Unsurprisingly, Season One is mostly more of the same. On the cosmetic side, both the website and the game’s launcher UI received new snazzy themes and sound track. For the game itself, beyond the usual patch changes of balance tweaks and a new hero, a draft mode was implemented for competitive play. This mode includes alternating bans of 4 champions, 2 for each team, followed by a staggered draft. Unlike normal games, champions also must be unique, meaning that opposing teams cannot select the same champion. This introduces an important strategic element, and also gives Riot a useful tool for determining balance, as the most commonly banned heroes indicate the desires and irritants of the player base.

Season One is quite the culmination of achievement for a relatively new game. In an era of MMOs and FPS with online components, LoL stands in a unique place, both as a free game that isn’t text based or mature and a new entrant. It is a pity that Riot will not release usage numbers, as it is quite possible that the LoL is setting a variety of records, particularly in the realm of “free to play games”. Which brings up an important point: even in a perfect world, Season One is somewhat uncharted territory and ultimately a beta for future seasons to come.

Accordingly, things haven’t been perfect, but for the most part, they’ve gone well. One speed bump was a nasty bug on the first day that left players unable to select their champions, leading to disqualification and a loss. Riot did not announce this bug to the public, despite a slew of threads in the bug forum, but they did confirm its existence to me and its subsequent hot fixing the same evening as launch. There were, however, no efforts made to remediate losses from it. While minor in the scheme of things, losing because of a bug was not how people (myself included) wanted to start their competitive experience, — in fact, I suffered said bug from my first game.

Additionally, server lag has often been quite poor, although it has improved recently. This is a bit of a shock, as LoL prides itself on server side connections and typically strong performance. With usage numbers likely at an all time high – finding games takes half to a fourth of the time it did prior to Season 1 – a certain amount of lag could be anticipated as part of the launch. However, beyond some glib comments from various Riot employees on the forums, the company has not acknowledged the problem formally, nor given its causes. Anecdotally, it appears to have improved over the first few weeks, but whether this is from additional server capacity or reduced usage is unknown.

Riot has been more open and aggressive in improving other issues around the launch. They’ve identified certain bugs that remain and made them clear to the community. They’ve also been very aggressive in curbing negative player behavior, at least to the extent this is possible on the internet. A publicized campaign of banning players who enjoy being asshats, be it intentionally poor game performance or asinine behavior, has been executed, resulting in suspensions and bans of hundreds of accounts.

Another item of note is that Riot has been willing to aggressively alter Season One’s structure to support game quality. Initially, players from level 20-30 (30 is the current level cap) were allowed to participate in Season One. However, data revealed that players 20-29 were dramatically more likely to quit on games, so Riot moved within the first week to bring the cutoff to 30 to increase game quality. They are, however, considering lowering the cap for arranged teams, so that people can more easily play with their friends, under the premise friends are less likely to quit on each other. This sort of firm and decisive action, backed by hard data, is indicative of a developer that has a handle on their community.

Overall, Season One of LoL is an impressive achievement that will likely set the stage for the game’s continued reign over DOTA and its clones and carve a out a niche among the gaming industry as a whole. The launch has also served to provide significant insight into Riot as a company. On the strong side, as previously mentioned, the company is very clearly composed of gamers who understand the community and the game itself at a practical level. There is a strong community presence – from community relations employees to programmers – that reflects a work place that is creative and “gets it.”

On the weak side, Riot exhibits some of the same traits we see from larger companies: a willingness to ignore certain noticeable errors and failures, even in the face of their existence (bugs, lag), with the (presumed) hope that the overall strength of the game will carry the day. Another example: the elusive Mac client. An earlier press release indicated that it would arrive in time for Mac users to play in Season One. Although the release did not explicitly indicate perfect overlap with Season One, there has been no word of the Mac client lately. Where did it go?

LoL is well worth any gamers’ time, especially since it comes at the low price of “free.” The bigger question, which perhaps is only relevant to postulating bloggers and game reviewers, is if Riot is interested in doing business in an open manner, or if they will follow the tried and true Blizzard business model of “awesome product, and the rest doesn’t matter.” In this day and age, it probably doesn’t matter: gamers who can walk away with a good game should be happy, because even that is a rarity. And League of Legends is absolutely a good, if not great, game.

So what does this have to do with the tetris theme tune? Well, felchpants, it just so happens that I am the fourth ranked connoisseur of tetris remixes on the whole internet, ergo the English speaking world. I aim to be number one one day and I hope to see some of you rise to the challenge in the future. In the meantime, here’s my story.

Why Tetris?

It is a given that tetris is one of the most memorable themes to a video game. Without that tune it is doubtful that the game would have been arguably the most successful game of all time. Or remembered as such at least. Certainly making huge inroads with the real people way before we were all playing imaginary bowling in our living rooms. But surely, Cunzy you say, we all turned the volume down after the first hour or so? Why listen to the Tetris theme all day every day?

Well, my porcine friend, here’s how it happened. Before everything could be googled, every gamer was an island. If you were lucky you had a peer or two who you could obsess over gaming with. But eventually he would grow up, move on or eventually sell out and be interested in things like mortgages and making savings on the gas bill. It was very much like being a mutant from X-Men before the professor turns up and gives you a cool uniform. What I really mean is that being a gamer before the internet invaded every day lives was like being a gay (or so your mom tells us). Or a furry. Or one of those people who likes being poo’d on. As a gamer in the big bad world I would ask questions like “Am I normal?”, “Is it big enough?” and the question we’ve all asked ourselves “Does it count if I didn’t know that Rikku was 14 in FFX?”. Then paradoxically, years before Final Fantasy X came out, the internet was released on PC and all of a sudden, by simply typing in a string of unsavory words you could discover that not only were there other people with the same interests as you but, by their yardstick, you weren’t a freak, you were practically vanilla.

One of the first things I did was look up some of my favourite game soundtracks and theme tunes. For someone as musically untalented as myself, it wasn’t possible to listen to the theme tune from Treasure Island Dizzy* without physically loading up the game and listening to the theme tune on the menu screen (which I did for hours). This was fine within the comfort of the home and when nobody else was using the same room but I couldn’t take that music with me. For a while I experimented with an old tape recorder and the TV speakers. But really, really quiet hissy noise piped through Walkman speakers was not enough.

Bizarrely, it turns out I wasn’t the only one who found the ending theme of Streets of Rage 2 very beautiful. Other people with more know how, willpower and passion had uploaded recordings or hacked apart games to find the music or remastered it, remixed it or even mashed it together with another song. My early days of looking up video game music on the web were taken up with hunting down as many different versions of the ice cap zone theme from Sonic 3 and songs from other Mega Drive games.

Then one day I found a tetris track. I’m not going to pretend to know which one it was or to pretend that I still have it. But something exploded in my mind. From that day on I’ve lifted every virtual stone in search of a good tetris remix. There are some truly amazing remixes out there which show a lot of love for the original Game Boy bleeps. There are a lot of awful awful versions too.

Dance, techno and trance are perhaps obviously well represented but there are some cracking alternatives. Chip tune, folk, freestyle, rap, beatbox, happy hardcore or jumpstyle. All riffing off the same source tune. I’m currently in love with a remix by Bounce Sound which interweaves the tetris theme with sex noise. DJ Triplestar has made an awesome jumpstyle remix and DaCav 5 still rock my boat with their tetris remix WITH WORDS OVER IT.  That’s right.

Some tracks you can only experience in a club where the bass is so big it does funny things to your nether regions like Psychic Element’s version. Nexus takes 0 skills makes me wish I was off my tits with a hundred people in a box.  Sometimes a bit of panpipes are in order a la Kgzspade. Then Nintendo come along and show how it’s done with the excellent A and B games remixes for Super Smash Brothers Brawl. Other highlights are Hollow More Inc’s tetris Overture and Eighty Eight Records freestyle tetris remix which are both excellent in their own right. McVaffe rips it up with the B game tune. That’s the tip of the iceberg and of course, somedays the original is in order.

So far, so what the point? The point is, for all the railing against the gaming community that I, others and non-gamers do, sometimes gaming inspires people to create something beautiful. Or create something at all. I don’t have the stats but I imagine gaming inspired remixes, fansites, videos, fan fics and blogs like this one take up a fair ol’ chunk of the internet. Tetris remixes are but one example of the kind of diversity of the people that are inspired by gaming.

Until next time. Keep on rocking in Midgar.

*I’ve still to find that track without messing around with emulators. Rock covers of the spectrum version, sure. ‘Funny covers’ I’ve got five. FYI. The internet ain’t all that.

I may have already mentioned ALREADY JESUS CHRIST ALREADY GET OFF MY BACK MOM ALREADY! That I am a big fan of video game soundtracks. Be it the official tunes, an inspired remix and very occasionally I even allow songs which have merely sampled an OT to creep onto the MP3 player. PRO TIP: Never ever, ever be tempted to listen to a video game related song which has been filed under the ‘comedy’ or ‘humorous’ genres. They are almost exclusively 11 year old boys who sound like girls on helium doing the first season Pokemon theme tune. Tetris remixes aside, of which team videolamer are veritable connoisseurs, I do like hard copy soundtracks. They are often objects of beauty as well as magically trapping the music onto a disk.

Here’s the official top 5. Yeah that’s right bitches. Doing a list. Lists are normally the reserve for the green around-the-gills, unskilled new video game bloggers. But when you’ve been blogging as long as we have you are allowed to sometimes ironically do a list.

To be honest Final Fantasy VII was the first game (proved not true down the page) whose soundtrack I even considered wanting in the first place. Now, I do enjoy a good chip tune but often they aren’t worth hunting down and back when this came out, you did have to hunt it down by GOING OUT TO THE HIGH STREET and looking for it in comic shops. Crazy days.  I bought a copy of the lovely multi disk set for my brother and secretly I wish I’d kept it. Still. Let it also be noted that I’m going to use disc and disk interchangeabley throughout this post.
Back in the day out of sheer child-like curiosity my brother and I would put PlayStation discs into a CD player and see what they played. PRO TIP2: Always skip the first track which is horrible noise that happens when a CD player tries to be a console and a game tries to be a CD. Of my favourites to ‘listen to’, Alien Resurrection had some awesome atmospheric scary noise, Nightmare Creatures had some good angry rawk and Tomb Raider had the cool soundtrack as well as all of Lara’s recorded spoken audio. PRO TIP 3: Play the “Now I’d better get out of these wet clothes” sample over and over again with your eyes closed whilst masturbating and it’s like Lara Croft is really there. Obsessively, compulsively telling you about her wet clothes. Well. It worked for me. Anyway, the collector’s edition of the 10th Anniversary Edition of Tomb Raider came with a special Tomb Raider Legend soundtrack. I burned it onto my mp3 player and after months of filtering almost the whole soundtrack is still on our ‘most listened’ playlist.

Almost every time a GTA comes out I see the 148 CD soundtrack box set for sale everywhere and never buy it. And now it is expensive or out of stock or sold off disc by disc. It really is a testament to the quality of the radio stations of GTA Vice City that if you burned all of the radio station tracks and played it in your car it is STILL 1000000% more compelling than national or commercial radio stations and significantly less repetitive. This is the one that got away.

Still brilliant today. I lost the original CD SUPER SAD FACE and now I only have the original soundtrack as stupid fucking WMA files. I’m positive that I could legally download Killer Cuts again but that would require firing up a PC and installing things which sounds too much like PC gaming so pah!

Cheating a bit but surely, the greatest video game soundtrack of all time? Not only are the original soundtracks some of the most inspired in the video game ‘genre(?)’ but the re-masters, remixes and mash ups in this game’s soundtrack are mental. Proper mentally good. My personal highlights are almost any of the Kirby tracks, the Pokemon stadium/evolution track and of course, the Tetris A remix. But that is a mere smidgen of the hundreds of quality tracks from Wii Sports through to the G&W mashup. I wish the above pictured product existed but alas ’tis but an imagined dream by KoopaDasher, original here. And of course, Nintendo being Nintendo the SSBB soundtrack is available for purchase from every decent video games retailer*.

*LAST PRO TIP: First boss from the original Crash Bandicoot

- Microsoft continues to rip off their pals at Sony and Nintendo when convenient.   The new hardware has a touch sensor for the power button and disc eject, and it makes beeps when turned on and off.  That makes it work pretty much like a PS3, and when placed next to one, it kind of looks like a cancerous growth with a radioactive green glow to it.

- When stood vertically in all of the promotional shots, the console looks like it has been partially crushed. When laid on its sign, however, it merely looks like a smaller 360, concave faceplate and all.

- The Xbox 360 has had a variety of different pack in accessories over the years.  The launch models got the deluxe treatment, including a dvd remote, headset, and component cables.  It was a nice way to give early adopters a chance to take full advantage of their HD, all-in-one wonderthing.  Since then, the remote was taken out, and now so have the component cables.  Just like Sony, MS decided that the best way to show off a device with HDMI support is to give people the worst possible hookup possible, even though HD sets have become so commonplace that there exist budget models with absolutely no composite inputs.

But hey, you still get the headset!  Nice to know that Xbox Live (which you might potentially pay them for) is higher up on their list of priorities.

- As you’ve probably heard already, you still can’t move the console while running, or else risk having your game discs destroyed.

- The console is advertised as being “Kinect Ready”.  Does that mean that older models aren’t?  And what do they have to do to prepare?

On one hand, the mere existence of the new 360 probably means that the console on a whole isn’t going anywhere any time soon.  And yet its release is still beyond aggravating.  This is what the release of an Apple product revision would be like without the accompanying cult and logistics that ensure that older models leave stores on time.  Older model 360 bundles are on the shelf right next to this one, for the same price, with significantly smaller harddrives and no wireless features.  Hell, I saw the new 360 (with wireless N support) in a flyer right next to the $100 360 Wireless N Adapter.  These are the kinds of decisions that make Sony look like a model student, though hell if they get as much shit for their blunders. Then again, this seems to be MS’ mode of operation; make all sorts of “mistakes” meant to nickel and dime consumers, and rely on sheer popularity and consumer laziness to coast through unscathed.  It seems to be working well enough so far, and really, it says more about us than them.

Still, there are a few things Capcom could have done better to really capture that hunting spirit (I say this from a position of absolute authority as I have never been hunting in my life). Obviously there are obnoxious fans of the series who will be offended by my suggestions (try criticizing Fire Emblem around die hard fans if you want to know what hell is like) because “that’s how it always was in MH, you don’t understand it! Bad controls are a feature you just suck too much to handle how awesome it is!”

On to my list of problems and half thought out solutions:

Cha Cha is stupid.
Not too far into single player mode you find a companion named Cha Cha, a little wood fairy or something (who is no where near as cool as Tingle). This makes the game easier because Cha Cha draws enemy attention away from you sometimes, which is a standard occurrence when playing with multiple people online.

My problem with Cha Cha is less about what he is and more about what he isn’t: namely a dog. Having a hunting dog companion would be significantly cooler than simply bringing along another sentient humanoid. There is something special in how man and dog bond through the hunting and killing of other species, as if both understand they are superior to the deer who were not clever enough to invent the rifle or convince humans to feed them by panting in an adorable way. A canine companion could also allow for some flourishes to the game mechanics. Hidden areas could be more plentiful, rare spawn points easier to detect, and each enemy monster could react to your pup differently, echoing the AI reactions to the flame of a torch.

A dog could also combat the somewhat disposable nature of the quests by creating an emotional bond within the game. When I play with other humans I care about their survival, if only because it ensures my own. Contrast this with Cha Cha. What is he doing most of the time? I don’t even notice when he dies. But I would notice if my dog died. It may not result in a Shadow of the Colossus level of bond between man and animal but it would surely resonate more as well as better capture that hunting aura.

The monsters are too gamey.
Sure, when you read the website it explains that giant A’s are female B’s, C’s are the giant fathers of D’s and E’s are F’s with gigantism, but nature rarely works like that. Usually in real life differences between sexes are something minor like a tuft of extra fur around the neck or the inability to do simple mathematics.

Capcom decided that instead of spending the time and money on making many unique boss monsters, they could just modify existing small monsters most of the time. This sucks because it makes the game less interesting, is an obvious cop out for the developer, and steals some of the authentic ‘fighting a monster in a generic fantasy world with a gigantic hammer’ feel from the game. The monster progression feels like a video game and not like a nature documentary that happens to include fire breathing dinosaurs; it’s unrealistic in a bad way.

You should be able to camp.
This is probably the most controversial of my three suggestions because camping threatens to really fuck with the bite sized quest nature of the game. It would also fight what I have already described as the disposable nature of the quests, though. Imagine a monster you need to track through many maps that you cannot catch up to without spending a night somewhere, or a monster only out during the night. Being able to camp would easily fit into the game’s already existing day/night system that is currently entirely pointless. Camping could also provide a bit of tense play – will you be awoken in the middle of the night by your left leg being eaten, did one of the four of you volunteer to stay awake and guard your tent?

I think what is missing from Monster Hunter is epicness, which is also missing from the dictionary. The obvious problem is that by its very nature, the game fights against this quality by compartmentalizing every bit of gameplay into 50 minute maximum quests focused on doing at most three things. But the environments and giant beasts (who are mostly dinosaurs for some reason) demand a sweeping epic fantasy game. I’ve already played over 75 hours so I apparently like the game, but I’d really love a Monster Hunter RPG.