Cruise Elroy

This is just a reminder for anyone interested in the Vintage Game Club — we start tomorrow! If you want to join us, install Grim Fandango and sign up for the message board and you’ll be all set.

Much of my bloviating intelligent criticism about the game will probably be offsite, but I’ll cross-post some of my thoughts here on Cruise Elroy too. I hope to see you in the forums!

Are you a fan of the Cruise Elroy music posts, or of game composer Nobuo Uematsu? Well, I’ve just added a bunch of new pieces to my irregular meter collection! Part two now includes songs from Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX, as well as a bonus tune from Chrono Trigger.

(If you missed the updates to part one, there are lots of new pieces to see there too — everything from Road Rash 3 to On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness.)

The Vintage Game Club is a new project from David Carlton, Michael Abbott and me that aims to get people playing and talking about classic video games. On July 21 we’re going to fire up Grim Fandango and play through it collectively, sharing our thoughts along the way.

Interested in joining? Michael has graciously agreed to host this round, so head over to this post for the full scoop. We already have around two dozen a ton of participants! If all goes well, we’ll probably do more games in the future. It should be fun!

Two quick site-tweaking announcements:

• As you can see, I’ve done some downsizing — the tab bar is gone, the links moved to the sidebar, there’s a new Archive page, etc., etc. All the info is still there though (except for the category list, which will be back soon).
• A few people have complained about the sluggish QuickTime embeds in the music posts, so I’ve replaced them with snazzy Flash players. Hopefully the performance is a bit better now — drop me a line if you’re still having trouble.

I’ll be in Cambridge, MA at ROFLCon this weekend, rubbing elbows with the rich and famous (or at least the solvent and Internet-famous). If you see a bewildered-looking guy with a mess of black hair and a nametag that says “Dan Bruno,” come say hi.

In other news, I’m about to graduate from college so the end-of-semester crunch is a bit more intense than usual. I also have three concerts to play in over the next week — one of which, you might like to know, includes Super Mario 64’s Bob-omb Battlefield theme. That oughta go over well at my jazz performance jury!

Anyway, the upshot is that posting may be light for a bit; stay tuned.

Hello to all the Brainy Gamer fans! As some of you will have already noticed, Michael was kind enough to promote Cruise Elroy on this week’s Brainy Gamer podcast (which features an excellent interview with Leigh Alexander, I might add).

The post Michael recommended is “Koji Kondo’s favorite cadence,” a brief (but detailed!) musical analysis of Kondo’s compositional technique. If this sort of thing strikes your fancy, stay tuned; I’ll be going even more in depth with Ocarina of Time music in a future entry, and plan to turn my attention to other games as well.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy the site. Have a look around and let me know what you think.

I have around forty gaming blogs clogging my RSS reader at any given moment. I’ve culled a dozen of the most interesting and reliable ones and featured them on a new Links page. They all come highly recommended!

(As a side note, I’m still settling in here — tweaking the theme, beating the CSS into submission, etc. Let me know if something doesn’t look right.)

Hi! Welcome to Cruise Elroy, a blog for intelligent discussion of video games. Ideally this will be a place for talking critically about gaming, with the depth and complexity of fine websites like The Brainy Gamer and Theory Fighter.

I hope you stick around.