As you may have gathered from my tweets of late, I was given the amazing opportunity to play Jonathan Coulton’s song “Still Alive” on Rock Band with Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, and of course Jonathan! Horrifyingly, it was also on stage and in front of about 600 people at the Great American Music Hall here in San Francisco! I was on guitar (in the video, my part is on the right), Jonathan was on (duh) vocals, Leo on bass, and Merlin on drums.

We were soooo close to getting through the song! 99% isn’t bad, and if we had more time to practice (instead of having only played the song once!) I’m sure we would have made it. But it was a ton of fun, and I even saved the band a couple of times with my overdrive

But I want to thank Jonathan for giving me one of the most memorable experiences I’ll ever have. I’m a huge fan of his music, and I got to live out my rock star dreams for real. Not much can beat that!

Jonathan Coulton performs “Still Alive” in Rock Band from Joy Stiq

Special thanks to Chris from Joystiq for recording the video! Go check out his post for more details.

The Mahalo video team is here at GDC (Game Developers Conference) covering the event with Joystiq! The Mahalo Games team is pumping out tons of pages about all the games we’re covering, and we’ve been shooting constantly for the last day and a half.

Today’s Mahalo Daily is a feature on the Independent Games Festival, happening here in the West Hall of Moscone.

I’m a Mac gamer, which means I end up hearing the following quite a bit:

“zomg, as if it wasn’t lame enough that you play WoW, you play it on a Mac which means you suck even that much more.”

Yes. Well. I’ve decided that I need to broaden my horizons a little and try some other games, but the problem is that my MacBook Pro is running low on space, so I don’t really feel like partitioning my hard drive to run Bootcamp for games that only run on Windows. Therefore, I need to decide what to do:

1. Buy a new Mac, install Bootcamp / Windows
2. Buy a PC
3. Build a gaming PC

Right now I’m leaning towards the “build a PC” side of things, but my experience in that area is weak. What is the best gear (without going into insane, $3000-priced things)? What are the best sites to buy from? Help me out, this copy of Tabula Rasa isn’t getting any younger.

I’m heading out in a few minutes to Niall’s to play some GH3 (I’ve spent the past couple days warming up with the demo on XBox Live), and I’m very excited. However, I’m wondering why they’re using some of the same songs on both GH3 and Rock Band: “When You Were Young” by The Killers and “Cherub Rock” by the Smashing Pumpkins spring to mind.

Rock Band is going to seriously fulfill some teen-aged rock and roll fantasies, I can tell you that much. Although, the thought of singing “Say It Ain’t So” by Weezer any place other than my shower is very scary. For everyone else, at least. Are they any songs you wish they had added?

In the meantime, if you’re stuck, check out the Mahalo guide for Guitar Hero III. And yes, in case you were wondering, there will be a show announcement made this week!

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