Last night, I joined the thousands of people around the city that waited in line at a store until midnight to get their hands of a copy of Halo 4, one of the most anticipated games of the year. The downtown Futureshop at Robson and Granville St. held a midnight launch party, which included giveaways and a multi-player tournament where the person with the highest score got to walk away with a limited edition Halo 4 XBox!


Monster Energy drink was parked out front to supply all the caffeine you need for the long night of gaming ahead.

 Long line up to be one of the first to get the game!

The street team were handing out sweet dog tags to the people in line! This will go nicely with my UNSC hat! XD

The multiplayer tournament consisted of 2 teams of four playing against each other. Basically it's try to kill as many of your opponents as possible in the allotted time.

The highest scoring person in each winning team received one of these Halo 4 t-shirts!

I was one of the last few people to play in the tournament. We were Red team. And we won! It was touch-and-go there at the beginning as everyone was trying to figure out the controls. The people before us didn't play with default settings lol. But once we got the tank it was all over. Woo! My team mate received the t-shirt, while the rest of us were given posters of Master Chief!




He's so tall!

Someone dressed up as Gengar from Pokemon to take a picture with Master Chief. Haha!

When it finally came time, the crowd counted down to midnight and Futureshop staff let people in a few people at a time.

Lot of limited edition XBox 360 Bundles available.

Other Halo 4 merchandise.

WOOOOT! It put a pretty dent in my wallet but I GOT MY COPY! It included a limited edition steel book, one month free of XBox Live and an amour DLC. And that's the poster from the tournament. Master Chief is replacing Legolas on my wall! Yes.

Yup. I got it. Halo 4. I played into the night, way past my bedtime so I'm a little ok a lot dead today. And still all I want to do is go home and play some more. Who needs sleep?!

My impressions so far are that the graphics are amazing! Everything is so realistic and I love the feel of the game. I can't wait to continue playing it! So fun!

I had the amazing opportunity to go see Video Games Live at the Vancouver Centre of Performing Arts tonight courtesy of Futureshop. VGL is an awesome concert performed by a live orchestra and choir and featuring music from popular video games. Every night is different as they have many songs to chose from a vast collection of games. Tonight they started off with mashup of old classic games including Pong, Space Invaders, Frogger, Duck Hunt, Street Fighter II and Tetris then moved to more modern games including songs from Final Fantasy, Halo: Reach, Castlevania, Silent Hill 2, Super Mario, Legend of Zelda, God of War, World of Warcraft, Uncharted 2, Chronos Trigger and a bunch of others.

Performances featured Tommy Tallarico, the creator of VGL, who was playing guitar, flutist and vocalist Laura Intravia and piano soloist Martin Leung. Intravia's first appearance on stage involved opera version of Tetris! Who ever thought Tetris could sound so opera-like! "Flute Link" also made an appearance with Intravia playing a solo from Legend of Zelda dressed as Link with Ciela on her shoulder that she arranged herself! It was very amusing to watch as Ciela had her own "flute" and kept interrupting Intravia and the whole piece was basically a flute playing war between them. Martin Leung played the theme from Super Mario Brothers and blindfolded at that! His fingers just fly across the keys; it is very mesmerizing to watch. I am really amazed at all the talented people that performed tonight. In fact both Intravia and Leung were recruited because Tallarico saw them playing on Youtube! I guess it is a breeding ground for stars! It's also the conductor, Emmanuel Fratianni's first time in Canada. If you look at the photos I took you will see that his conductor stand is actually a joystick!

Throughout the performance they also gave away prizes. There was also a contest which involved two audience members playing Frogger while the orchestra played the sound reacting to what was happening on screen. A Guitar Hero contest was also held prior to the concert and the top scorer was invited on stage to play "Emotion" by Aerosmith on Guitar Hero while Tommy Tallarico played real guitar. He only needed to get 125,000 points in Hard to win a prize but he choose to play it on EXPERT and hardly missed any notes! The audience went wild cheering him on. He took home the prize of a Kinect for XBox360 courtesy of Futureshop! Some lucky person walked away with a PS3 AND PSP courtesy of Sony from a random draw! I'm so jealous!

After the show, they held a meet and greet with Tallarico, Intravia, Leung, Fratianni and Chris Mair (?) and I got to meet them and get their autographs. Unfortunately Flute Link accidentally smudged her signature. ='(

Anyways I had an awesome time and will definitely go again next year! My favourite part must have been when they sang "Still Alive" (from Portal). (Oh my gosh! I found it on iTunes!) The lyrics are so funny and the images that accompanied the song in the background were hilarious! I wish I had taken a clip it. Here's one I found on Youtube:


Video Games Live is only in Vancouver for one more night, April 14th, so get your tickets now! And in honour of the Canucks win tonight they released the discount code: CANUCKS for 50% off any balcony seat ticket! Don't miss this opportunity to see them! Any one who enjoys music should go see Video Games Live, gamers and non-gamers alike!