorer parts will appear now.

Today I would like to speak to you about old games, and about multiplayer games. These were originally to be two separate discussions, but intertwined themselves so thoroughly I felt they should be brought to you as one. So here you go.

On Retro Stuff:

So I looked around at my pile of games today. When I say pile I do mean literally, a pile. I’ve been decent about not buying a giant pile of crap that I’ll never finish lately, and I think I’m only sitting on 80-100 titles between three consoles and the PC. What amazes me is how many of my “must keep” titles and how many new games I’ve bought are actually retro titles. For example, my hulking, obese Nintendo DS contains Etrian Odyssey (old school fucks your mother and then shoots your dog to drink in your sorrow hard) and the Capcom Classics Collection. Aside from the must-buys (Mario Galaxy, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, et al) for the Wii, my purchases are light gun compilations, the Metal Slug Anthology, and Virtual Console titles. One of my favorite 360 titles is Earth Defense Force 2017, which is hilariously out of date and truly feels like a title from a decade ago with prettier graphics. I won’t even start on my PC collection, but simply say I have many, many, many titles from 1998.
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This has been one hell of a summer for downloadable games, hasn’t it? It seems like every week I’m saying, “This could be the best game on Xbox Live Arcade” or “This could be the best game on the PlayStation Network.” And what’s amazing is that every week I mean it, despite how “Best Game EVAR” it sounds.

I’ve been a big fan of Galaga since the mid-80s. I think it was our local Pizza Hut that introduced me to the game, but that’s not the fondest memory of it that I have. No, my fondest memory of Galaga came from a Gwar concert. Excuse me, I mean GWAR!!! concert. My friend Scotty and I received free tickets to see GWAR at the legendary First Avenue in downtown Minneapolis, and I’ll see just about anything for free. And hell, GWAR’s always been a curiosity for me. Why not?

But once we got there, I was distracted from the spectacle on the stage by a Galaga machine I saw standing in a dark corner upstairs. Soon, not even someone shooting blood out of a giant, metal, spear-shaped penis could distract me from the old-school greatness that is Galaga.

Galaga’s one of those games that I can zone out to; completely shutting out the world around me. And as fake blood, vomit, piss, and whatever else rained down from the stage, I stood in the corner racking up points. By the time I lost my last ship, GWAR was almost done…uh…performing. I may have missed the show, but I hit 1st place on the scoreboard. It seemed like a fair trade to me.
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Now that you’ve seen both of our image galleries from the Midwest Gaming Classic, we have one more special treat for you.

On Saturday evening, we hosted a Video Game Trivia Show pitting two teams of contestants against one another for some pretty awesome prizes, most of which were provided by GOAT Store. The evening was a total blast and we were fortunate to have the entire show recorded by John from Die Hard Gamer.

The video has been broken up into three segments:

Segment 1
Segment 2
Segment 3

If you have any troubles getting the videos to load, please let us know.

We would like to extend a sincere thank you to John from Die Hard Gamer for putting in so much hard work to get these videos edited and produced. Please check out Die Hard Gamer for tons of great video game information.