Hey, you know who was amazing? Jeff Buckley. Even the uninitiated think of him as "The guy who did that incredible, heartbreaking version of "Hallelujah" that I will literally never hear enough times."

I have Grace, I love Grace, and I've listened to it a hundred times. But it wasn't until a few years ago that I picked up "Live at Sin-é," a collection of recordings from a period when Buckley was doing solo gigs at Sin-é in New York.

It's a wonderful collection of performances, and gives a sense of his odd, off-kilter personality as well as his ferocious guitar-playing. Buckley is primarily known for his incredible voice, but he was no slouch on the guitar.

As great as many of the tunes on the collection are, this performance of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's "Yeh jo Halka Halka Suroor Hai" is… well, it's unreal. He spends the first three and a half minutes of the clip (sorry!) talking about how much he looks up to Nusrat, before going into full-on Urdu and performing the entire dang song.

WAT.

Good god, the talent-level on this guy. I like how the audience kinda laughs uneasily when he starts singing, thinking, "Is this for real?" Before they realize that yes. Yes, this is for real.

Also worth checking out: his performance of "Dink's Song," recorded in the same space. The placeholder image for this YouTube video gives an idea of the venue—literally a coffee shop with like, ten people in it. Unbelievable. It's basically 11 minutes of him building, building, building… listen to this entire track (no really, do it), and picture a guy standing in a coffee shop, mostly alone, singing like this. What a monster.

If you don't have Grace, well… hey, get Grace! You can also get Live at Sin-é here.

It's very, very difficult not to dance to the "Lum King" music that plays at certain points in Rayman Origins. Those saxophones! That guiro!

Stephen Colbert agrees, or at least… he likes to dance. So, okay, yes, this video mashup is totally silly, but also delightful. It makes me want to both play Rayman Origins and watch The Colbert Report.

Two things that I want to do already, as it happens...

Are you like me? Do you get a little misty eyed when you hear Schala's theme? A swell of nostalgia when the violin from Chrono Cross swells? Well boy howdy, this is the mixtape for you!


Yasunori Mitsuda's music set the tone for so much of gaming in my youth: Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, Chrono Cross. His music is so good that I'll still go back and listen to soundtracks he did to games I don't even like any more! So this week on the Kotaku Mix Tape, We're devoting giving a hats off to a man who worked himself sick making some of the best game music out there.

Also, for any Chrono fans out there: Check out the Front Mission Gun Hazard soundtrack he did with Uematsu if you haven't. It's kind of fantastic.

The List:
Scars of Time - Chono Cross
Trial Zone - Front Mission Gun Hazard
Lost Pieces - Chrono Cross
Village of the Dog God - Shadow Hearts: Covenant
Schala's Theme - Chrono Trigger
Albedo's Theme - Xenosaga
Distant Promise - Xenogears
To Far Away Times - Chrono Trigger

Why hello, Kotaku, and welcome to another hour of musical video game coverage. We've got some nice stuff for you tonight, so turn up them speakers and enjoy.

As always, you can find our whole past archive at the Kotaku melodic main page.

Sony's pre-E3 trailer for The Last of Us was pretty great. Though not as great as this recreation of it using LittleBigPlanet.

Watch Dogs is a game that feeds on our connectedness and paranoia. It posits an ever-so-slightly tweaked version of the reality we know, and tells us it can be manipulated to no end.

The footage we saw at and after E3 has led into an ARG centering on the fictional art gallery owner Joseph Demarco and his gallery, dotconnexion. Today, the dotconnexion team announced the untimely "yet unexplained" demise of Mr. Demarco to everyone who had signed up to follow them. But when they did so, they gave participants a whole new reason to be paranoid.

For at least one thousand participants, the e-mails they received were not sent BCC. The blasts, which went to 500 players each, display each and every e-mail address to which they were sent. It appears the mistake was caught and corrected as the sender moved along the alphabet: forwards we've received from readers show the error from addresses beginning with digits and the letters A and B, but forwards from readers whose e-mail addresses begin with the letters I and M didn't have the same problem.

Readers who alerted us to the issue report that they are now caught in reply-all hell, tangled in "a lengthy string" of unpleasant messages from strangers. That's one way to tie the world of Watch Dogs deeply into the world we live in, but it's probably not the way anyone wanted.

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Here's an interesting read for anyone who loves, hates, or feels rather indifferent about Japanese games. JP Kellams, a writer for Platinum Games (the studio behind Vanquish, Bayonetta, and the upcoming Wii U game currently titled Project P100), took to Twitter today to voice some eloquent thoughts about the current state of the Japanese gaming industry.

Read the full transcript, courtesy Siliconera. (Bolded part bolded for emphasis by me.)

The problems with Japanese games aren't that they are JPN games or that they are Westernized games. The problems with JPN games are simple: Most of them aren't very good games. People don't buy those. Most games from anywhere aren't good. That's why exceptional means exceptional.

Most Japanese publishers/developers can't invest money/manpower enough to compete with exceptional Western productions. Risk is too high. It costs money and sweat to make things stand out, but it also raises the risk. Then marketing is crazy expensive after that.

Games today sell on spectacle. Spectacle is also easy to market. However, good ideas lie behind these spectacles. So it makes me mad to see people diss "AAA" games like they are all rote executions on some tired formula. They sell because they are good. They match great production values with great execution on great ideas. They sell on easy to understand themes. Even Western games that don't get that right fail. Just because you make a "dudebro" shooter doesn't mean it is a sure thing.

Japanese games can be awesome. They can suck too. It is about picking ideas and themes that you can execute exceptionally on. Then you have to communicate that exceptionalism in a way that people understand that your game is exceptional. You have to do both, and you have to do both at a high level, or you will fail. It is just how the industry goes right now.

Japanese can make a highly Western game, Westerners can make highly Japanese games. These are talented creators on both sides. However, if you screw up executing on the ideas you are supposed to be executing on… You fail. Simple as that.

Where Japanese games need to get better is reducing friction. If we have the best ideas, we need to make sure you don't have to wonder why. Friction means you need to look at a character and identify with what that character is supposed to represent. Friction means never underestimating the intelligence of your audience. Culturally, Japanese design is about being inclusive. They don't want anyone left behind, so they will add friction to an experience. Except then you move at the pace of the slowest one in a group. It bogs the experience down for people who already get it.

Just imagine if you had to order McDonald's like a Japanese game's option menu. It would be horrific if you had ever been to a McD's before. Can I take your order. Hamburger. Hamburger is a piece of meat, two buns, ketchup and mustard. Are you sure you want a hamburger? Yes. That is friction. Western games stop when the user says hamburger. They assume that user intent is initially correct. JPN games should too.

Friction for the sake of completeness is one of the things that makes it difficult for JPN developers to make good multiplayer, I think. Other place have friction. Culturally, I think our touch stones for classic character designs introduces a lot of friction into a narrative. It takes time for a Westerner to parse the boy hero archetype from Japanese design versus the young adult Superhero in Western design. Too often, Japanese design assumes you will "get it" regarding characters and doesn't establish them. But the touchstones are different.

We can pull off that boy hero successfully, but we have to execute perfectly on the premise behind the character and communicate it. Another place where Japanese games tend to introduce friction is in narrative exposition. So many "bad story" complaints come from this.

By the way – Nintendo games are so awesome and so successful because they are some of the most friction free games in the world.

I don't know that I agree with everything Kellams says (and if he really thinks Nintendo games are some of the most friction-free, clearly he needs to play Skyward Sword), but it's really interesting food for thought from someone in a position to know what he's talking about. What do you think? Do Japanese games spend too much time babying you?

JP Kellams [Twitter via Siliconera]

Based on the upcoming sequel to the hit action ensemble film starring every action hero still able to pick up a weapon, Ubisoft's The Expendables 2 is missing a real opportunity to assemble the greatest team of game developers that ever coded.

Sylvester Stallone. Jason Statham. Jet Li. Dolph Lundgren. These are names that deserve a crack team of gaming legends banding together to dole out hot development justice. Instead they get a downloadable game coming this summer to Xbox Live Arcade, the PlayStation Network and PC.

The Expendables 2 video game is set in the fictional world inhabited by the big names in run-and-gun cinema. The team is on a mission to rescue a famous billionaire (not Lord British) from kidnappers when, and I am quoting the official announcement here, "all hell breaks loose and the explosive mix of testosterone and kerosene detonates in a massive fireball that never lets up".

Come on, that's got Bleszinski and Romero written all over it. Meier could work in a strategic element, Wright could bring the non-player characters to life, and Carmark could code everything while taking a nap, not that the man ever naps. Pull in Levine to twist things up a bit, and then finish the whole thing off with a Miyamoto adventure about growing flowers on the graves of your enemies.

Instead, we have four player online and offline co-op and challenge-fueled leaderboards. I suppose that's good enough, but the game I'll be playing in my head is guaranteed to be at least 100 times better.

I make movies for a living. I shoot, I edit, I transcode, I color correct. J, K and L are as intuitive to me as WASD is to you. I went to school for it. So when I saw that Valve was releasing Source Filmmaker, their internal video editor slash 3D modeler to the public, only one thing ran through my mind:

"This could change everything."

Here's why:

The Price is Right

Professional NLE (Non-linear Editing) systems are almost never free. The same goes for 3D modeling software (except Blender). You either get something that's awfully dumbed down, like iMovie or Windows Media Player, or you're shelling out hundred dollars or more for Final Cut, Premiere, Autodesk 3DS Max or Avid.

Source Filmmaker is not a replacement for any of those products, but if it really ends up being a professional tool then it's one of the most important evolutions in user-created content in years, because nobody gives something like that away for free.

Not unless they're crazy... or they're Valve.

The Test Ground

The "Meet The Team" series has been one of the most interesting experiments in marketing to date. Until yesterday, I'd just assumed that it existed as a way to generate goodwill towards Valve while at the same time allowing the Team Fortress team to flesh out their universe. So for them to end their last video in the series by stating that the whole thing has been one giant beta for a creative suite that they're giving away for free is a mind-blowing cherry on top.

"Hey, like all those movies we've made in the last five years? Here are the tools we used to make them. For free. Go nuts."

Also, according to Valve, as long as none of their assets are used in the final product, "there are no restrictions on what you do with your content and you can make money with it."

When the Going Gets Meme, the Memes Go Pro

For years, Valve games have shipped with the Source SDK. More than "just" a game engine, the SDK is a set of development tools, supported by Valve, that anyone can use to modify their games. Because of that and mods like Garry's Mod, we've seen an insane explosion of absurdist creativity on YouTube, from things as crude and simple as "This is What I see With My Eyes Closed" to complicated works like "Law Abiding Engineer". Valve already has a user base of richly creative fans, and now it's giving them the keys to the car.

Yesterday, I came into the office today looking forward to "Meet The Pyro." I left it thinking about Source Filmmaker. I look forward to giving it a spin.

In today's dark fantasy edition of Speak Up on Kotaku, commenter Dracosummoner compares the Game of Thrones television series to the worst tabletop role-playing game ever published. Yikes.

I think I'm losing interest in Game of Thrones. Dawn of War: Dark Crusade has better motivations for why its factions are so obsessed with conquering, and in retrospect the series isn't much more mature in how it treats women than the infamous tabletop game FATAL is. (I was already bothered by how pretty much every adult woman I've seen in the novels is either a "whore" or some kind of manipulator, but when I realized that this really wasn't that much better than what I've seen of one of the most condemned tabletop RPGs to ever exist, I think that really did it for me right there.)

The writing style seems to alternate between being somewhat interesting and being incredibly self-indulgent—just how many more pointless characters is this series going to have, just to nail down the point that life in this series goes on outside of the main "plot?" And even that basically seems like a slice-of-life approach to a generic conquest story with no goals outside of this detailed for ... pretty much anyone, except for perhaps Arya, who wanted to become a Water Dancer or whatever.