My current musical addiction is now The Glitch Mob. Its rare for independent artists to hit it big, but that is exactly what it appears they have done. Their self-published debut album Drink The Sea debuted on the iTunes Electronic Chart at number five and peaked on the CMJ Top 200 Chart for College Radio at #57. The album’s debut led Electronic Musician to run a cover story on the trio.

The album can be downloaded from Amazon. If you are more into the physical CD, you can purchase that from their website.

Raptor: Call of the Shadows was one of my favorite PC games back in the day. It was a top down shooter that offered a lot of challenge without being ridiculously hard. While most shoot ‘em ups required you to memorize patterns while throwing tons of enemies at you, Raptor was more about having solid aim, dodging enemy attacks, upgrading your ship wisely, and using the right weapon for the job. The game features a number of different “sectors” that each had a different visual style and enemy set, and multiple difficulty settings that significantly increase the number of enemies you will be facing. Killing enemies and picking up credits gives you credits to spend on a large array of ship upgrades. Upgrades included things like shields, ground to surface missiles, auto-tracking machine guns, and even nukes. With great music and explosive action, I easily lost hours at a time playing this game.

The great news is that the game is set to be released on Good Old Games later this week. I honestly could not be more excited. Raptor is one of the few games that I could never get working on Windows, and I lost my copy of the game ages ago. The Good Old Games version will be updated to work, and come with copies of the manual and soundtrack. Plus, the game is DRM free.  I will certainly be buying a copy later this week, and I would be ashamed if all if you don’t pick it up and give it a try for only $5.99.

As a mercenary in the not-so-distant future, flying the super-advanced Raptor space fighter, you’ll be sent on interplanetary missions to knock out your MegaCorp’s top competitors. Battle against hordes of relentless enemies. Spend the bounties claimed for their demise to expand your devastating arsenal!

Discover secrets, find bonuses and battle boss ships that appear at the end of every wave! With each ship and ground target you destroy, you’ll earn more cash to improve your ship’s already formidable technology, in preparation for the next wave. You’ll be sent out to kill and destroy… But then again, it’s in your blood.

Raptor: Call of the Shadows – GOG.com

I am not sure what it is about the Half-Life series, but they seem to inspire a ton of amateur film makers. I have posted about some previous Half-Life films in the past, but here is another one that I am going to be keeping an eye on. This one follows Adrian Shephard, the player’s character from the Opposing Force expansion pack to the original Half-Life.

Inspired by the Half-Life Video Game series, this is an action packed short film centering around Adrian Shephard and a band of resistance fighters struggling to get out a warning about the impending invasion.

The film’s website can be found at http://beyondblackmesa.com/.

The Nerd conquers an oft-requested NES classic.

So I got my hands on a capture card now. I decided to get one since there are a number of projects that a friend of mine and I could use one for. It captures in HD up to 1080i from HDMI, so there is a lot of potential there. I decided to capture the first couple of Halo 3 clips saved to my Xbox to see how it looks and I have to say that I am pretty pleased with the quality. Of course the files are many GB per clip and they have to be compressed before they can be posted here. However, even rendering them out at only 3000kbps they look a lot better then the clips I got from Bungie Pro for the Reach Beta video that I made a little while back.

Anyway, here are some random Halo 3 clips. They are not edited at all as this is just a test to see how they look after being compressed for the web. I can go a lot higher then 3000kbps, so any final video that I make will certainly have much higher quality then this.