I've been waiting for Video Games Live to come to Boston ever since their debut in 2005. Last Friday, the wait ended when the touring group that performs live renditions of video game music finally came to its founder's home state.

My two tickets in hand, I showed up at the Wang Center early enough to take in the atmosphere before the doors opened. The first element I encountered was my fellow concert goers. There was no mistaking this crowd: from their apparel to their hair to their glasses, these were gamers. Almost any stereotype you could imagine applied to this throng who diligently played their DS and PSP handhelds while waiting for the doors to open. A few people dressed in costumes, though more often these were children being paraded by their parents.

Once we finally took our seats, we were treated to the music video "Yuri The Only One" (iTunes), which was a great tribute to modern gamers:

The orchestra and choir, both local and conducted by Jack Wall, then took the stage. Each number was accompanied by a montage of scenes projected onto a screen above the orchestra, complementing the game's live rendition with a visual component. I wondered if this perhaps detracted from the experience. I've enjoyed many orchestral performances just by watching the conductor and his players, but here my eyes were naturally drawn upward and away from the source of the music. Of course, if I wanted to focus on the music, I have plenty of video game soundtrack CDs that stand alone just fine.

As it turns out, my previous blog post had presented in order the show's two opening acts: a montage of classic games, followed by a Metal Gear Solid medley. After witnessing the music of God of War, we were introduced to Ken Levine from nearby 2K Games, who briefly discussed the importance of soundtrack to a game such as his BioShock, whose music we then heard. A representative of the Massachusetts governor's office briefly appeared to offer his congratulations and support (and a brief reminiscence of King's Quest III), but otherwise didn't add much to the evening. A 21-year-old gamer was also then ushered onto the stage from the audience to clear a round of Space Invaders on the big screen, with live music from the orchestra. Not only did he fail the challenge, he was nearly booed off the stage before he even began by admitting to having never played the game before. Shouldn't that be a prerequisite for attendance at such a concert?

The next two pieces featured some guest performers. The music of Civilization IV included Ron Reagan, the soloist who sang for the original soundtrack. Next came YouTube phenomenon Martin Leung, aka the Video Game Pianist, who played ten Final Fantasy pieces, demonstrating some brilliant and subtle transitions between tunes from the entire storied series.

VGL's repertoire includes 50 arrangements, but each concert features only 20. Apparently, the pieces can be voted on at their Web site, and more than any other city, Boston had requested Metroid. With a follow-up of Zelda music, this Nintendo fan boy was in seventh heaven; the two pieces together made the perfect conclusion to the first act.

Time between acts was filled with two more video tributes that had apparently been floating around the 'net for a few months without crossing my path. Both Junior Kickstart and My Childhood In Four Minutes had plenty for the "older" crowd to appreciate. Speaking of which, the audience was composed almost entirely of twenty-somethings. A few older folks were there with their kids, though it was hard to tell who had dragged who along.

But it was the oldest gentleman in attendance who opened the second act. Everyone knows and respects Shigeru Miyamoto for inventing Mario and Donkey Kong in the Eighties, and Yuji Naka for Sonic in the Nineties, but Ralph Baer precedes them both by decades. Mr. Baer is often considered the father of the video game industry, because it was his invention, Pong, that Nolan Bushnell popularized in arcades with Atari. Pong was not the first video game — that honor likely belongs to Spacewar! — but without Mr. Baer, the modern landscape of electronic entertainment would be very different indeed. We saw a video of Mr. Baer compete against Bill Harrison in a 1969 match of Pong before both men were reunited on stage. Rather than a rematch, an eight-year-old was invited from the audience to play against Mr. Baer using one of the original Pong machines. It was a close game that eventually went to the younger generation with a score of 5-4.

After that, the second act relied less on guests than the first act had, proceeding to again play from both old and new scores. Kingdom Hearts, Sonic the Hedgehog, World of Warcraft, Starcraft II, Super Mario Bros., and Tetris were the next pieces. Martin Leung returned for the Mario medley, playing a few pieces blindfolded before engaging in more challenging and extremely fast compositions.

The next set relied on an audience member who had won a Guitar Hero contest during intermission. The gamer was challenged to play Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion" on stage, with Ron Reagan on vocals and show designer and emcee Tommy Tallarico on bass. This gamer wasn't prepared for the "Hard" setting, though, and insisted it be changed — to "Expert"! He blew away the 200,000-point challenge Tommy had set to him, much to the audience's delight.

Speaking of which, Tommy Tallarico has the ego to be on stage: he loves to perform and be the center of attention whenever possible. And that's not a bad thing, since he is both a talented and prolific performer. He loves his work, his art, and his fans, and was happy to accommodate them all. He stayed on stage to play guitar for most of the next pieces, which were Halo, then two encores: Final Fantasy VII's "One Winged Angel" followed by a Castlevania composition, with Martin Leung on organ.

It was a brilliant evening shared with an enthusiastic crowd that didn't want to see it end. As an old school gamer, I didn't fully appreciate many of the pieces, such as God of War or even Halo, which makes the majority of their first album (iTunes) unappealing. But every piece was professionally done, and the variety of genres, eras, and styles played to everyone.

If I had one valid criticism of the evening, it's that not all the music was live. One of the choir singers told me, "They did have some percussion/rhythm tracks that they played on some pieces. For the choir, we were backed up on most of the pieces by a choir track, although they did mix us into it." Though this mix may've produced a sound more akin to the original soundtrack, I don't think such imitation was wholly necessary; as sites like OCReMix have proven, variations and original arrangements are more than welcome.

Several of the evening's numbers have made their way to YouTube, but it's no substitute for the environment, audience, and sounds of a live performance. Check VGL's their tour dates to find when you'll have an opportunity you won't want to miss.

This past week, Microsoft launched the New Xbox Experience (NXE).  The NXE is a major update to the Xbox 360's dashboard that adds several new features and generally improves the user interface.  The new UI is faster, prettier (the boring text-based menus have been replaced with appropriate images), more informative (selecting games now brings up a wealth of screenshots and other details), and generally easier to navigate.

My favorite new feature is definitely the Community Games section, where you can download games made by various hobbyists and indie groups for 200-800 Microsoft points each (that's $2.50-$10 in US dollars).  The system started with a few dozen games; today, there are already about 50.  They range in quality from atrocious (most of the 3D shooters) to must-buys.  Of the games currently available, Weapon of Choice is easily the best — a Metal Slug/Contra-style run-and-gun game with great graphics, multiple paths and playable characters, an intriguing death system (one-hit kills, but when you're about to die, time slows down, giving you a chance to change your fate), and insane weaponry.  A whip with a machine gun on it?  Check.  Flame thrower that doubles as a rocket pack?  Check.  A gun that shoots out more guns?  Check.  At a mere 400 points, I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys action games.

A few of the other community games that are definitely worth checking out include Artoon, a bouncy ball platformer with very stylish graphics; In the Pit, an audio-only game where you're a monster in a dark pit eating people; Biology Battle, a high quality Geometry Wars-style shooter; Blow; a puzzler that has using fans to navigate bubbles through levels; Endless Swarm, akin to Tower Defense crossed with Missile Command; Word Soup, word creation puzzle game; and StarPilot, avariant on the light cycle game from the movie TRON.

My second favorite feature is the addition of Netflix Watch Instantly support, allowing you to watch any of the movies and TVs shows on Netflix's streaming service on your Xbox.   This feature has more requirements than I feel it should: being a Netflix member is a natural prerequisite, but you must also be an Xbox Live Gold member. It could be more convenient by allowing you to adjust your Netflix queue directly from the Xbox. Even with these limitations, my wife and I have been greatly enjoying watching episodes of The Office on the monitor that my 360 is hooked up to, instead of our usual method of streaming to her laptop's small screen.  The picture quality isn't amazing, at least with our DSL connection's speed, but it's adequate and is a great feature that I dare say will sway a few people who were on the fence about a 360 purchase into buying one.

Avatars were probably the addition that Microsoft was advertising the most, and they work.  They're basically the same as the Miis that Nintendo's Wii has, except a bit more realistic though still cartoonish.  Judging from my own avatar as well as my friends', it seems to be much easier to make your avatar look like yourself than it is with Miis.  Avatars are a decent addition that will probably draw more casual gamers; my eight-year-old daughter loves them and spent an hour or two this morning customizing her own.

One last feature that needs to be mentioned is the ability to copy 360 games to the hard drive for quicker load times.  How much it reduces load times varies from game to game (the worse the programming, the bigger the improvement). I installed Earth Defense Force 2017, which took about 5-10 minutes. After installing it, the loads all seemed to go a bit faster, although by exactly how much, I can't say.  More precisely, I did a before-and-after test installing Burnout Revenge and found the load times to be drastically better after installing: level loads went down from around 18 seconds playing from the disk down to around 8 seconds playing from the hard drive. Unfortunately, installation takes up quite a bit of hard drive space since it basically copies the entire game to the hard drive and I only have the 20 GB hard drive.  Oh well, maybe I'll pick up a large hard drive when the prices go down.

All in all, I'm really enjoying the new Xbox 360 dashboard, so much that it almost feels like I just bought a brand new system.  The addition of Community Games alone would have been enough to make me thrilled, but the additions of Netflix support, avatars, hard drive installations, and a vastly better looking interface that offers more information make the new dashboard a fantastic new addition to the Xbox 360 system.

Sega announced today the spring 2009 release of Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection, which has not only six 16-bit Sonic games, but at least 34 other games from the Sega Genesis. A complete list is available at their Web site and includes Golden Axe I-III, Phantasy Star II-IV, Streets of Rage 1-3, Shining Force 1-2, and several others. As much as I love the Virtual Console and its ilk, paying $40 for such a comprehensive package is far preferable to being nickeled-and-dimed to death at $5-10/game.

The Ultimate Genesis Collection also offers a feature not found in a pure emulator: Scale2x, a "real-time graphics effect able to increase the size of small bitmaps guessing the missing pixels without interpolating pixels and blurring the images." That means that graphics can be upgraded on-the-fly to be smoother and less pixelated. As an example, observe this before-and-after comparison of a scene from Sonic & Knuckles, one of the many games on the disc:

Purists need not worry, as this upgrade filter is optional and can be disabled.

In my heart, I'm a Nintendo fanboy, and though I'm more cosmopolitan now, in my youth, I eschewed anything without the Nintendo Seal of Quality. That focus has robbed me of the history and nostalgia necessary to fully appreciate a collection such as this, but it is nonetheless a great offering to Xbox 360 & PS3 gamers everywhere.

How's this for a confluence: I like gamebooks like the Choose Your Own Adventure series and the Lone Wolf books. November is NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month.  Also in November, Microsoft is launching their Xbox Live Community games system, an online distribution system that makes it possible for any gaming hobbyist to sell their Xbox 360 fan-made games.  I like video games and would like to make my own.

Put all these pastimes together, and what do I get? … Molly the Were-Zompire.

I am currently writing Molly, a digital interactive novel in the style of the Choose Your Own Adventure novels.   It will be released on the Xbox Live Community games system with a price tag of 200 MS points ($2.50 in US currency).  Before that happens, I need to get the plotting and first draft done in November, the programming done in December (some of the coding is already done from a previous version of this project), and then do editing and debugging in January, with a public release later that month.

The premise of the story is that Molly is just an ordinary girl with dreams of becoming a heroine.  One day, she finds a magic book with a spell that promises great power to the one who casts it.  She casts the spell, summons the undead, is simultaneously killed by a werewolf, zombie, and a vampire, and then is reborn as Molly the Were-Zompire, potential heroine extraordinaire.  At this point, the game begins proper and the player decides what choices Molly will make.  Depending on the player's choices, the story could end up progressing in very different directions: an ally in one path of the story could be an enemy in another; entire locations and plot points are exclusive to certain plot paths; and so on.

The game was initially envisioned as a cross between interactive novels and traditional console RPGs, but in the end, I decided to just make it a straight interactive novel.  The problem with the previous version was that the two aspects didn't want to play nicely with each other. The RPG aspect kept wanting to interject combat situations and complex leveling up systems into the game. That complexity interfered with keeping the pace of the story moving briskly while exploring interesting non-combat situations.  In the end, the story aspect won out.  (I'll save the complicated formulae for a later RPG.)

Doing this kind of branching story in a digital form should have several advantages: the pacing should be a lot brisker without any of that pesky page flipping in search of a new page number for each choice; players won't accidentally read other storylines when they're searching for the next page; it'll be very easy to program in the ability to backtrack at any point if they reach a premature ending or just want to try a different path; the game can keep track of which endings have been seen and maybe even display a flowchart showing which parts of the branching storyline have been experienced; and perhaps my favorite digital advantage, the novel can be as long as I like without having to worry about page counts and editor concerns.

To be honest, I have no idea if this will be successful.  I believe there's a market for interactive fiction like this, though Molly's almost entirely text-based nature could deter people.  The $2.50 price tag could result in impulse purchases, but some people might see the low price as an indication of lack of quality.  Regardless of whether the game is a commercial success or not, I still think it'll be a success for me.  I've had the unfulfilled goals of writing a novel and making a video game ever since I was a little kid and this is a way that I can accomplish both goals at the same time.  Plus, the experience and self esteem gained from working on this project could pave the way toward future project.