On friday I had the wonderful pleasure of experiencing Video Games Live - basically, music from video games performed by an orchestra (with choir). First of all, holy crap, the music was good on its own. When you knew the piece, that was just a bonus. Second of all, it was a pretty sweet event all told, music aside - they had booths from Microsoft and Sony, demo hardware, a Guitar Hero tournament, a costume contest… It’s pretty much the closest thing to a gaming convention Ottawa will ever have. I highly recommend you see them if they’re playing in your area.

        Let’s move on to the summary of all the fun I had (that you didn’t :( ), shall we? I don’t know about you, but that sounds great to me! From what I understand, here’s what Video Games Live does: play shows anywhere there’s an orchestra willing to play the music, with video accompaniment of cutscenes and gameplay from the games. They travel around and play with local orchestras, playing an assortment of the 80 or so songs the creator has arranged for the project. They try to play different songs everywhere they go, so it’s worth going more than once. They take suggestions on songs, too, so if I got to choose I’d love to see Assault of the Silver Dragons from FF IX, or Eternity ~ Memory of Lightwaves ~ from FF X-2, or even Destati from Kingdom Hearts. I would have been the happiest boy in the world if either of those were played.

        Well, life is full of minor disappointments. They played lots of other great stuff, though! In no particular order, they played a medley of retro games (Joust, Centipede, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, etc.), the opening sequence for Assassin’s Creed 2 (literally, they played the video behind, and did the music as it played), a similar video-and-music arrangement for God of War 3 (not sure if the video is from the game or not, as I haven’t played it, but it showed stuff from all three games so the song may have been a mix as well), an arrangement of songs from the Halo series, a medley of vanilla Megaman songs (from Megaman to Megaman 10, but no Megaman X or any of that stuff), an arrangement of character themes for Street Figher 2 (if Guile’s Theme is in SF 2, they played it) a piano medley of Final Fantasy songs (this made me so happy, I knew every song XD), a piano medley of Mario songs (half of which was played while blindfolded, and received the night’s first standing ovation), and maybe a few others I’m forgetting… There’s more, but the others bear special mention, so I’ll get to that.

        They picked two people out of the crowd to compete for a high score in Frogger, while the orchestra played the background music. The ultimate winner was a man lovingly nicknamed “Jesus” by the crowd. Jesus only hopped on the lady frog once. What a great monogamous example for us all.

        After the intermission, the winner of the Guitar Hero tournament was brought on stage to play a song alongside the orchestra (on Guitar Hero, obviously) - if he could score 175,000 points on Hard, playing Jump by Van Halen, he’d win some stuff. His response: “I want to play it on expert!” He got 200,000 points in the end. Pretty cool.

        They also played Baba Yetu (the song from Civilazation IV that won a Grammy, the first for any video game), accompanied by the original singer for the song, because apparently he’s from Toronto. Pretty sweet.

        The vocalist for all the songs was Laura “FluteLink” Intravia, who (I think) was recruited by the group after they saw a skit she’d performed and uploaded to youtube. She did the skit live, with a plush Navi over her shoulder, which was cool.

        Now I’ll give you three guesses what the finale was. Here’s a couple of hints: the title ends with the word “angel”, it had to be played by an orchestra and a choir, and it’s more than ten years old.

        If you called it before the end of that sentence, congrats. If you didn’t, you need to brush up on your gaming history and dust off a copy of Final Fantasy VII - the finale was One Winged Angel, and it was great. Lots of people did their best to sing along, mostly poorly, because who remembers all the lyrics anyway? You know, except the Sephiroth part. While it was an obvious choice for the finale, that certainly doesn’t make it a bad choice, because it was a totally fitting finish.

        Everyone stood and cheered, and a chant for one more song rose up around the room. It continued for a minute or two, and died down a little when it started to seem like we weren’t going to get it. Then it got a bit stronger, and finally they came back for an arrangement of music from Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. Everyone pulled out their backlit screen of choice (DS, cell phone, PSP) and waved them around. Probably looked really, really awesome from down on the stage. One guy was waving a laptop. A couple of the guys we’d met up with while we were there waved the copies of Chrono Cross they’d bought just before coming to the show. Lucky bastards got them for twenty bucks…

        All jealousy aside! After that song was done, everyone stood again and clapped and clapped until they said “if you guys keep standing, we’ll just have to keep playing!” Spoiler: we stood. For our second encore, we got a rendition of Still Alive, with lyrics up on the big screen for the two people who didn’t know them already. Everyone sang along, and it was great.

        Everything about it was great.