| Not
really sure when exactly it became my job to sit down and
write shit whenever someone misses a deadline, but here we
are again. This time, I get to park my ass down in Anthony's
chair.
I
don't get to listen to a lot of good shit anymore, mostly
because of the fact that I like loud stuff like metal, and
that doesn't really fly when you've got a little kid in tow.
So will I buy the new System of a Down CD eventually? Hell
yes. Will I get to listen to it more than once? Fuck no. I
can only go as far as listening to Green Day sing about Jesus
of Suburbia, and that's mostly because the wife likes 'em
too. Even that will probably get pushed aside when the new
Coldplay CD she's waiting for comes out, then I'm stuck with
that when we're in the car until she goes back to U2, which
is like her default setting.
So
ya see, I'm forced to take action and find ways of getting
a fix of heavier stuff in unusal places. There's the internet.
I don't know if you can call the internet an usual place,
but you sure as hell can find anything on it. So if I've got
a free connection at work and some time to abuse it, I like
surfing around and try to find interesting stuff to download.
Probably the weirdest thing I ever look for is rock or "metal"
versions of video game music. Now this is something that you
don't really ever think about someone doing... taking music
from Nintendo games and having their freaking garage band
learn it and build it up into something worth recording. Why
the hell not, though? The first time I learned about it was
when someone played a metal version of the theme to "The
Legend of Zelda," which a lot of you are probably familiar
with. It's funny as hell, and it was supposedly done by the
guys I mentioned earlier, System of a Down. Score.
So
a little poking around in Google (love me some Google), and
suddenly there's all this shit out there, like bands called
the Minibosses,
who specialize in this sort of thing. And they do some of
the better games, too, like Castlevania and Mega Man. Almost
makes me want to dust of my old Nintendo, if it weren't for
the fact that the PS2 is still the tits.
 The
recent major find, though, was a site called metroidmetal.com.
For those of you that never played Metroid, it was probably
the longest, meanest, and still most interesting game that
was out for the old NES. The damn thing took hours and hours
to play, usually meaning days of leaving the game on if you
wanted to beat it. Sure, you could use a password, but that
doesn't help your ass when you start off with hardly any energy
and you've got to spend the day just tanking up before you
move on. Sorry, off topic. The music for Metroid was cool--very
spacy, but it was good enough that you could go for hours
and not get tired of hearing it, especially when the soundtrack
changed depending on what section of the game you were in.
So the guys at metroidmetal.com lifted it and made it really
hardcore. Nice guys that they are, they've even posted high-quality
MP3s on the site that you can download for free. So now you
can listen to really tight versions of the music from Brinstar,
Norfair, and the mother of them all, Kraid's theme. It really
comes in handy when you need something to listen to as you're
sitting at your computer, trying to write someone else's fucking
column.
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