Poppin' Off- Video Games Live

Last week was a heck of a week. I spent a lot of time in Southern California. It was nice, but man am I exhausted.

A couple of weeks ago, Mandie of Geeky Glamorous was having a giveaway for a set of tickets to see Video Games Live in Irvine. I was super excited. I had first heard of VGL through the opening screen of WoW. Blizzard had paired with them and was offering a discount on tickets. I really, really wanted to go, but with San Diego Comic-Con being that same week, my husband and I had to save up money for potential purchases, so we didn't get to buy them. Well, I entered the contest for the tickets and I won!!! I was so excited. I mean, first of all, I'm a fan of Mandie's site, so winning something from there was pretty cool. Secondly (and most importantly), I was thrilled to be seeing VGL! 

We got to Irvine a few hours before the show, so we killed some time at a movie theater. It was at an Edwards Cinema, but it only played independent films which was really neat. There was this lady in the bathroom that was making all kind of sexual noises, which was mystifying since she was only putting on her makeup. Anyway, we saw The Hijacking, which was good but a little long. We left for the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater after the movie was over. Parking was ten dollars for self parking, and even though the gates had been open for a while, we still managed to get a pretty good parking spot.

Our seats were amazing. Down pretty close to the stage and on the aisle, and I didn't have anyone tall sitting in front of me obstructing my view :) There was a costume contest before the show started and I'd just like to say, if you're ever in a costume contest and there's a child also entered, expect the child to win. There was this girl that had an amazing costume she'd made to be a character from Final Fantasy something.....Twelve I think it was, she really should have won. But there was a little boy dressed in a store bought Mario costume (I know, my son wore the same one for Halloween last year) who ended up winning instead.

The show was played by the Pacific Symphony and the Glendale Concert Choir (it was the choir from the community college), and they all did an amazing job. They played songs from old school video games, and scores from games like World of Warcraft (my favorite) Chrono Cross. At one point, they had the winner from the Guitar Hero contest go up there and perform The Pretender by the Foo Fighters. Tommy Tallarico  challenged him to get 400, 000 points on the hard setting, and the winner asked if he could do it on expert instead. He got around 390,000 points which I thought was pretty cool. There was a meet and greet after the show with some of the composers, but we couldn't stay because we had a long drive back home to make(and at midnight, traffic through L.A. was still horrible lol, we didn't get home until almost 3am). The show was so awesome that I was hoping to catch it again when they were doing the free concerts at Comic-Con, but I was unable to make it. The concert in Irvine was amazing though, and I'm so glad that I got to go.



P.S. I'm still itching to do that giveaway! Twenty (20) follower on Bloglovin to make it happen :)