Bliterations
Thoughts/Gaming

VGM of the Week
24
Apr

(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:

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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.

Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on April 24th, 2010 :: Posts :: Tags : , , , , , , ,
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VGM of the Week
16
Apr

(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.

Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on April 16th, 2010 :: Posts :: Tags : , , , , , , , , , , ,
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VGM of the Week
9
Apr

(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.

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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).

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Related Posts:
Blitcast One: SNES Mouse
Collision Detection

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

Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on April 9th, 2010 :: Posts :: Tags : , , , , , , , ,
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VGM of the Week
1
Apr

(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.

Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on April 1st, 2010 :: Posts :: Tags : , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Blitcast One: SNES Mouse
14
Mar

  • label: Media

I never thought that I would actually have the nerve to podcast anything here at Blit, because I definitely write gooder than I talk…or are I? Regardless, I’m happy that Phil Theobald from Player One agreed to join me for a Skype chat on the SNES Mouse, since it made for a very fun conversation about a fascinating and mostly forgotten piece of early 90’s Nintendo hardware. Of course, there’s no point in discussing the SNES Mouse without also mentioning Mario Paint, the free-form creativity software that came bundled with it. Other games mentioned during our chat include King Arthur’s World, Vegas Stakes, Snoopy Concert, Mario and Wario, and Mario’s Super Picross. It’s my most…sophisticated…podcast to date. (Total Runtime: 59:44)

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Download Blitcast One MP3

Choose your own Theme Song:

Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on March 14th, 2010 :: Media :: Tags : , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Collision Detection
27
Jul

  • label: Image Series

Images from VGMuseum.

Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on July 27th, 2009 :: Images :: Tags : , , , ,
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My Summer Conundrum
25
Jul

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?

Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on July 25th, 2009 :: Posts :: Tags : , , , , , , , ,
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Collision Detection
29
May

  • label: Image Series

Breath of Fire image source: VGMuseum

Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on May 29th, 2009 :: Images :: Tags : , , ,
3 Comments

Signs of Life
18
Mar

And then there is a game like Soul Blazer (1992), which encapsulates the fragile and tenuous balance between man and universe through roughly translated language that seems hewn from some half-completed philosophic masterwork by an author long forgotten before they could ever be remembered in the first place, illuminating moments of humanity that are probably spun at every minute of every day yet never quite brought to light in such a plain and beautiful way, and makes one wonder if a video game developer can indeed be unashamedly altruistic, wanting nothing more than to use their games as a means to impart simple existential wisdom through lines of code and patterns of colored squares, too small to be counted individually but all equally essential for the glowing tapestry that we can sometimes actually take to heart, if we are willing.

Related Links:

Hardcore Gaming 101 Retrospective on Soul Blazer developer Quintet
Gamespite forum thread on Soul Blazer (EXTENSIVE WALKTHROUGH)
TerraEarth, a site dedicated to Quintet’s “post-Actraiser” titles

Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on March 18th, 2009 :: Images, Posts :: Tags : , , , ,
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Multiplatformulas
17
Feb

There was a time (as I’m sure was the case in many gamers’ lives) when I was forced to decide which hardware system to purchase or receive as a gift for the holidays. As a kid growing up in the late ’80s/early ’90s, it was a no-brainer: Nintendo systems were part of the zeitgeist in American popular culture, so there was almost no way to NOT want an NES or SNES (with due respect to Sega fans, who I know are plentiful in number). Those were the systems I received for my 6th birthday and Christmas 1991, respectively. And while my love for Nintendo proved to be a strong bond (I purchased every hardware system Nintendo has produced since then, with the notable exception of the Virtual Boy since it physically hurt my eyes when I tried out a demo station at a Toys R Us), there was the consumerist zealot inside of me, gently prodding along my envious desire to own a Genesis, a GameGear, a PC (our family computer was a Macintosh, and while Shufflepuck Cafe (1989) and Myst were great, how was I going to play Half-Life and Planescape Torment on that?), a Playstation, etc., etc., even though I knew there was no real way to rationalize and condense such extravagance into a blunt request that my parents could stomach. They were of the mindset that one system per cycle was enough, a perfectly cogent argument and one that even  trickled into my sub-conscious and waylaid me from buying any other hardware on top of the one Nintendo system per generation, although with enough elbow grease I could definitely have worked and saved up enough to afford another system every few years or so.

It was the Summer of 2004 in which I finally plunged into the depths of cross-platform hardware ownership. I had just graduated college and wanted to celebrate…SOMEHOW. I wandered into a Best Buy with the sole intent of picking up a copy of Mega Man Anniversary Collection (2004) for GameCube (yes, THAT one) and somehow managed to walk out of there with a PS2 and a copy of GTA: Vice City (in addition to MMAC for GameCube, I’m sorry to say). I remember just being proud that I had really earned the privilege of owning multiple systems—and rivals to boot! Believe me, being a multiple system owner during a single cycle changes your perspective on things. When you see that two competing platforms can occupy, thrive and then eventually wither and gather dust within the same space on your shelf, you become more aware of their materiality than any consumer report and sales chart can hope to illustrate for you.

This cycle (or generation, or permutation, or however you want to classify it) is particularly different and painful for a cantankerous consumer like myself. The market seems to be divisive between the so-called “core” gamers (oh, how I do hate that word, along with other token game journalism signifiers like “mechanic” that are so broad and nebulous they end up diluting their own meanings completely) and the “casual” audience (”casual” meaning recreation I guess, but…EVERYBODY plays games as a recreation, so what is the point of this word).

(I have to interrupt myself and apologize for my frequent use of parentheticals.)

However, the idea of the multi-platform game and, I think it is safe to say, “parsed down” list of hardware one chooses from is actually resulting in a hobby that’s pretty simple to understand and make pat buying decisions about. A triple-A title that comes out from a third-party publisher is, with a high degree of probability, going to come out for whatever computer box you happen to have in your possession at this very moment. Those that don’t, well, that list isn’t as big as it could be, so either you have the liquidity to pay for these “exclusives” (which encompasses the game and the hardware you need to play it with) or you don’t. We can apply digital distribution to this equation as well.

Here’s a couple formulas which should help put things into perspective:*

An Exclusive purchase is the exclusive Game plus the Hardware needed to play it.

A “normal” Game purchase requires the system but without any Exclusivity factor attached to it.

The purchaser Interest in buying a hardware system is equal to the cost of the system itself, divided by the attached exclusives you want to play for it, minus any multi-platform games that you can get for the current system that you own, which therefore render them superfluous.

“I” MUST be greater than “G”, or the result is negative—or “DF,” which in this case is defined as “Damn Fool.”

I weighed these quick and dirty equations last October when LittleBigPlanet and Valkyria Chronicles came out in rapid fire succession, and I made the somewhat impulsive decision to buy a PS3, figuring that my “I” values juuuuust edged out my G values (in this case, G equals an Xbox360 and Wii).

So, am I proud to be the owner of every console system in this current cycle? No, no, I can’t say that I am. Actually, I have to be SOMEWHAT proud, or else why would I spout meaningless and technically incorrect mathematical formulas and parentheticals—and my word, there are so many parentheticals I’m resorting to em dashes now—on this topic? But really, considering the pile of unplayed, unopened games in my library (and they go back YEARS, folks), the stark realization that my amount of free time has been reduced by about 300% since I bought this stuff, and the rising expenses that are going to accompany the tattered U.S. economy for what will probably be quite some time longer, I think shame is a more appropriate characterization.

But not remorse.

*Equations not proofed.

Links:
Write your own meaningless equations!
Shufflepuck Cafe Redux

Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on February 17th, 2009 :: Posts :: Tags : , , , , , , , , , ,
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