As anyone who's ever worked as a freelance journalist will know, online internet games are a surefire... hang on a sec, just got to jump, shoot and jump... fire!!! Erm, sorry, where was I? Oh yeah, internet games - they're a surefire way to distract your attention when you should be doing something of EXTREME IMPORTANCE like, say, spell-checking a Pigeon Detectives live review. They're a nuisance. They ruin your life and mean the children never get new shoes.
Last night is a case in point. Thanks to the likes of www.stickcricket.com, it came to be 11pm and I realised I hadn't written my blog about musical net happenings. Luckily I had a brainwave. Wouldn't it be a thoroughly subversive trick, I thought, to write about all the bands who've got online games on their websites. Piece of piss - it'd only take ten minutes! [Blog ed: You're fired! Or at least you would be if we were paying you anything]
Anyway, it is now 5.27am and I still can't get the F***ING C***ING KY**ING ball to hit one of the gnomes at the back of Jim Noir's football game. Worse, I keep getting bitten by a seagull in Milk Kan's Scrappy Game on my mission to get my guitar back from "a Brighton slapper". Nice. Elsewhere, my hours were chewed up with Rapper Wars, a shonky stats game that involves joining Snoop Dogg's gang, selling drugs and killing people. You wouldn't get that on Travis's website would you? (Answer: no, you just get to have a food fight).
Of course, most of these online games are nothing more than funky branding exercises that have nothing to do with the ideas of the actual band whatsoever. In my time on the indie frontline I've come to realise that most bands on a major label employ someone to do all this stuff for them, and they just grunt their approval. I remember Kasabian's marketing girl showing me a bunch of promotional stickers the band were releasing and me naively asking whose idea it was (meaning, which member of the band came up with it). She looked at me like I was stupid and said "mine".
Anyway, enough about games - I'll leave you with news that a bunch of geeks have rewired the controller for the console game Guitar Hero and turned it into a proper functioning instrument. It involved lots of charts and long words, but now they've got it working it sounds just like a real guitar (ie. rather pointless) and they've formed a band, the Guitar Zeroes.
Talking of Guitar Hero, I recently had a go on it at some horrific corporate indie gig and can quite confidently predict that if that game was ever in my possession I'd never earn a penny again. I'd be like that Chinese boy who forgot to eat whilst playing too much World Of Warcraft and died. I'd be unable to think of anything more productive than how to get the maximum riff bonus on Rape Me. Yeah, you heard right - one of the songs you can rock out to on your Xbox360 is Nirvana's Rape Me. And they wonder why Kurt Cobain topped himself.
