Video Games Live was fun stuff. For the day, we visited first Funland arcade in the city centre then went off to the show. There were some Guitar Hero: World Tour bits going on before it began, too.

The show itself was great. All console music, basically, but quite well done mixtures of tracks and video accompaniment. There were also some special bits – Martin Leung (who didn’t really talk 🙁 ), did first a set of Final Fantasy tunes and then his famous Mario and Tetris tracks on the piano. There was audience interaction too – someone who played Tetris by being the gun at the bottom, although it didn’t work to well 🙁 – and also a Guitar Hero: Areosmith track, accompanied by Tommy Tallarico.

Tommy Tallarico hosted it, and even got a Guinness World Record for the most games worked on by a single person during the show. Jack Wall was the conductor, who has created some great music before, conducting his own Mass Effect music during the show too.

A few oddities though – there was no Square Enix videogame footage, substituting Disney movie footage for Kingdom Hearts, and fanart for the Final Fantasy “One Winged Angel” piece. Odd that. Also, there was a distinct lack of PC videogame music – no Red Alert, Civilization, Half-Life or anything else (but there was the ubiquitous World of Warcraft, and for some reason Everquest II. There was also Diablo III – they need to update the video which was all concept art though 🙂 ).

I also got the CD, which is pretty good (if only I still did my radio show!) – I love the Civilization 4 rendition, which is one of my favourite tracks. The line to get it singed was a wee bit big, but oh well, I’ll try and get it signed some other time 🙂

I hope they can get around to doing a Phoenix Write melody at the show, if so, I’ll definitely go again 🙂 – there’s my full gallery of pictures of the event. I also had some videos; which are pretty cool:

• Funland’s DDR (8MB)
• Dragon’s Lair (5MB)
• Metal Gear Solid (5MB)
• Martin Leung Blindolded (35MB)
• Guitar Hero Competition Winner (90MB)

atypicalgamer also has a report on the event, with some better pictures too 🙂