It was the third of December, and it was a Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays – for me it is right in the middle of my work week, and thus a day I couldn’t hate or look forward to. Yet, here I was queuing in the wet on a Thursday, about to break from the norm.

I was in line to see Video Games Live at the Cardiff International Arena. Headed up by veteran composers Jack Wall (Myst, Mass Effect) and Tommy Tallarico (Metroid Prime, Earthworm Jim), the show brings forth the soundtracks of games new and old with an orchestra and choir taken from the chosen locale.

People are quick to call Tommy amateur in the way he presents the show in question and pity Jack for having to put up with him. So naturally I was keeping this in mind, and had a fair idea that the show would be more about the spectacle than the history of the music I have come to enjoy.

The orchestra sat, Jack walked up onto the stage to conduct, and the show began.

The set opened with Pong – a simple two note rhythm following the act of the ball on screen. This transfered to Space Invaders, and then Defender.  It was with this last change that the music shifted from the soundtracks of old to The Flight of the Valkyries and a montage of classics through the ages. It set the show up perfectly.

It was barely five minutes in, and I knew that I was right to consider this more of a spectacle than what others have hoped for out of it. I cannot remember the specifics of the play order, but I can summarise what I saw.

Amongst the tracks they played was included games such as Metal Gear Solid, God of War III, World of Warcraft, Kingdom Hearts, Tetris, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith and Castlevania. All the titles had respective footage from their games except for Kingdom Hearts – a licensing issue with Square Enix meant that we had to make do with footage from various Disney cartoons involved in the game.

As you can expect the music was quite frankly awesome. But you would hope it wasn’t anything less – the orchestra and choir were amazing as per their profession and Tommy, despite what people say about his demeanour, can shred a guitar better than many I have seen.

On top of this, there was “flavour” brought in via on stage acts. Some of this worked well, and some of it was damn right cheesy.

During the performances there were often theatrics on stage – during the recital of Halo, for instance, Master Chief walked up on stage holding the red flag of the Covenant. When the Metal Gear Solid suite was being performed, a guard walked on stage – complete with alert sign I must add – and was sneaked past by Tallarico in a cardboard box.

There were also video presentations that often worked a treat - songs being introduced by those who scored, or created, the game in question.

Unfortunately it wasn’t all roses.

The issue was that they tried too hard (rather than not enough) to produce a bigger show than it actually was. There were so-called “live Skype calls” with Ralph Baer (widely accepted as “The Father of Video Games”) and Martin O’Donnell of Halo fame, which while they worked on stage were obviously faked with good rehearsed timing from Tallarico. Well, “they” – Jack’s laptop (apparently) crashed while trying to load the O’Donnell sketch and as such they had to do a quick reschedule (frankly it was probably planned as well).

We also had the moments of audience participation. A girl was called from the audience to put on a shirt with the famous ship from Space Invaders on it’s back and play the game live… using her body as the ship. That worked well enough and was certainly a good laugh.

But Tommy tried to play it off as some technological marvel – “we are tracking you on stage” he proudly proclaimed, pointing towards the back of the arena like there was a laser rig up there. I’m pretty sure the only tracking was done by somebody in the stage booth with a joystick – something confirmed later on when said somebody dropped the controller on the ground during the half time break.

Then we had the winner of the Guitar Hero competition from earlier come on stage to play GH: Aerosmith with the orchestra. Again good fun, but we could have done without the obviously acted “if you play this on hard you’ll win something” “no put it to expert so i can really kick ass” bullshit before it started off.

I digress. The fact is that I was just looking at it with an objective eye. I had a very good time and it was a good laugh despite some of the stageplay involved being a little too obvious for my taste.

In summary, if you go expecting some really deep educational experience into the music of video games – like many people seem to – then you will be very disappointed. If however you go simply for the show, expecting nothing more but good music, some laughs and an overall awesome spectacle, you will have a fantastic time of it.