Hi there, you seem to be new here! Here at Dark Diamond we frequently update with news about video games, anime, Japan and other cool stuff. Head on over to our homepage or go ahead and subscribe to get updates! Enjoy!

Tekken 6 isn’t the series’ best soundtrack. I don’t think Namco are ever going to touch the awesomness that was Tekken 3’s soundtrack. But 6 is certainly the most varied of the bunch sonically. Each piece is completely different in style and tone to the last. Many of them you wouldn’t associate with a Tekken game at all.

Amongst the various styles that the Namco sound team play with, “Fallen colony” is my pick of the bunch. It’s just a bad ass piece of music. Distinctly Japanesey, yet with many musical styles thrown into the mix. Live drums, kickin’ guitar solos, strings, chants, trumpets, percussions, drum ‘n bass, synths and several bars of awesome.

Dishing out cans of whoop ass to this song feels incredibly gratifying. More so if you manage to smash your sucker of a victim through the glass floor of the stage this music features on, and then juggle their arse up off the floor. Good times…good times.

Listen: Fallen colony

Tekken 6 OST
© 2007 Namco Bandai

For the mp3 players: Fallen colony

We’ve seen lots of people do their own renditions of Videogame themes but it’s much more rare to see someone do a remarkable anime music performance. Much more remarkable is it when it’s a whole marching band performing an anime theme!

Such is the case with Towson University’s TIGER Marching Band and their rendition of Cowboy Bebop’s Tank! a couple of weeks ago. You can almost imagine the geek fervor it must have taken to get the whole band to go along with it. It’s an arrangement for marching band so there are subtle differences with the original theme but this is something we definitely want to see more of!

We shouldn’t be shocked by the various guises, ways and fashions in which Hello Kitty gets pimped. You’d be harder pressed to find something she hasn’t had her faceless mouth all over. But still; Kitty finds ways to make us feel inner shame, sickness, disappointment, yet also a great deal of commendability for her knack for rolling with what ever is popular at any given time. Lady Gaga is currently the world’s ‘it girl’ on the music scene, and Hello Kitty is right there along with her. Do not knock the hustle of Hello kitty. Ever!

[Gaga daily]

One of my good friends is a Persona freak. He loves the games and owns every single PlayStation release of the series. A few days ago he’d got himself a copy of Persona 4. He was opening it as I was talking to him on the phone. “Oh, it comes with the soundtrack!” He put it on and as he skipped through the tracks, I caught a whiff of some J-Pop. “Stop. What song was that? Go back!” “My affection”. I have a soft spot for easy breezy J-Pop that are so sickly sweet and happy-go-lucky that it’s enough to make you sick and vomit an ice cream cone with a side of rainbow. And “My affection” has buckets of sweetness. All it took was the “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeeeaaah”’s and I was on the song like a fly on shit. It’s just a really nice song. It isn’t a main theme or a major centerpiece song or anything. It just plays when you’re wandering around a town! I love it. I’ll probably get too sick of it eventually. But for now, it’s my pleasure that I’m not even guilty about. The entire Persona 4 soundtrack is pretty spiffy. In the realm of RPG’s, many tend to forget there are other hot composers other than Nobuo Uematsu.

Now if you’d excuse me whilst I go sing my shit. “Your affectioooooooon! Your affectioooooooon! Take it for coffeeeeeeee!”

Listen: Your affection

Composed by Shoji Meguro
Performed by Shihoko Hirata
Shin megami tensei: Persona 4 original soundtrack
© 2008 Aniplex

For the mp3 players: Your affection

While we’ve featured much weirder self-shot videos from Japan this one excels in the sadness category. Here’s a man who wears not one, but three different skimpy girl outfits while playing slap bass to a Hatsune Miku song. A song about having small breasts and pondering if drinking milk would fix it. He then performs breast increasing exercises on screen with amazing prowess, it’s clear he has vast experience in self-treatment.

There are men who see a moe character and are overcome with a lust and longing for the little girl. This man? This man wishes to be the little girl.

Also, Nice Boat reference at the end.

It appears the guys at Crypton were holding out on the technology for Miku’s live appearance on Animelo a couple of weeks ago. This time for Miku’s 2nd anniversary concert they pulled out the big guns and we finally got our 12 feet holographic Miku on stage. She even teleports around the stage which beats the hell out of jumping from speaker walls. Now all that’s left is a full motion android Miku and I wouldn’t put that that far off into the future.

Japan keeps pushing the line on what constitutes a live performance but all of the flesh and blood pop stars nowadays are manufactured anyway. If you ask me this just makes the process more efficient!

Well it turns out the only thing I got right about the ‘live’ appearance of Hatsune Miku on Animelo was the fact that it would be a giant Miku on stage. No holograms, no animatronics, no smoke and mirrors, just a big-ass LED screen and a video of Miku playing to some live musicians, a bit underwhelming if you ask me but then again Miku doesn’t have the budget that maybe Gorillaz had. She sang a couple of songs, both from her own repertoire and from Black Rock Shooter, good stuff but it really lacked more Miku on-screen time, after the middle of the performance you might as well had been watching a video.

Thanks Julie!

8-Bit Trip is a music stop-motion video of all the glory of the 8-bit era made almost completely out of Lego sculptures. It’s mind-bending in its animation, tremendously witty in its detail and just plain lovely. The work of only 3 people and 1500 hours of labor. Fifteen-hundred hours is way too much time even by geek standards. File this under ‘beyond the call of geek duty’. Simply awesome.

The zombie apocalypse was never so wonderful as when Luis Armstrong composed this song based on it. An avid zombie hunter that Mr. Armstrong, you know? It is in fact quite well known among zombie-hunt historians that Luis Armstrong would go out at night singing this very song while shooting zombies in the head with a hunting rifle. His favorite weapon, thought? His trusty trumpet fitted with explosive darts. Jazz was never so deadly.

[Wonderland]

There’s no real reason to add functionality to cat ears, they are functional enough by themselves. It would be like adding a cell phone to a blender or good games to the Wii. It doesn’t need them and it would just feel wrong. But this case is a brilliant exception because it makes sense. See someone took a pair of cat ears and fitted them with earphones allowing you to 1) better ignore the mob of sweaty nerds stalking you and 2) do some caramelldansen in your own, very private rave.

It is also a marvelous addition to the USB maid cosplay from 2006, the one with the USB camera in the tail and the keyboard on the apron. This is a fashion trend that’s taking a little too long to catch on.

[Thanko / Via Boing Boing Gadgets]