Hey all! As I am sure some of the regular readers of The Flickcast have noticed, my favorite part of the Con season is taking pics at them. Unfortunately, due to some professional responsibilities, I was only able to get down to one day of WonderCon this year.

But because my time was limited, I didn’t waste it on panels and the like. Instead I hit the floor with camera in hand and got as many pics of the Wondercon sights as I could.

While WonderCon doesn’t have the size of San Diego or New York Comic Con, the fans there weren’t any less fervent with their cosplay love. This year I saw a lot of new and original costumes I had not seen before. While a pimped out Boba Fett was present, I also saw for the first time Paper Mario as well as a group of female X-Man villains. Alongside the working R2 units, there was a life sized Wall-E that sadly the picture doesn’t do justice as it captured all of the personality of the movie and brought it to life in front of us all.

Black Friday, the biggest shopping bonanza of the year. Virtually everyone has the day off and with retail stores doing sales on top of sales, going out to the store can be a mad house, especially if rumors are to be believed.

Go Nintendo has it from GameStop sources that the console will be launching the week of Black Friday. Based on Nintendo’s release pattern, that should put the Wii U in stores Sunday the 18th of November. Which gives Nintendo almost a full week and a half of mad house sales for their new console.

This release schedule makes sense both in Nintendo’s historical context, as well as in relation to third-party rumors that have been cropping up since E3. The major question that needs to be answered now is how well will the new system do, can the Wii U match the hysteria created by the original Wii?

It is had to guess with out the price point information just yet, but it is a safe bet to assume that the Wii U will sell out of its first shipment pretty quickly. What made the Wii such a phenomenon was that it couldn’t stay in stock for months. In January it was still hard to get a Wii, which was due in large part to a pretty genius strategy by Nintendo. Most stores would only get shipments of three or four systems, perpetually keeping shelves bare.

To recreate that Nintendo had better hope they can keep the Wii U price point low, and the demand high.

Stay connected to The Flickcast for any new updates on the launch of the Wii U.

Let’s be clear about one thing right from the start. This article is by no means making a blanket statement that all piracy is okay. Piracy in the broadest sense is theft and is wrong. But with most things, it’s not just a black and white, yes or no, right or wrong topic. There is that gray area up for debate and here, we are going to take a look at piracy specifically as it relates to the video game industry.

If a game is about to be or has just been released to retail, is it okay to download off of a torrent site because someone leaked the code out from the manufacturer or was able to rip the files off the disk? Is it okay to use a key generator to claim ownership of a disk so you can play a copy that has been passed around your dorm? No. These are blatant acts of theft. These are where people are trying to mess with the system for their own personal benefit and denying payment to the people and companies behind the created game.

Some will argue that games are too expensive nowadays and piracy is their way of “sticking it to the man” to show them they aren’t okay with high prices. The truth of the matter is that, in relation to inflation, games are cheaper today than they were twenty years ago. During the heyday of the NES and SNES where larger cartridge memory required higher manufacturing costs resulting in some games costing well above even today’s norm price of $59.99. Don’t believe me? Go ask anyone in finance (or even your third grade math teacher) if something that cost $79.99 in 1990 is cheaper than something that today is sold for $59.99 and expect a slap in the face from them.

I like to make it a point to cover video game music as often as I can. I really think the entire industry is on the cusp of breaking down what little barriers are left and establishing itself as a thoroughly acceptable artistic medium.

So when I was given the chance to take a listen to London Music Works’ Essential Games Music Collection Vol.1 I was excited. Usually compilations like these are reserved for film scores but the quality of video game music has risen so high this release isn’t just warrented, it’s way over due.

Of course with any release like this there will be a heavier reliance on the newer and more popular themes to sell the album. Luckily that works in this release’s favor, as the industries most recent and most popular stuff is what people should be hearing.

The album does still try to strike a balance between the new and the old, but with only 13 tracks to deal with there is going to be a lot of music left for volumes 2 and beyond. The descending order of most recent to oldest also makes for a very interesting listening experience, a devolution on the industry, if you will.

On last week’s episode of The Bitcast I was challenged to put my video game money where my film score loving mouth is. So this week I decided to give you all a special edition of Film Score Friday: a top five rundown of my favorite video game scores of all time.

The music in video games has often been considered an after thought that had little to no bearing on the games themselves. Only a handful of franchises had transcendent music, and everything else was just deemed filler.

Now that video games are growing to near cinematic heights of popularity and quality, the music in these games has also seen a renaissance. High profile film composers are taking on video game projects, marquee games are releasing sound track albums and the film score community is finally accepting video games as source of quality music.