• 3Jul 10

  Bands I've seen

  Recently I got the idea to make a list of all of the bands I've ever seen live, before I forgot them. So I did, although I'm sure I've already forgotten a lot of them. Most of these were in high school (1999-2003), and most were either opening acts or part of a festival. So if you think one of them sucks, just assume I wasn't there to see them.

  1. Metallica (S&M)
  2. The Offspring
  3. MXPX
  4. Reel Big Fish
  5. No Doubt
  6. Blink 182
  7. The Starting Line
  8. Homegrown
  9. NOFX
  10. The Real McKenzies
  11. The Mad Caddies
  12. The Ataris
  13. Lit
  14. The Hold Steady
  15. Sevendust
  16. Stone Temple Pilots
  17. Ozzy Osbourne
  18. Godsmack
  19. Limp Bizkit
  20. The Deftones
  21. Creed
  22. Oleander
  23. Live
  24. Incubus
  25. Jimmy Eat World
  26. The Movielife
  27. Catch-22
  28. Streetlight Manifesto
  29. The Superspecs
  30. The Used
  31. Tom Petty
  32. Bob Dylan
  33. Willie Nelson
  34. John Fogerty
  35. Cake
  36. Alkaline Trio
  37. The Get Up Kids
  38. Taking Back Sunday
  39. My Chemical Romance
  40. Audioslave
  41. Seether
  42. 30 Seconds To Mars
  43. Autopilot Off
  44. Bad Religion
  45. Ben Kweller
  46. Dashboard Confessional
  47. Brand New
  48. Weezer
  49. Saves The Day
  50. Cheap Trick
  51. Coheed and Cambria
  52. Filter
  53. Foo Fighters
  54. Red Hot Chili Peppers
  55. Green Day
  56. The Living End
  57. Lagwagon
  58. Ozma
  59. RX Bandits
  60. Straylight Run
  61. Zebrahead
  • Posted Jul 3, 2010 1:49 am GMT
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• 17Jun 10

  Pictures from E3

  For some reason the link to my album didn't work in my last post, so here it is:
  
  http://s200.photobucket.com/albums/aa39/archiebot/E3%202010/

  • Posted Jun 17, 2010 11:31 am GMT
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• 16Jun 10

  My First E3

  So I went to my first E3! It was lots of fun: tons of games, elaborate booths, and booth babes all over the place. I got to watch and play a lot of games, including some that I'd probably have never noticed which is really cool. Unfortunately there were also some seriously long lines for the big ticket attractions, and since I only went today I didn't want to spend 3 hours waiting to play them. But overall I still saw a lot of great stuff!
  
  Here's some of my impressions:
  
  

  • Sony had a lot of Move games set up in their monstrous booth, including some older games retrofitted with new controls (like RE5). It handles almost exactly like Wii, so it doesn't really feel like anything new.
  • LittleBigPlanet 2 looked great. They had a lot of cool levels set up, including a full RTS that you could use the Move controller with.
  • Killzone 3 is more killzone, no surprises there.
  • Twisted Metal looks pretty cool, has sort of a WarHawk vibe to it. Still rough around the edges, though.
  • The new Castlevania looked like it could be kinda good...the combat didn't look too bad. Didn't really stand out either.
  • I played Peace Walker, and I still can't get used to the controls. It constantly felt awkward for me. Probably needed more than I could get from a 5 minute demo.
  • Most of the Kinect stuff looked seriously Lame with a capital "L". I mean there's a game where your avatar rides in a raft, and you can hop or lean to the left or to the right. It looked like the kind of thing you'd see on XBL Indie games. Kinectimals looked similarly dumb...you stand there while the game says things like "try leaning to the left!" and at some point this leaning causes the animal to hop around or something. The sports game was a pretty blatent Wii Sports rip off. The only cool Kinect game I saw was the Harmonix game, Dance Central. Not at all my sort of game, but I was surprised at how well it picked up the the various dance moves. It was actually rather impressive.
  • No Reach anywhere at the MS booth.
  • The XBLA game Limbo looked really cool. Has a very unique look. Could be a surprise hit like Braid.
  • APB was actually kinda cool. The character creator has tons of options. I also like the cops vs. bad guys thing they've got going on. I got an invite to the beta, so I'll have it play it some more.
  • I played the game Global Agenda, which I'd never heard of. I actually had fun playing it...the cIasses play like TF2's, except you're playing co-op against lots of bad guys.
  • I played Mindjack in the Square Enix booth. Combat was pretty bad, klunky and overly generic. Their one cool feature is that you can "hack" other people in the game when they're controlled by AI's, which is actually annoying since you have to do that every time you die. I mean you just wanna spawn, and instead you gotta float around like a ghost looking for a body.
  • Epic Mickey was disappointing. The platforming was pretty awkward, and throwing paint thinner on bad guys isn't really that much fun. I'm sure there's plenty of good aspects that don't come out unless you play for more than 10 minutes like I did.
  • The line for Zelda was wayyyy too long to wait on, but I watched some other people playing it. I wasn't particularly impressed. There's still a fixed set of sword moves triggered by various gestures, there's just a bunch of them now. So not really something you can't do with a normal controller...just more intuitive I guess. Which perhaps allows you to have a larger moveset without making controls too complicated. Otherwise it was very much Zelda. When I first saw screens and videos I thought it looked cool, but in person it looked pretty bad on those big HDTV's.
  • The line for 3DS was ginormous, so I didn't even get to look at the thing.
  • I played Conduit 2 for a little but, and it was pretty terrible. Not really anything positive to say about it.
  • The new Rock Band 3 "pro" guitar controller looks pretty cool. Apparently it's a fully functional electric guitar. Unfortunately you coudn't play it on the show floor. They also had this giant wall covered with all of the tracks that have been in Rock Band, which was pretty awesome.
  • I tried out Onlive. They had Assasin's Creed 2, running at around 720p with settings that looked worse than what you get on the Xbox 360. It also kept stuttering, which was annoying. The compression wasn't too bad when things weren't really moving around, but whenever things got crazy on-screen there were significant artifacts. It was comparable to what happens when you watch an action movie on cable, and there's lots of explosions or a chase scene. There wasn't really any lag, but you can't judge without a real internet connection that's many miles away from the server. One cool thing they did, was while we were playing another guy came up with an iPad and said "hey, here's the game you're playing" (since you can spectate any game).
  • Dead Rising 2 is lots of fun. Pretty similar to the first one, but with cool new weapons to play with. For example a bat with nails in it, or a power drill. There's also some sort of system for upgrading/combining weapons.
  • Bethesda was only showing things behind closed doors, which was upsetting. I would have liked to see Rage. I guess it will be another 2 years until it comes out.
  • Crysis 2 was also only behind closed doors, so I couldn't see that either. Guess that still has a ways to go as well.
  • My favorite game of the show: Vanquish! So much awesome. Boosting into cover and roundhouse kicking a mech is as much fun as it sounds. For me it takes a lot of the cool parts of Lost Planet and combines them with some cool gunplay and melee. It also has that sort of crazy wacked-out fun that Bayonetta has.

  Well that's about it! I posted my pictures here, so feel free to have a look if you want to see some booth babes.

  • Posted Jun 16, 2010 11:57 pm GMT
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