See also: Five Artists ESPN Should NOT Tag to Replace Hank Williams Jr.

---

Hear that buzz in the air? No, not the whirring noise coming from your trees. I'm talking about the electricity caused by the click-clack of cleats; the smell of freshly cut grass and iron-tinged blood. Ah, yes -- football season is almost here.

Which also means Madden NFL 13 is upon us. The popular football video game hit shelves on Tuesday, September 4, with crazy cool graphics and wickedly realistic gameplay, but gamers are likely to notice one key staple missing from the franchise once they fire up their gaming systems: a great soundtrack.

More »

Slaying zombies on Monday at the Marquee

Whether you love the progressive instrumentals or hate the screeching screams, The Devil Wears Prada is stepping up its game on as many levels as possible.

Count 'em off: An ongoing cross-country tour with their most elaborate production yet; photos splashed across the covers of Alternative Press (who named them Band of the Year), Revolver, Kerrang! and Outburn; and a new album, Dead Throne that debuted at #10 on Billboard's Top 200 chart and displays the band's evolving musical maturity, showcasing dual-vocal assaults, a soaring instrumental quality, and such themes as anti-idolotry and the perseverance of the band's Christian faith.

And to top it all off, a video game. Yes, these 20-somethings, self-proclaimed gamers decided to conceptualize and develop "Zombie Slay," a multi-level game for mobile devices on iTunes that features music from their critically acclaimed 2010 Zombie EP. It may just come off as a fleeting music-related novelty, but it may represent something deeper--just how savvy these young guys are, knowing that the traditional methods of selling music are dead.

So they are surging forward to find non-traditional ways for fans to get their hot little hands; religious or not; on their tracks. And after Up On The Sun spoke with singer and lyricist Mike Hranica. It seems that from Dead Throne on it's just going to get more unconventional.

More »

Jonathan McNamara

Minibosses

In this week's olde-timey paper edition we told you all about local rapper MegaRan, who delivers slick rhymes and rapid-fire lyrics inspired (mostly) by classic video games like Mega Man 2 and Final Fantasy VII, and is appearing live at Martini Ranch tomorrow night.

We also mentioned a couple of other bands, most veering towards guitar shredding, who play powerful tunes inspired by the 8-bit era of console games. Here's our list of five great bands inspired by video games.

More »

Brütal Legend, a 2009 video game released by Electronic Arts, featured voice work by Jack Black, Lemmy Kilmister, Rob Halford, Ozzy Osbourne and Lita Ford and a soundtrack of more than 100 hard rock and metal songs.

​

Over the past three decades, two institutions have constantly remained near-universal pastimes of the young and young-at-heart: Rock 'n' roll music and video games. Despite myriad changes in the sound, style, technology and sophistication of both mediums, video games and rock music have endured as uniting forces in an ever-evolving youth culture that places increasing importance on individuality.

It's no surprise, then, that the two have also been intertwined since video games first rose to prominence in the early '80s. Long before games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band turned gamers into "rock stars" with instrument-shaped controllers, there was the infamously shitty Journey arcade game, in which you played as all five band members, trying to retrieve their respective instruments in time for an outer space gig.

The relationship seems to be a little one-sided, however. Rock stars showing up in video games is relatively commonplace, but when was the last time you saw a two-dimensional, pixelated video game hero playing in a real live rock band? With that in mind, let's take a look at some of the most popular video game characters over the years and speculate on what direction their musical careers might have taken, had things gone differently.

More »

What happened to this, Square-Enix?

As we near the end of the aughts, most of the bright minds in gaming are focusing on what was. They're all over the best games of 2009 and the best games of the decade. Well that's fine, but we're looking forward. Whether Uncharted 2 was the best game of the year in 2009 won't matter with all the wacky advances in gaming on the way in the 2010's. With that in mind, here are 7 of our predictions for gaming in the next ten years.

1. Square-Enix's long-term memory:
Gamers will remember the CG sequence at the end of Kingdom Hearts II that seemed to be pointing toward a keyblade war in an upcoming Kingdom Hearts Game. These beautifully-rendered scenes of keyblade knights will be completely disavowed by Square Enix in the 2010's as they continue to make games concerning minor characters instead of focusing on what fans of the series identify as "plot" and everyone else identifies as drug-induced bull shit.

More »

Benjamin Leatherman

These peeps have got a serious case of Pac-Man Fever. See more pictures from the game in our slideshow.

For us, the streets of downtown Phoenix are an urban death maze of scalding asphalt, never-ending construction, and anger-inducing bonehead drivers that we attempt to maneuver through as quickly as possible during our daily commute.

But to Linzi Juliano, our city's central core were the perfect setting the perfect setting for a game of "Urban Pac-Man," a real-life version of the infamous 1980s quarter-muncher writ large. This past Saturday, the 25-year-old doctorate student and a group of her friends transformed the streets and sidewalks of Copper Square into the meatspace representation of that classic glowing blue virtual maze.

Juliano is something of a gaming geek (her masters thesis at NYU even covered the sociopolitical complacency of World of Warcraft players during the 2004 presidential election and Iraq War) who heard about similar urban Pac-Man events that were held in NYC and Paris and was inspired to organize a Phoenix version.

More »

Z-Trip: Coming soon to your Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3.

We've got some stellar news for anyone who's a fan of local-DJ-made-good Zach Sciacca (a.k.a. Z-Trip): Thanks to the joystick Jedi at Activision and its developer FreeStyleGames, the 38-year-old superstar turntablist (and former Valley resident) will be a playable character in the upcoming DJ Hero video game, which is set for release in October. 

Read on for more info on the game and his involvement, as well as some footage of the game itself.

More »

By Jonathan McNamara

The games of the Nintendo Experience Mobile Tour. See more shots in our Nintendo Experience Mobile Tour slide show.

I want to be one of the converted.

I want to be the kind of Nintendo fan that happily shrieks at the chance to play mini games. I wish that I didn’t mind waiting three months between releases for another game worth playing. I’d like to embrace casual gaming as a new video game direction, but after visiting the Nintendo Experience Mobile Tour I know that I can not.

As I pulled into a large parking lot North of Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, I saw it gleaming in the distance: a thiry-foot trailer on its annual journey across to United States to share the joys of video gaming with the masses. The Nintendo Experience Mobile Tour seemed like a godsend to an over-worked journalist on a Friday afternoon.

Yet inside the gleaming vehicle I found only disappointment.

More »