11.12
A while back a heard of a pretty cool “music adventure” site called thesixtyone.com. You get quests and complete them by listening to music in different ways and you gain exp and level up. It’s a pretty cool idea. The music available is uploaded by the bands so you won’t find anything mainstream, which is nice when my iTunes library gets a little dull.
I eventually came across this “NES-Rock” band from Chicago called I Fight Dragons. I pretty much instantly became a fan because they sing about stuff like Zelda and robots, and they covered Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ but with some Mario tunes thrown in. On stage they perform all their NES synth stuff by playing actual Nintendo controllers and peripherals that they’ve programmed to play music.
I somehow managed to get some free stickers from them by replying to one of their twitter posts. Here they are, sent all the way from the US in a hand addressed envelope:
I think that was pretty AWESOME of them.
Coincidentally one of my favorite songs of theirs, ‘The Future Soon’, is a cover of a Jonathan Coulton song of the same name. Jonathan Coulton is the guy who wrote the ‘Still Alive’ song from Portal. I started listening to him a lot as well. While playing the Left 4 Dead 2 demo I noticed his song ‘Re: Your Brains’ playing from one of the in-game jukeboxes. My head pretty much exploded.
I highly reccomend listening to I Fight Dragons and Jonathan Coulton if you think you’d enjoy either NES-Rock or happy/funny songs about random stuff like what it would be like to live with a T1000.