You Wouldn't Steal a Purse

So steal some music instead. Any qualms you might have are easily remedied by Courtney Love. Here's an 8-bit indie-electro blast to the face from Sweden's The Touch. While the intro smacks of Le Justice, is soon settles into a thick, chunky, chopped-up groove and stays there for awhile before bringing in the indie vox. It's a versatile track that offers varying intensities of a spacious, mixable buildup, then serves up the more traditional song elements later on, where it demands more room to breathe. Rockin' stuff. Thanks to Fluokids for the link -- stop by if you get the chance.

The Touch - Heart of the City (Stuffa mix)

The Touch Myspace

Hit the Bricks

There's not really too much to say about this, other than it'll most likely be the coolest thing I view all day. Although a couple of years old, here's FF7 in Lego, by way of Destructoid:

Best use of bananas ever. It's the identity-crisis ridden supersoldier clone with the biggest pair since Van Damme in that one movie, Universal Something. His hair's always looked like how I imagine a corrupted-yet-still-readable 3d Studio Max file would. But infused with the essence of Jenova or no, he's useless without his perpetually pissed-off protege, That Black Dude.




This model is probably the least accurate, as Barret is pictured smiling. Together with the help of Cloud's nondescript, utterly forgettable childhood sweetheart, some bead-bedecked flower-growing hippie slut (thanks to womengamers.com for the link), a foul-mouthed, cigar-chomping airplane mechanic and a shapeshifting goth amputee, they'll try super hard to save the bilinearally-filtered 3d overworld map from David Carradine.



Rad. Speaking of, that same page features the Blue Dragon from Strider (the good version). A Lego Hiryu is sorely needed.

Steal This Link

Okay, before I do this, let me say that I promise to set up a zShare account of my own and to keep my hotlinked to the accounts of others to a minimum. I'm fucking serious. This is bad form. I'm ashamed.

Alright! Now that that's out of the way, here's a little tidbit I pulled off of Discobelle earlier in the week. I'm still debating with myself whether it makes for a better opener than closer, but whatever the case, this is a track that delivers a super-smooth lounge vibe underneath rollicking, discopunky, cowbell-laden drums, straight from the suburbs of Melbourne, Austrailia.

Architecture in Helsinki - Debbie (U Turn remix)

AiH's MySpace.

Rearranging the Furniture

You may or may not notice that a couple things have changed here at KBN, depending on whether or not your name is Larry. Regardless, here's a primer on what's new.

Link lists!

There's more of them and more to them. 'Read This Instead of Working' is basically a list of sites that I review, daily, for at least one hour immediately after arriving at work. All of them are highly reccommended, and as I'm sure many are aware, superb timesinks. Digg and Stumbleupon are for developing a sweet meme addiction, while the others are just gut-bustingly funny.

All the gaming sites have been heaped into one list. That includes blogs, review megasites, and links to the pages of games that I'm 'into'. Whatever.

Local Flavor is where I support the good men and women of the Houston electronic music (Dubstep?) scene. All the people involved in what's on the other sides of those jumps contribute way, way more than I do. Support.

The present form of Music That I Steal is, for the moment, a meager assortment of blogs from which I pull a chunk of my mp3s. You'll find that they're mostly centered around that crazy electro-disco-rock music that the kids enjoy. Read them. Download the music for yourself so that, by virtue of your knowing exactly where I find my material, I'll be shamed into scouring the net deeper and wider for tunes ever more interesting and obscure. While at work.

If you don't visit, that's okay too, as I'll occasionally be shamelessly aping their links from time to time (see above).

Too Much Free Time Files: Nerf GoW Lancer

I originally came upon the following via this fine service and posted it to Houstonbeats -- just about the only place that this blog gets advertised. Upon being asked why it hadn't yet been posted here, I check my comments and was pleasantly surprised to find that readership had virtually exploded since I last wrote anything. Thanks, guys (Larry). Now, onto the meat:

You like Gears? Maybe you like chainsawing the shit out of aliens in Gears. What about Nerf guns? Did you ever shoot Nerf guns at your friends as a kid? Maybe you put out someone's eye. Did you chainsaw the shit out of them? What? No? Well shit, this next post's for you.

BAM.

One day while I was playing Co-op with my little buddy Gabriel I put the game on pause and told him I was going to make a Lancer. He asked how and I didn't exactly know. All I knew was the seed was placed deep within my brain that I needed to make one.



That seed grew into an idea. I then found that same make of toy chainsaw over at ToysRus.
I was eyeballing it and realized it could be done.
I then brought it home. After taking it out of its package I realized this was going to be harder than I thought.

If your face feels freshly rocked, that's because this is exactly what it looks like. More after the jump.

The Core is Exposed

Saw this on Digg today: apparently the dollar value of a smooth game of Crysis at maximum detail sits at around $1800 for only the video cards, plugged into what one can only assume is the Citadel's dark energy reactor. Gaze upon their works, and despair:

PC Games Hardware magazine has finally done it. They got Crysis to run smooth on very high with a Triple SLI video card setup. The cards alone cost over $1800. I didn’t even know they made power supplies that could output 1200W!

The article in its entirety can be viewed at Gemega, with benchmarks. The way things are going, Crysis is shaping up to be one of 2010's best games.

Listen All'a Y'all It's A Sabotage

Pandemic Studios (a recent aquisition of publishing behemoth EA) has had this one in the kiln for some time now. Although not much is known regarding core gameplay, Saboteur (X360, PS3) seems to be shaping up as an action-stealth-sandbox hybrid that promises some innovative graphical twists -- specifically, a gameplay element known as "will to fight". From Wikipedia:

Color will be a key-element in the gameplay, and players will experience an Okami-esque style when entering certain parts of the city. In order to make that district colored ("happy") again, players must weaken the German forces occupying the area. In doing so, that district's citizens will regain their hope, characterized by what has been called the "Will to fight" factor. In areas with low WtF, the area is dark, with color being various shades of grey (with the notable and sinister exception of several historically-accurate German Flag types, complete with swastika), whereas in areas with high WtF, the area is vibrant and with full color.

In addition, areas with a low WtF will be portrayed as being suffocatingly dense with lovable Krauts, while in high WtF areas, the soldiers will be far more sparse and mostly concentrated within bases, barracks, and -- if all goes well -- brothels.

It's always refreshing when a developer approaches the visual side of things with more than just an impetus toward prettier, sharper, and more folds per square foot being sported by character models. Given that we're already seeing the first glimmers of photorealistic fidelity in gaming, devs will have to get a little more conceptually creative to be seen as having pushed the envelope graphically throughout the next generation of platforms -- after all, you can't make something look more real than real, not unless Assassin's Creed 2 ships with complementary psilocybin. After that whole near-perfect visual fidelity banchmark is met and we all own GPUs dedicated to rendering water, we're probably going to want to see some risks getting taken.

On a personal note, here's hoping that Pandemic regals us with a little bit of that old-fashioned stealth gaming the likes of Hitman or Deus Ex, and not that craptacular alert-status mechanism made possible by what I can only assume is Altair's pager.

For the curious, Saboteur previews and screenshots can be found over at Gamespot (down, but not out!)