Video Games

After this, I’m going to go home, smoke weed, and play Modern Warfare 2. It’s what I’m going to do all night.

Anybody have the Nintendo Switch? I gotta tell you. I'm high-minded. I try to be a high-minded guy. I bring books with me on tour. I bring the Kindle, bring an iPad, I tell myself I'm gonna do all sorts of highfalutin things. Nothing is more exciting to me than a Nintendo Switch right now.

There's a rhyme in there, I'm not gonna do it, because many people look at my Instagram. I'm never one to run from a pun, but I'm—"never one to run from a pun." I wish Logic was here to see that. But I love my Nintento Switch. Love my Nintendo Switch. And of all the games now, like—I got the Tetris game. And now I'm playing Tetris. I am back in Tetris. Tetris is one of the best games ever made ever. Nothing feels like the original Gameboy Tetris. But I'll take any Tetris over most any game.

I was on the plane last night playing Tetris and I didn't even know we landed. I'm a very bullish Tetris player. Do we have any bullish Tetris players [watching]? By that I mean, you just keep delaying the long stick, so you can get as many Tetrises as possible. Do we have any daredevil Tetris players in the room? If you're like me, you'll know what I'm talking about. You will risk losing the game completely, to only get Tetri. Tetri? I don't know. I'm a hell of a player.

Doctor Mario? Yep, I remember that. Daredevil Tetris player.

I'm gonna tell you a story nobody knows about the making of Heavier Things, my second album. Does anybody remember a Gameboy Advance game called WarioWare? Does anybody know WarioWare? WarioWare was a game that was all mini-games. So WarioWare comes out, and Jamie Muhoberac, great keyboard player who was on Heavier Things, introduces me to WarioWare one night at a restaurant. And it blew my mind. The mini-games don't explain what the rules are. Part of the game is figuring out what the objective of the game is. I made the entirety of Heavier Things, or at least the entirety of the second half of making Heavier Things, playing WarioWare. I listened back to every possible moment that I wasn't recording, playing WarioWare. And that's one hell of a game that I wish they would bring back.

[...]

Mario Brothers? Always. I had a Nintendo back in 1985. Crash Bandicoot? Just after my time.

Playing Metroid? One of the great feminist moments in my life was when I found out that Samus Aran was actually a woman! I thought that was, to me, a real primer on living a modern integrated life. That was huge for kids, to find out that Metroid's protagonist, Samus Aran, was female.

Yeah, Samus is a woman. Which is awesome. And if you look at the year, 1987? That's progressive.

I played Halo I so much that I would play right before showtime and I would go on stage frazzled. Chad's in the other room, he was "Paco," and we would play "hang 'em high," and we would play with other bands across the buses using an ethernet cable.

We used to play Linkin Park, they would do a show and then they'd race over to our show. And then after the gig we would park the—maybe it wasn't their bus. [...] So I was a Halo guy. And it was—to this day—the game physics and the game engine is the best game engine of any multiplayer shooting game known to man. It's still the most fair, it's still the most responsive. It's still the most, sort of, consequence based, on the risk-reward.