There have been a couple of times, watching some TV show or movie, when a piece of music suddenly appeared and the combination of images, emotions, lyrics and notes elevated whatever was going on. The use of “This Woman’s Work” in the film She’s Having a Baby is an example of how it can work brilliantly for dramatic effect.
I was thinking about that recently because I ran into an example this week that fires on all cylinders… in a video game, of all places.
I’ve heard the song “No Rest for the Wicked” by Cage the Elephant, and it’s okay. It’s fun, even. But pair it up with the pseudo-cell-shaded, dark-humored goodness of the sci-fi RPG shooter Borderlands and you’ve got a toe-tapping intro that revels in its own bad-assery.
If you’re the type of person who would enjoy a sci-fi RPG shooter, I defy you to watch that and not want to play this. It’s damn near perfect in setting up the visual and emotional tone of the game.
1) Blackberry Better — Turns out there are a couple of easy fixes for some of the frustrations I’ve been encountering on my Blackberry. First, if I’d read the manual, I would probably have come across Standby Mode. By holding down the Mute key, it goes into a low-power mode that ignores all key presses except the aforementioned Mute key. No more random key presses as my car keys bump against my phone.
Second, and this isn’t in the manual, I downloaded Opera as a Web browser. Not only is it 1000 times less likely to display a “can’t find the network” error, it actually makes the Internet usable. In fact, that’s how this entry is being posted.
2) Samsung Comes Through — The promised May update to the BD-UP5000 combo Blu-ray/HD DVD player came on May 31. The unit seems faster, still plays anything I throw at it, and now decodes Dolby TrueHD sound and outputs it in full surround-sound glory. Listening to the theme to the old Star Trek TV show in all its re-recorded 5.1 goodness was enough to bring a smile to this geek’s face.