Infinite Lives

• IGN – Bit.Trip Beat Review
  If other writers are as on-point with their reviews as Mark Bozon is, I’m going to start reading IGN again.
• WIRED – SXSW: LoudCrowd Turns Music into Social Video Arcade
  Oh, here’s something I kept meaning to mention, and forgot. (Sorry, Loudcrowd!) So, OK. Loudcrowd is this really fantastic social gaming music website. In the beatmatching game—the one I played endlessly last December—you "dance" and chat with other players. Often, one of the players acts as a "guest" DJ, spinning tracks for everyone else on the site. And Wired.com is right: for someone sitting around waiting for Justice tracks, Loudcrowd is MIGHTY addictive.
• Bliterations – Like an Opera Singer with a Chastity Belt
  Relegating this link to a delicious.com cron batch is utterly painful for me, because Kurt Shulenberger’s "Like an Opera Singer with a Chastity Belt" is absolutely one of the best nonfiction pieces I’ve read this year. Posing as a retrospective of the bizarre NES title ‘Gumshoe,’ the essay soon turns to the game’s 8-bit soundtrack—which, apparently, is all that grounds this otherwise inexplicable game. "The game’s dirty jazz tunes (which, admittedly, only make up a fraction of the score) are the only ligature holding the game’s gritty detective narrative together. Without it, it’s just a fever dream hodgepodge of raining boulders, giant armadillos, jumping swordfish, and other mid-80’s videogame idioms designed to kill you as quickly as possible instead of fleshing out the environment." Shulenberger helpfully provides mp3s, too. "Complex in their harmonies but rhythmically inviting," he writes, "these pieces make Gumshoe almost worth playing through. Almost."

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