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!

Splinter Cell: Conviction

3D Dot Game Heroes

Trauma Team

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.”

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:

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.

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.

A malfunctioning news ticker sign reveals its abstract materiality with a lone visual unit.
Perhaps this is pixél vérité?

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.

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).

Related Posts:
Blitcast One: SNES Mouse
Collision Detection

Title screenshot from VGMuseum. Composer information courtesy of SNESMusic.org. Goblin Underworld map from VGMaps.

Related Post:
Prelude to Pixelation: Norman McLaren and Early Video Games

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.

Download Blitcast One MP3

Choose your own Theme Song:

Please note that this piece contains spoilers, some of which are significant.

Banjo-Tooie (2000) marks a significant place in 3D platforming history, yet it appears to be somewhat forgotten now, perhaps buried amongst its own brand obscurity. To be fair, the Banjo-Kazooie “brand” doesn’t lend itself to ubiquity in the first place—Banjo began his life as a character in developer Rare’s 1997 racer Diddy Kong Racing, along with other throwaway sentient animals such as Timber the tiger and Drumstick, an overall wearing chicken. The ulterior motive behind DKR, it seems, was to use the game as a vessel to lay the groundwork for future character-specific Rare titles (the only one to succeed was Conker the squirrel, famously), but, really, there doesn’t seem to be anything significantly endearing or memorable about, well, a bear with pants. Granted, sticking clothes on an animal mascot may not be the oldest trick in the book, but it sure seems that way, and I think that’s enough to result in Rare’s IPs getting glossed over with the same kind of dismissal that seems to befall every new Saturday morning cartoon show that isn’t specifically tied to an already popular product. Banjo the bear and his bird sidekick Kazooie had a very, very, very steep hill to climb when their first game, Banjo-Kazooie, was released in 1998—and despite its popularity (popular enough to warrant two sequels, at least), in the face of that OTHER franchise competing for consumer dollars on a Nintendo system, there really was no way that Banjo’s first solo effort would seem like anything other than an ostensible conglomeration of every other non-Mario mascot in existence.

Faded characterizations aside, however, I’m happy that Banjo-Tooie exists as both one of the platforming swan songs of the Nintendo 64 and as a recent re-release on Xbox Live Arcade, because it is a fascinating video game relic, a resolute and finite amalgamation of the N64’s capabilities and Rare’s boldness to address the trappings of a genre that it helped to define, even doing it with an almost parodistic zeal.

Treating Banjo-Tooie as a “sequel” to BK, however, may not be wisest approach. Granted, the game certainly aims to improve upon the first title in concrete technical ways like graphics and camera control and, for the most part, succeeds admirably—there is some clever “elasticity” tech, for example, that gives soft and squishy environments an appropriate bounce: this isn’t the first N64 game where you end up inside of a sea creature’s stomach, but it’s much more impressive to traipse through intestines that have grosser jiggle to them. And the variety of mini-games tucked away within each level shows that the development team was making a solid effort in trying to craft a more robust experience for the player than its predecessor (never mind that most of these gameplay sidebars are either boring or, in the case of the first person seek-and-shoot timed missions, downright annoying). But underlying all of my assessments of the game and its nature as a “continuation” of BK is this ecstatic revelation that came to me during my recent play-though of the 360 remake, brought on by my desire to follow the Stop N’ Swop arc to its deserved conclusion (read here for a little history of this esoteric feature).

It feels to me as if Banjo-Tooie was the game that the developers wanted to make all along but weren’t able to until they constructed Banjo-Kazooie as a kind of prelude, since BT presupposes your involvement and familiarity with the first game in delightfully fecund ways. This is apparent from the first screen of the game, picking up from where the last screen of BK left off, with the evil witch Gruntilda trapped under a huge boulder—the direct result of the player’s assumed job well done. What’s more, when Banjo and Kazooie begin their adventure, they already have their entire previous move-set intact, and things only progress from there as each new world offers at least one new special technique or item or weapon to use. This actually led to a very frustrating moment for me—I was required to use a specific beak attack in order to gain a jiggy (the equivalent to Mario’s stars), but in order to correctly execute the move, I had to tap a shoulder button instead of hold it—a variation on an attack from the first game that I wasn’t even aware I still had. The assumption is that you can remember every ability from BK, and the new move-set is simply mapped on top of that (luckily, strict XBLA requirements mean that the “Help and Options” section has an onscreen guide to all of the moves, or else I would have been totally stymied without the original instruction book or an FAQ). It’s an incredibly ambitious development tactic that results in a game that, while not necessarily “deep,” is certainly impressive in terms of breadth; Kazooie can shoot and lay eggs as before, for instance, but now there are no less than five different egg types to use in various situations…and one of those eggs actually hatches a miniature Kazooie that is controlled remotely and is used to get into small crevices and squeeze past large path-blocking enemies, among other things. I smiled.

A core aspect of Tooie’s improved gameplay derives itself from the new ability to separate and individually control both Banjo and Kazooie (in BK, Kazooie was permanently tethered to Banjo’s back via his rucksack), which could have made for some deep and interesting puzzle solving, but unfortunately falls back on the “simultaneous switch hitting” trope found everywhere in everything. The bird and the bear both feel properly unique, however, and each character builds up their own individual abilities as the game progresses, so it just manages to stay fresh enough through completion. Kazooie can glide on her own without a flight pad, for example, and Banjo can use his empty backpack as a kind of potato-sack hopping vehicle and zip himself up inside in order to gain health. Again, these gameplay aspects aren’t necessarily implemented in a masterful way, but the fact that so much is nascent makes Banjo-Tooie a curious experiment in uninhibited design.

The true appeal of the game, however, lies in the inter-connectedness of the environments. I know I’ve written this before, but it bears is worth repeating again: for 3D video games, environment is KEY to an enjoyable experience, especially in a game where exploration is a core aspect of gameplay. And I don’t think I’ve ever played a game that had its levels reveal themselves as smaller branches of a larger overarching design as often or as well as Banjo-Tooie: you truly get the feeling that, as new areas are unlocked or discovered non-linearly, Rare constructed a master blueprint that was meticulously mapped out and designed to fold back onto itself at specific points like a complicated origami sculpture. In short, the whole game is a virtuoso’s ode to platformer backtracking, and in my opinion it’s done spectacularly.  One of the very first jiggies earned, for example, requires Banjo to travel from a Mayan inspired treasure chamber in the first world to a prehistoric cave in the fifth world, where a sleeping caveman is guarding a golden idol he stole from the vault. This is an instant and jarring transition; you simply walk through a door and are transported into a completely different time and place, a time and place that you won’t see again for quite some time, when you unlock the area proper. I didn’t even put the pieces together until I found my way into that specific cave again and spotted the hiding spot where the idol once stood. Rare has taken the setting of Spiral Mountain from BK and developed it into a fully realized, Byzantine universe that somehow feels more easier to navigate than the endless array of cavernous spaces that constituted Grunty’s lair, the overworld of the first game.

The issue of methodological collection has to be addressed as well, since it’s the bane of Banjo games specifically and Rare games in general (even Diddy Kong Racing had the player riding around and collecting balloons in a hub-world to unlock courses). Gamespite’s article on the matter does a fine job in summing up the problem with most 3D collectathon platformers, in that the burden of having to use the game’s programmed and technical limitations to look for something in these gargantuan areas is disproportionate to the incentive for actually getting them. The stats alone for Donkey Kong 64 (1999) should incite a tsk from almost any gamer. While Banjo-Tooie doesn’t reduce the amount of acquirable trinkets in any significant way, there is definitely more thought put into how exactly they are distributed within the areas. The 100 golden notes scattered throughout each world are now grouped into bunches of 5 and 20, lightening the load somewhat, and I didn’t have to comb through every nook and cranny in the way that BK required me to. And while shamans Mumbo Jumbo and Humba Wumba (…) each require a tiny animal called a Glowbo to perform their level-specific spells, these creatures are always found near their respective dwellings, and the game makes it a point to mention that to you via one of many hint signs strewn everywhere.

What’s more, Rare seems to actually be toying with the cliche of item collecting, making disarming jabs at their own fastidious audience. There are many NPC’s throughout Banjo-Tooie that will ask you to find this or that item or recover this or that offspring…but then, about three-quarters into the game, you encounter Mildred and George, a couple of “square” and star-crossed ice cubes who ask you to reunite them. Unfortunately, due to a necessary item tucked away inside Mildred, and a pre-designed “accident” that befalls George–which the player has to inadvertently set into motion—the only way for Banjo to acquire all the necessary jiggies necessitates that the pair is destroyed. So, Mildred and George actually are reunited, but in a unspoken, existential, and oddly beautiful way. The multi-colored Jinjo creatures also return, as expected, but about halfway through the game, a new enemy type is introduced—Minjos, who are actually evil doppelgangers of Jinjos—requiring the player to now be on their toes when they discover a Jinjo, since it may actually attack them instead of fill out a pre-determined quota. It’s another daring and meta move on Rare’s part; by subverting the very idea of item collecting that the developers introduced by using false Jinjos—and then, in the last world, the ultimate, a false Mumbo—they seem to actually be redefining somewhat what it means to play a “Rare game,” but specifically for those who have been following their games long enough to identify what it means to play a “Rare game” in the first place. It’s a defiant statement for both the fans and the critics, and undeniably original.

While one can surely see in Banjo-Tooie the groundwork being laid for Conker’s Bad Fur Day (2001), Rare’s N64 swan song—there is plenty of PG level toilet humor, large breasts and non-PC characters—the game isn’t simply a bridge or a contractual obligation. There was a surprising amount of “breadth” and ambition put into it, using expectation as a means to expand upon, and even satirize, itself. For all of the frustrating and characteristically Rare things I came across, I was compelled to continue playing, if for any other reason than a desire to see if my criticisms would be addressed or mirrored back to me. I don’t know if these thoughts equate to a positive review, but it is certainly an interactive study that I’m happy to have invested in. I came to Banjo-Tooie for Stop n’ Swop (which I’ve not unintentionally neglected to mention altogether), but once I arrived there, I found something more.

Screenshots from Spiral Mountain and GameFAQs.