Just a quick note: I wrote about Super Mario Galaxy 2 for The House Next Door. SPOILER ALERT: It’s a very good video game.
I’m disappointed that the editors didn’t use my original title (although I also completely understand), so I’m shamelessly using it for this post!
Sorry about the current lack of updates—I have been writing about vieo gams, honestly, but lately it has been for another site, The House Next Door (Slant Magazine’s blog). I reviewed a few recently released titles for them, the links to which are below:
I should also have a piece on Super Mario Galaxy 2 up there soon. Yeah! To quote Chris Remo, “VIDEO GAMES [.]”
VGM of the Week will return, as well as the podcast, although the ETA right now is uncertain…I have some ideas, but they are stupidly ambitious and will require a multitude of special guests, so I don’t know how/if that’s going to work out. To quote myself, “wish me luck, i guess.”
(Part of a continuing series spotlighting an individual piece of music from a video game.)
Villi People/Jim’s Now a Blind Cave Salamander! (Moonlight Sonata, 1st Movement)
Game: Earthworm Jim 2 (1995–96)
Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven (arranged by Tommy Tallarico)
For all of the wacky and irreverent humor that the Earthworm Jim series is known for—and indeed, its manic, schizophrenic style is one of its most enduring qualities—Shiny Entertainment’s platformer/shooter/cow launcher games exhibited true craftsmanship and artistry at the time, sometimes at the expense of gameplay (attack distances and collision parameters can be hard to judge because the animations are so fluid, for example). While the first Earthworm Jim is more of a standard jump and gun platforming title—albeit with a refreshing taste of self-depreciating humor—Earthworm Jim 2 actively sought to erase players’ expectations by making each level a complete guessing game as to what the objective would be and how your character would control. By the time the game’s fourth level is reached (really the third, but the first of three “catch the falling kittens” mini-levels has also taken place), the notion that “all bets are off” has already been well established.
Which is what makes the level itself so strange and poetic. Main character Jim disguises himself as a cave salamander and must slowly drift and swim through a gastrointestinal tract, avoiding its walls (as they are lined with pulsating villi) and dodging pinball bumpers and cellular organisms. Think of the underwater bomb diffusing in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game for the NES, but slightly less frustrating. In a series known for its brisk hi-jinx, having the pace slow significantly and requiring the player to carefully navigate through a tranquil but very dangerous minefield creates a surreal meta-mindscape, allowing room to breathe and reflect, even while in the midst of heavy concentration (some of the collectibles scattered about the level are extremely difficult to get to, especially considering the sprite spatial issues mentioned earlier.)
A large part of this section’s weird beauty and uniqueness is due to Tommy Tallarico’s arrangement of the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, eerily represented with synthesizers to invoke a melancholy mood as a backdrop to the level’s cold and sterile biology:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
And before you start coming at me with pitchforks and accusing me of being too Nintendo-centric, here’s the Genesis/Mega Drive rendition:
I’m going to give the edge to the SNES version, however. While there’s nothing wrong with the more plucky harpsichord-sounding instrumentation of the Genesis arrangement—and it does inherently have a more “Classical” feel—the more sustained E. Piano sound of the SNES rendition, with notes that are held longer and decay more realistically thanks to the system’s sound chip, achieves a more emotional and haunting effect (something that is actually more faithful to Beethoven’s original instruction to pianists performing this work to keep the sustain pedal held down throughout).
Before I’m taken to task, yes, there was a version released for the Saturn and PlayStation with a proper acoustic piano sound, but it sounds a tad thin to me and lacks the “warmth” of the other-worldly electric piano that seems appropriate for traveling through a hot and stifling intestinal maze. You be the judge:
Moonlight Sonata returns for the last level of Earthworm Jim 2, with the kinetic final movement of Beethoven’s work serving as a Looney Tunes-like accompaniment to the race against Psy-Crow, the main antagonist of the series. That’s more of a traditional application, however, which makes the moody journey of the blind salamander all the more bizarre and wondrous.
(Part of a continuing series spotlighting an individual piece of music from a video game.)
Games of Happiness
Game: Yoshi’s Story (1998)
Composer: Kazumi Totaka
The name Kazumi Totaka has a bit of notoriety attached to it, and it’s no wonder—the man hides secret melodies within games’ sound files, provides the odd cartoon grunts and gibberish of the Yoshi species, and has a guitar-playing vagabond dog modeled after his likeness. If there was ever a time to use the descriptor “zany,” now would be it. That said, I totally respect Totaka as a composer and sound designer, because his work is always original and refreshing, and not afraid to push an average listener out of their comfort zone. His scores are both catchy and anti-melodic, jaunty and arrhythmic, and usually all of these simultaneously. One gets a hint of his style in titles like Animal Crossing—the default town theme on the bulletin board contains a random note as part of its melody, for example—and even Mario Paint has a little irreverence to it, shamelessly dropping cat meows and baby “goo-goos” into a sophisticated (at the time) music editor. I don’t know the extent of Totaka’s input into the design of that music editor, of course, but it sure seems like a suggestion that he would make, doesn’t it? There’s always a little “kink” in his work, some aural element that you have to compute, always succeeding at keeping you in the game during any given moment, observing and processing.
I think Totaka’s score for Yoshi’s Story strikes a perfect balance between the weird and whimsical things we expect from him as a composer, while also proving to be one of the most charming collections of song variants ever in a video game. The game itself has some design issues that disappointed critics, especially after many thought they were getting a sequel to Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island. It’s a tad too short and a bit too simple, perhaps even shallow in its gameplay. Regardless, the music is daring—each track is an arrangement of a principal melody, done in a different style depending on the theme of the level and its particular tasks (perhaps influenced by Koji Kondo and his work on Super Mario World ). Here’s the example I selected:
This piece exemplifies all of the personal flourishes of Totaka that make his music so great: A delightfully upbeat melodic line filled out by a vaudevillian-jazz inspired chord progression, fluctuating tempos, and slightly off-center instrumentation and sound effect embellishments that seem to actually be working against the composition (phones, teledata packets, Game Boys). The brilliant thing is that they aren’t, of course. Everything is meant to invoke a certain timbre, as varied and interesting as the visual textures that define the look of Yoshi’s Story. It’s coarse and tactile. I love it.
Yoshi’s Story is available on Virtual Console if you’re curious about the rest of the score and never played the game. It’s a great example of a Nintendo composer doing things his way, even if they may be categorized as a little eccentric.
(Part of a continuing series spotlighting an individual piece of music from a video game.)
Funky Goblin
Game: King Arthur’s World (Royal Conquest in Japan) (1992)
Composer(s): Martin Simpson, Justin Scharvona
King Arthur’s World is one of those lesser-known gems that I was extremely lucky to have played as a kid, when I had little knowledge of/access to qualitative information about video games other than what Nintendo Power commanded me to love. If I recall, I received this game as a birthday present because I was into knights and castles and Gothic architecture (David Macaulay’s Cathedral: The Story of Its Construction was a huge influence), and my Mom saw the box inside the big glass case at Target and thought it was a good fit. She was right! I discussed this side-scrolling Lemmings-type strategy game on Blitcast One (Mom certainly wasn’t aware that it was an SNES Mouse compatible game and lucked out there), but one thing I didn’t elaborate on was the excellent soundtrack. It was one of the first SNES games to feature Dolby Surround, and while that can be passed off as merely a gimmick, an extra excuse to play with the Sound Test on the main menu, the fact that the music stands on its own in plain ol’ stereo is a testament to its quality.
Most of the score is what you would expect, with stately marches and bleating brass, but there are a few pleasant surprises—a rendition of Ride of the Valkyries, for example, with swirling digital strings that will pump up any strategy-game player preparing for battle guaranteed. The biggest surprise, however, is when King Arthur and his army travel to the Goblin Underworld and come face to face with, uh, funk.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
I remember putting this track on during the Sound Test and letting it play in the background while I grooved through my homework in our den, a precursor to Winamp. It’s a strange shift in a game with a mostly medieval score, but it undoubtedly works—hell does seem like it would have a little funk to it, heat and “bad”-ness.
An interesting side-note: King Arthur’s World was developed by Argonaut Software, the company that collaborated with Nintendo on the development of the Super FX chip and its flagship title, Star Fox (it was also the former stomping grounds of alumni Dylan Cuthbert, now at Q-Games, and Giles Goddard, who stayed on at Nintendo for a time and lent his programming prowess to titles such as the excellent 1080 Snowboarding).
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Related Posts:
Blitcast One: SNES Mouse
Collision Detection
Title screenshot from VGMuseum. Composer information courtesy of SNESMusic.org. Goblin Underworld map from VGMaps.
(The first in a weekly series spotlighting an individual piece of music from a video game. VGM stands for Video Game Music, just in case you were wondering.)
Wave Man
Game: Mega Man 5 (1992)
Composer: Mari Yamaguchi
To say that Mega Man 5 is a disappointing game is quite an understatement. No, actually, maybe it isn’t—any gaming cynic boosted by hindsight should be able to piece together how the 4th sequel to an NES title released 5 years prior would be disappointing. By this point, Capcom was just telefaxing it in, assembling its game from elements of previous installments like a cartoon Construx set without doing any QA to assure that the pieces were fitting together properly. Mega Man’s power-ups were unbalanced, the enemies and bosses scant and uninspired, and the stages—while technically impressive—exercised frustration while lacking the thrill of accomplishment, a delicate mixture that makes the MM series’ notorious difficulty so addicting in the first place.
Alllllllllllllll of that aside, however, Mega Man 5’s soundtrack is surprisingly good, and one track in particular is outstanding:
Admittedly, I don’t know much about composer Mari Yamaguchi, but her credits include Breath of Fire, the SNES port of U.N. Squadron and Super Ghouls N’ Ghosts, as well as a contribution to the soundtrack of recently released Mega Man 10. That’s quite a chiptune pedigree! Also, let this be a solid argument against the naysayers who think all NES music “sounds the same” or is hindered by technical limitations. The good programmers knew how to make good music, period. My opinion: all truly great music has structure at its core, and since structure and arrangement are the life-force of the digital, the great composers recognize and embrace it, crafting tunes with solid underlying foundations instead of trying to emulate “performances” that are more comfortable in the realm of the analog. Mari Yamaguchi’s Wave Man is one of the best. It’s catchy, contains some interesting changes, and puts every channel to melodic use, rather than being simply textural. There’s nothing wrong with programming tricks like echoing, of course, but it’s nice to hear musicality being brought to the front of a composition like this.
(Now, if you put this music on while playing through MM9’s Splash Woman stage, you’d have the ideal Wave Man experience!)
Screenshots courtesy of VGMuseum.
Ico (2001) requires nothing less than complete investment in its construction. Every crumbling stone and rusty lever serves to reinforce an exacting and authoritative design, as staged and artificial as the huge obtrusive castle that serves as the only environment. The game remains strangely ironic in this way, exhibiting a realism and artistry that’s twice or maybe even three times removed from prominent troubles on the receptive level: the controls are unintuitive, in-game cameras are stubbornly restrictive and refuse to comply with direction, and bloom lighting frequently threatens monotony, casting everything in a hazy glow that makes one squint and strain unnaturally.
Fine. As a game—as an interactive apparatus—it’s not perfect.
But behind Team Ico and Fumito Ueda’s unnerving design lies moments so inescapably beautiful and human that to call Ico anything less than moving is missing something entirely, something important. Yorda (the NPC that the player, as young protagonist Ico, must lead through the massive fortress labyrinth) curiously checks her elbow often when left idle. Perhaps it’s to knead the arm that Ico must constantly tug on, ushering the both of them through gameplay sequences of puzzle solving and light combat that would be brisk enough in the first place. Or it could simply be fatigue—after all, stress manifests itself in many forms and, without spoiling the story, to say that the adolescent Yorda is worried about sneaking out without Mom’s permission is quite an understatement. Later, when freedom seems all but spread out before the pair, Yorda is so physically and emotionally drained that she can barely stand on her own two feet, and stumbles when Ico tries to drag her with the same aggressive urgency that he (the player) has used before.
Many people cite the bridge sequence, the false endgame, as the crux of Ueda’s authorship, the “moment” in which the game crosses over from simplistic platformer to emblematic beacon of art, but the true measure of Ico’s brilliance comes from everything that came before: Ico’s half-lanky and awkward stride as he struggles to carry a bomb (clearly biting off more than he can chew but masking the struggle behind not-quite-realized machismo); the small controller vibrations set off when Ico and Yorda’s grip snaps taut; and Yorda, when given a moment to herself, quietly examines her elbow, and humanity’s small intricacies become stylized revelations of themselves, lasting far beyond their intention.
The apparatus of Ico is flawed, to be sure, but at the same time, how alive the diffraction is!
We are now officially done with one-third of our summer, and I couldn’t be feeling more pressure with regards to the videogames that I’m currently playing. It’s not like the old days: Summer slammed into our soft impressionable minds like a freight train of liberation, and the possible configurations of doing everything but anything stretched on for subjective eternities. Videogames were a part of my everyday playscape, as it was for a lot of people, and while the leisure-ness of games also lent itself a little guilt during the school year, summer meant we were free to spent hours and hours—days if some of us wanted to—tackling a game (or two, or twenty) without fear of any harsh parental scoldings other than the occasional “go outside” mantra and, frankly, I was totally fine with that. It all fused together into a tapestry of seasonal freedom and I could shift activity gears seamlessly. The games would always be there, after all, and time was simply a measure of sunlight, not scheduled events.
It’s different now. This is something every gamer realizes when they reach their 20s: our calendars condense closer and closer together (”the circle is closing in,” I think the old saying goes) and free time becomes a commodity as precious as a gemstone. Nothing will bring those carefree days of childhood back. Coincidentally, the gaming industry seems aware of this as much as we do, and exploits our nostalgia to nefarious ends: “Retro” releases tantalize with the possibility of re-living our pre-pubescent periods, and franchise reboots claim to strip a game down to its core appeal, to its “roots,” brewing the feelings we once felt when we first laid eyes on them. The industry didn’t simply abandon our demographic when we aged out; it followed us because we are STILL the demographic, and are doing everything imaginable to persuade us to purchase new merchandise by disguising it as the old. And, for the most part, it’s working.
Yet old habits die hard, and I have a particular summer gaming tradition that I’m currently agonizing over, which is to play a Zelda game from front to back. I’ve been doing it on and off for the better part of twelve years, and while last season was Zelda barren as I tried to settle into a new full time job, this year I plan to ritualistically dive in head first, which is exactly where my conundrum lies. But first things first: why this particular tradition?
Zelda games, to me, exclusively have the summer vibe going on more than any other. One can indirectly channel the feelings that creator Shigeru Miyamoto must have experienced as a youth during his own adventures in the forests and caves around his hometown of Kyoto, the inspiration for the Hyrule universe. The essence of Zelda has remained resolutely intact all of these years, and no matter how ridiculous and off-center the series may spin (for example, Link shredding on a cog), one aspect of gameplay is delightfully ever-present: environmental exploration, the timeless techniques of turning over every rock, bombing every crack and poking through every bush while searching for all manner of hidden treasure, finding your way around more by memory and natural landmarks than by map. Of course, Zelda games do have maps—considering some of the trickier 3-D temples, it would be ridiculous if they didn’t—but do you honestly use them more than sight alone?
Another important and quintessentially summer-like staple of Zelda games is that more than half of Link’s time in Hyrule is spent outdoors, dwarfed by his natural surroundings and forcing the player to simply take a moment and assess their rightful place within that world. Every time you enter a town or dungeon or acreage of land that hasn’t been revealed before, a short panoramic cinema offers a quick geographic survey that both invites and overwhelms, a travelogue of epic proportions, the ultimate vacation. The inevitable warping takes much of the tedium out of travel, but at the start of these games, all that legwork is actually useful in getting a sense of the scope of the Zelda universe, a scope that, with the later 3-D iterations, spans time as well as space. The sheer pleasure of living in Hyrule for dozens of hours isn’t just from Link’s satisfying workout on that gentle Nintendo treadmill—starting as frail and all but written-off forest waif and ultimately arriving at nearly indestructible master swordsman—but from taking part in a narrative that encompasses an entire ecosystem, in which a reward can stem from merely watching that Hyrulian sun rise and set many, many times, a constant in a game constructed around a remarkable transformation. Link’s adventures encompass summer, to be sure, and not just any summer, but ones that we always remember as occurring long ago: fresh, exciting, and endless.
What’s vexing me isn’t the issue of whether or not to play through a Zelda game: considering the unusually cool and damp June that the East Coast has gone through, it’s high time for some sun and adrenaline. The question, rather, is WHICH game to play? I held off on finishing Twilight Princess because I purchased it with my Wii in January ‘07 and, snowboarding section or not, it just didn’t feel right to be playing it in the winter. I wouldn’t mind revisiting Wind Waker again, and Majora’s Mask recently made its way onto Virtual Console (never mind that the game is a masterpiece of dread; that’s a topic for another article). Oh, and the handheld games! I can actually play those outside, in the open air, maybe sitting on a park bench or walking The Ramble. What a Mobius strip that would be! I have been meaning to play through Link’s Awakening again after being swaddled in fuzzy Game Boy memories this year. Or maybe Ocarina of Time? Or A Link to the Past? Or The Adventure of Link? Argh!
Now that there are only a little less than two months left, time is running out for my Summer Zelda playthrough, and I’m a little panicky. Maybe the only way to settle this is through a marathon series session. Hmmm. What do you think? And more importantly, what were your summer gaming traditions, and do you still observe them today?
Space is a crucial element in a video game. It helps dictate the environment, defines the limitations of the player, and establishes the boundaries that can either help or hinder one from progressing through what can sometimes be many many hours of real world time. The way that the interactive environment has evolved—from concrete and planar to a fluctuating open-world 3D ecosystem—gives the awesome impression that you can “go anywhere” and “do anything.” Unfortunately, it’s kind of the exact opposite: with such a highly complicated and tech-based infrastructure, the freedom a player actually experiences is all in-game, and the possibilities of trying to color outside the lines (or full-out “breaking” it) are getting fewer and farther in-between. Many people like their realism, and that’s fine, but sometimes I wish that games hearkened back to the olden days (of yore), when the discourse was more elastic and dictated by gameplay, and the spatial relationships were more “open.”
For instance, a mechanic (shudder) that seems to have fallen by the wayside involves a looping, continuous line authored by the player: when the character you control travels in one direction, he/she will continue in that direction, even if they leave the playing field. If they go off of the screen, this doesn’t result in failure and/or a lost life: you’ll simply cycle around to the other side of the screen without ever losing any momentum. Kid Icarus (1987) utilizes this concept in some of its level design—what appears to be a blocked vertical path can actually be circumvented by moving from one side of the screen to the other, not by traveling across the designated geographic layout of the level but by purposely leaving that space and popping out on the other side. In other words, the player is manipulating the game’s “negative” space. Pac-Man (and his Ms.) allow for this technique also, as you can move from one side of the board to the other via the two openings in the middle of the maze, a quick way to avoid closely pursuing ghosts. Early one-screen arcade and NES titles like the original Mario Bros. and Balloon Fight contain an extra dimension of strategy because of the perpetual direction you can apply to both sides of the board at any given time.
I remember one of my literary professors back in college describing Eastern writing as “spiral-like” by nature, and that concept stuck with me ever since. Modern Japanese authors like Kobo Abe and Haruki Murakami employ a writing style that is both flowing and cohesive, never lingering on a plot point yet also never failing to laterally connect with the events that came before. The results are fluid, briskly paced works that, while often dealing with the surreal and fantastic, never have any rough edges or tangential prose. The plots of most games—retro and modern—certainly don’t hold a candle to the masterpieces of the great Eastern novelists, but in games like Kid Icarus, the spiral materializes in other, more implicit forms. (It may seem like I’m trying to argue that this is a fundamentally “Japanese” quality, but games like Williams’ Joust and Rare’s Jetpac also use the non-terminating line, although the argument of whether any particular game influenced any other is an historical matter that I’d rather skirt for the time being.)
Another interesting implementation of space is “warping,” but in the case of a game like Super Mario Bros. (1986), the idea of using an interstitial space to travel between two points within a game’s diegesis is actually a tool with a physical presence: the pipe. This was all designed as a means to encourage exploration and tuck away secrets that could be discovered after multiple play-throughs, of course, and I concede that there is something very whimsical and fun about having Mario duck into a pipe or climb a quickly growing vine as a means to traverse terrain that breaks from the game’s pre-established norms, but it seems that a little bit of the “metaness” charm present when you actually force yourself off-screen is lost by making it a mechanic (oh, that dreaded word again). It turns into something explicitly anticipated and flaunted by the designers instead of being a more subtle technique that creates the illusion that the player is discovering and exploiting some unseen bit of architecture all by themselves. But the pipe serves a valuable purpose: by being an in-game object in SMB (one that everyone recognizes) that is also a vehicle for quickly skipping through game areas or accessing secret rooms, it fills in a spatial gap that would otherwise break our engagement with Mario’s world if we simply just jumped, say, from World 1 to World 4; without the pipe, it would seem like a cheat, like we were passing over something, but with it we instantly picture Mario tubing through some unseen labyrinth of plumbing that some very enthusiastic Mushroom Kingdom planning committee drew up one night. And all of this taking place telepathically, while the screen flashes black.
The “continuous line” principle does make a brief comeback in Super Mario Bros. 2 (1988) (or Doki Doki Panic, depending on whose side you’re on), but unfortunately it’s severely restricted as the closed, mostly scrolling, and compartmentalized level design is not very conducive to physics-based platforming puzzles or strategic cross-screen vegetable throwing combat. You would think that the boss fights might try to involve some geo-spatial quandaries, but alas, the lairs in which you battle these large enemies are woefully brick-laden and claustrophobic, with hardly any character finessing involved at all; it becomes either a block stacking mini-game fit for a robotic operating buddy, or a surprisingly boring round of explosive hot potato.
With the advent and popularity of side-scrolling in game design, the fixed screen grew out of favor and never really came back in any significant way, with some exceptions (the puzzle genre, for one). Even today, I don’t think that developers want to mess with the idea of left-right screen wrapping anymore: it’s too jarring, too unrefined. How can Realism exist when the player is given the opportunity to go Dada? And while warping remains a feature in use today, it certainly doesn’t have that element of discovery and imagination that it did in the days of SMB—oh look, Niko, you found a subway car. Stand clear of the closing doors.
I would love to see more clever uses of negative and interstitial spaces in today’s games, because the potential is there: Closure (2009) is an excellent example of “negative” design done right, and Portal (2007) deliciously hints at how continuous momentum would work in a 3-D environment. I say “hints at” because Portal uses its level design to cocoon a system of control around its concepts instead of allowing much player freedom, but hey, everything starts somewhere. Can you imagine a Portal multiplayer mode, for example, in which the maps are simple, single rooms, much like the one-screen boards of Balloon Fight? Or a game where the player can only inflict damage or influence the environment when their avatar is out of view, in the game’s ”between” spaces, resting in the seams? Perhaps by looking back at the early titles (of yore, remember) that favored a more interactive method of spatial discourse, video games can be open-ended enablers of self-narrative that also feature the polish and production values that gamers enjoy today. There’s no reason why developers can’t focus their hindsight a little more; after all, the line of technology is always curving, never straight, and the most important quality of a spiral is that it can continue to grow while still revolving around its origin.
Game screenshots from VGMuseum. Magritte/Pipe image by Genée Cosden.
Sometimes, that’s all you need.
Download Amazing Spider-Man Cut-Scene MP3
Stars Down Deep
Vieo Gams!
VGM of the Week
VGM of the Week
Games/New York
VGM of the Week
Collision Detection
VGM of the Week
Blitcast One: SNES Mouse
Dear Kurt,
I largely agree with your review.
I really like how the (3D) Ma...
HAHA!!! World Famo S dancing and tic tac toe. oh the craziness...
Nice to see that you didn't vanish into the internet. can't wait for more podcas...
The podcast is on hold for now, as it's been extremely difficult to wrangle gues...
i remember when i first heard the beethoven piece in Earthworm jim 2 i was plese...
Yoshi's Story was a great game. i think that colors and sound of this game ditra...
I would love to play this game. Do you still have it? I still have my SNES....
@.ale, I took a look at some of your work and it's great!...
