Weekend Highlights

Just 2 things, really: Video Games Live and sushi.

Video Games Live
If you haven't already visted the link, VGL is an event where an orchestra+choir plays video game music synced with a video and light show. They were playing in KW Saturday. We got student tickets for $20, which was an awesome deal =3. It was about 2.5 hours long, I really enjoyed it. I think a lot of the excitement came from recognizing the tracks they played, and also in seeing such a candid conductor. He was like, laughing and jumping around and everything, even pulled out a guitar at one point... certainly not my typical image of a conductor =P

They played a medley of old arcade tracks, metal gear solid (they had a "terrorist" running around during this, plus the Box), metroid, halo, starcraft2 (with live skype session with the sc2 music director!), warcraft, final fantasy, chrono trigger/cross <3, mario, Civ4 (I liked this one a lot too) and a bunch of others that I don't remember anymore.

They also had the Video Game Pianist with them, and he did a final fantasy medley and a mario medley... and he did the mario theme blindfolded, of course. I was really amazed at how fast he plays though... the most impressive part of the show, imo.

There were a couple of on-stage games, though only one was interesting. An audience member was picked to play a game of Space Invaders... the catch being that he physically was the ship, so he had to run back and forth across the stage to move the ship on the screen ^^. He didn't actually end up running around a lot, but it was still amusing.

My only complaint would be that whatever it was they did with the sound system, it made the orchestra sound really fake =/. Also, electric guitar was overdone... but it was played by the guy who created VGL, so I guess he gets to do whatever he wants?

AYCE Sushi
A bunch of us CCFers ended up going to a new AYCE sushi place on Sunday, very last minute. It's called Sushi Star(s) (sign says stars, menu says star? lol) down by the Greyhound in Kitchener. While I wouldn't call their sushi amazing, the food in general was very good, and is definitely better than Ye's Sushi. The portions are smaller, which is nice for AYCE since you can sample more stuff that way, and they use less rice for their rolls, so you don't get full as fast =P.

At the end of the night, I realized we hadn't tried any of the actual sushi.... we'd been pigging out on maki and sashimi, along with other cooked foods. They also have deep fried bananas with chocolate syrup... mmmmm so good. Their sushi presentation was also very pretty, though our end of the table got the less pretty ones =P

Suffice it to say, we were all very stuffed by the end of the night ^^