Tuesday, July 14, 2015

A Tribute to Satoru Iwata

The gaming industry lost a tremendous figure on July 11. Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo, passed away due to bile duct cancer that he had been battling for a few years. He was one of the few CEOs who was humble, seemed to care about his workers and consumers, and understood where his games came from as a former designer and programmer. People who have known Iwata on a personal and professional level have already given their tribute to him and while I have never met him, I’ll write about how his games influenced me growing up.


Concert Review - Mac Sabbath



Being a parody band can be a tricky thing. You have your gimmick and the music. The parody might be in just the image or it might be in the music or it could be a combination of both. Unless you are as clever and as good as someone like Weird Al Yankovic you probably are not going to go far. Mac Sabbath manages to get the image and the sound right. An Ozzy-era Black Sabbath tribute band with McDonald’s themed lyrics, Mac Sabbath has it all to be a successful parody band. They came to Phoenix for the first time on a Friday, July 10. With a couple of friends and my girlfriend in tow, we set off to see this hilarious and fun band.



Saturday, July 11, 2015

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

The Games That Got Me Excited at E3 2015 - Part 1

Another year and another E3 has past. For the past several years I was pretty lackadaisical on the event. Most of the games there barely had me in excitement or I had already known about them before it even started. This year, however, there were quite a few games that have me excited as well as quite a few surprises from older game franchises and some promising looking new titles. This is the first part of three of that games that I’m looking forward to the most coming out later this year and the next.

Happy Canada Metal Day 2015!

The first of July marks the day that Canada violently rose up against the tyranny of the British Empire and establish their freedom as a nation. What’s that? It’s just a few colonies uniting into a single country, effectively creating Canada within the British Empire of the time? Well so Canada made not have a bloody beginning as the United States had but Canada sure has some fantastic metal bands. When talking about metal and the countries that have them, Canada rarely shows up. You have the usual nations of Sweden, Norway, United Kingdom and the United States but United States’ hat is rarely acknowledged when it comes to prominent metal bands. And while our Northern Neighbors don’t have many innovators of metal they have a lot of bands that perfect the craft and push it forward. Probably another reason that Canada doesn’t get recognized is that there really aren’t any large bands outside of Rush and the technical death metal outfit, Nickelback. Here are some Canadian bands that I enjoy and push the envelope of metal.