Author Archives: necromoonyeti

Clint Eastwood’s Chair

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Politics constitute an indomitable itch for those of us inclined to discuss them. This is not a post about politics. This is a post about Clint Eastwood’s chair.

Clint Eastwood’s chair was first made known to me at about 3:30 this afternoon. I know, I’m behind the times. At my ripe old age of 27 it’s hard to keep up with the world. But I made that perilous journey to youtube, and with, I am proud to say, no great difficulty, I procured a mouse cursor in a blank textbox, from whence my journey began.

Arriving at my destination, and bearing witness the public oration there displayed, I found myself not at all befuddled or amused by an old man’s rant. Quite the contrary, I thought it a reasonably clever comedy sketch in consideration of his age, chuckled at his tongue-in-cheek endorsement (which amounted to little more than a ‘lesser of two evils’ vote), and felt inclined to comment on his behalf. Then my troubles set in.

I was caught off guard. The text below the video bombarded me like an artillery barrage, every 10 seconds a new string of demented rambling surpassing all of my direst expectations for the video at hand:

“LOL do you just make shit up? California well off? LOL just keep making shit up your boy will gone in November.” (kEMCO2)

“YOU’RE PROBABLY A LOSER SITTING IN YOUR MOTHER’S BASEMENT WATCHING FADING POSTERS OF OBAMA WAITING FOR YOUR NEXT WELFARE CHECK.” (Chloe Smith)

“You’re an idiot. You’re going to get old to you moron. Old age has nothing to do with dementia. People become deranged at 35, look at your hero Obama, he is as stupid as they get.” (DonDraperism)

“Ask the ones that OUR military freed and saved! Your a pansy and have no clue! Your part of the reason we’re in the shape we are!” (bessedchevy20)

“LOL. congratz u have been brainwashed” (bobilo95)

And I realized something.

I realized something terrible.

My internet was gone.

It was gone. It was dead. The shroud tailor measured it for a deep six holiday.

I didn’t believe it at first. I panicked, frantically hammering out search terms into Google, but no relief was in sight. I turned to Gogloom, dear old friend, but its springs too had run dry; IRC, my last vestige of hope, failed me.

And I thought maybe, just maybe, this tragic loss and the verbal assault upon Clint Eastwood’s chair were somehow related.

I was born and raised on the internet. I remember when we first got dial-up in 1996. I passed the tender age of 11 sharing insightful comments much akin to those I experienced today, only geared to my youthful interests. “LOL u dont even know ff3 is rly ff6 and u wasted $200 on a PSX even tho ff7s gonna suck NINTENDO FOR LIFE” Ah, such fond memories. A prodigy no doubt, I learned quickly to curb my intellectual idioms to placate the masses, adapting to the drudgery of coherent English in my teenage years and beyond. Was it some cruel twist of fate that now finds me linguistically isolated from the very internet users for whom I learned to converse? All I wanted to do was talk about Clint Eastwood’s chair.

The fact of the matter is the internet no longer functions as an outlet for sharing free thought. Oh, I am “sharing” my thoughts here, with the four or five of you who happen to read this, but should you choose to respond you will do so in the form of a comment, in reply to my post which I moderate. I am in charge here, and that means I am not really intimately engaging with anyone. These WordPress blogs completely lack an equal playing field for discussion, but they’re ideal for sharing one’s opinion with the wind. We’re all special. We all have a voice. Here’s mine.

That’s the state of WordPress. That’s the state of Facebook. That’s the state of Twitter, I suppose. I don’t use the latter two, frankly because the notion of making an isolated personal statement bores me save on rare occasions such as these. I post here because all of my previous outlets have slowly withered away. Are new outlets out there? I suppose there’s 4chan. The launch of /r9k/ encompasses some of my fondest memories of the internet, specifically due to the brief period of intellectual discussion it spawned. Coincidentally coinciding with the launch of Project Chanology, it generated countless debates on the political and social impacts of anonymity and collective thought, perhaps culminating in a collective realization of and expansion upon the notion of Stand Alone Complex (Ghost in the Shell). We were each participants, debating and trolling in turn, in the very social experiment we were conducting. It was a grand culmination of everything I loved about the internet in the 1990s and 2000s, but it was indeed a culmination–an end–because complacency and the totality of its form of anonymity rendered it non-sustainable. I remember acknowledging that at the time, and feeling as though my online world was passing away even as it stood resplendent in its most accomplished form.

And so it did. It took me four years to admit it, but the internet is dead. The pathways and connections through which such experiments as /r9k/ emerged as hubs for collective contemplation (a great majority of us, myself included, were not active 4chan members, and that fact was pivotal to elements of the discussion) dried up into defunct forums and dead irc channels. Our mutual file-sharing ties, the final tether, were severed by delayed but decisive corporate rationality headed by the likes of Apple and Netflix. The generation-spanning cultivation of anonymity was wiped clean and even culturally discredited by Facebook, with present-day internet users lavishly emblazoning their identity upon all electronic activity. The collective internet mind dispersed into relegated pockets. I am now an individual, and I despise that fact.

I wanted to talk about Clint Eastwood’s chair, but I couldn’t. I could tell a few people about it. I’m not really doing so at the moment, but I could. I could also scream at the wall, as so many youtube users of voting age are doing right now. And indeed, they’re relatively anonymous. Chloe Smith and blessedchevy20 will certainly never know that I read their banter, and, though I could probably trace down their thorough identities with easy today, apathy preserves them. But they aren’t engaging anything. Their ‘thoughts’, if what they wrote even amounts to thinking, involved not but petty rebuttals to the most recent of 12,000 comments, by now surely buried behind thousands more. The /r9k/ ideal, of thoughtful engagement under the shroud of total anonymity, was short-lived. Perhaps it carries on in some diminished form. But the long-sustained anonymous community is what we’ve truly lost. The modestly sized forum; the casual irc channel; the self-contained communities where one could engage under independent but locally consistent identities: it’s their loss that we now suffer.

Would so many adults scream at the wall if they had any alternative? In an age where everyone has access to the internet, would we be so simultaneously excitable and yet devoid of well-formed opinions if we had any means of discussion? I can talk here and hope you hear me. I can shout on youtube knowing you won’t. In neither medium am I well positioned to receive an intelligible response by an identity in equal social standing. You’re either on my turf or in the combat zone with barely time to breathe before taking aim. And even if the spirit of youtube calmed down a bit, what can you meaningfully say in 500 characters?

I don’t want to talk about Clint Eastwood’s chair anymore. I was going to say some silly crap about a metaphor for lack of political leadership that would sound corny as hell but would spark up some discussion. But I can’t do that here, because as an editor I’m in charge and that means I have to maintain boundaries. And there’s no point in doing it anywhere else. I guess I’ll just go back to playing Warcraft, maybe discuss the new expertise cap or auction house inflation. In the absence of loosely-moderated discussion boards and public chats those seem to be the approachable topics we have left on the internet.

VGM Entry 34: Stormlord

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 34: Stormlord
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

There were only so many things a musician could do within the limited capacity of the Commodore 64, and though a rare boundary-breaking exception or two snuck by, I think that by 1989 most music sounded like a rehash of the same old thing. It wasn’t declining in quality, but it was getting a little repetitive, while many of the best musicians were moving on to other platforms or beginning to burn out. The amount of games I feel inclined to exemplify diminishes in turn.

Dominator (System 3, 1989), composed by Matt Gray, is a perfect case in point. It was a solid four-song work that incorporated a lot of standard C64 innovations while remaining pretty laid back. It’s definitely a pleasant listen, and in a way it reminds me of Jeroen Tel’s work on Cybernoid II the previous year. It is one of the best Commodore 64 soundtracks of 1989 that I’ve found, but it offers absolutely nothing new. There’s no stylistic innovation here. It doesn’t employ the SID in any sort of novel way. It’s just a catchy tune in C64 style. That’s all well and good, but if the whole SID musical movement was defined by constant experimentation and expansion then it was surely by 1989 well in decline.

Part of Jeroen Tel’s real claim to fame was his ability to keep pushing forward in the midst of this:

Stormlord (Hewson, 1989) is a joint effort by Johannes Bjerregaard and Jeroen Tel. Its sort of cheesy extra-terrestrial vibe does little to reflect the gameplay, but that’s to be expected. I’m more impressed by how effectively poppy it is compared to Commodore 64 titles of the past. It sounds almost too pop to be SID, with even a tip of the hat to Michael Jackson (0:37) as far as I can tell, and that’s a lot of what makes it a significant composition. Jeroen Tel kept on incorporating new styles of popular music into a chiptune medium long after most SID composers had become set in their ways. Johannes Bjerregaard was of course also involved in Stormlord, and I don’t know the extent to which either contributed to this tune in particular (or if there even are other tunes in the game). Bjerregaard is a name I seldom run across, although Lemon 64 credits him with 63 compositions.

Stormlord also comes with an amusing story. The game caused Hewson Consultants a bit of trouble, and the box art you see above is not the original design. The original, if fairly innocent, would probably still cause a ruckus today.

Hewson Consultants didn’t beat around the bush. They knew that finding out the princess was in another castle wasn’t what gamers really wanted, and they attempted to deliver the real deal. So in Stormlord you play a behemoth, loin-cloth laden viking who runs around saving hot naked chicks. Sexist? Maybe, but not really sexual. This wasn’t an “adult” game by any means. Your interaction with the distressed damsels was in no way suggestive, and there was no discernible full-blown nudity. It would have surely landed a safe PG-13 rating were its contents in a movie today, but… is that the side of a pixilated breast I see? Good heavens!

VGM Entry 33: Amiga 500

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 33: Amiga 500
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

It was around 1988 that European computer gaming really started to make the transition over to the Amiga 500 from the Commodore 64. While the Amiga line had been around since 1985, the Amiga 500 launched in 1987 and was designed to be a much more cost effective, mass consumer-friendly product.

With a change in platform came a change in composers, oddly enough. Rob Hubbard is mentioned in a measly nine game credits on Lemon Amiga, and Martin Galway not at all. Suddenly David Whittaker, a Commodore 64 composer with an expansive library but little fame, ruled the roost. If we consider again a simple Lemon Amiga search result, his name pops up in 86 different Amiga titles. Platoon (Ocean Software, 1988) was not actually originally his, but as a faithful port of Jonathan Dunn’s 1987 C64 original (unless of course the music appeared in the movie itself; I’ve never seen it) it makes apparent the audio improvements the Amiga could offer. Whittaker’s Platoon was not necessarily better than the Jonathan Dunn original if we consider what the two artists had to work with, but he certainly did not squander or misuse the expansive new options that the Amiga 500 brought.

Whittaker’s most famous work would arrive the following year. Shadow of the Beast (Psygnosis, 1989) was a 12 song collection which really helped to solidify what we might think of as the Amiga 500 sound. The old Commodore 64 crew typically failed to carry on their legacies in the Amiga era, true, but most of the composers who replaced them did get their start programming for the C64 and enjoying the works of Hubbard and co. Artists had to be very selective about the styles of music they pursued in the C64, given its limited capacity, and what I think you hear on soundtracks like Shadow of the Beast is a continuation of those styles set to pretty decent instrument samples. This song could easily be translated into a SID piece and retain its original character. The actual C64 conversion sounded bad, as it turned out, but only because Fredrik Segerfalk did a shoddy job of it, not because the music was incompatible.

My favorite Amiga 500 tune by far though is Crystal Hammer (reLINE Software, 1988) by Karsten Obarski. The game itself is a mere Breakout copycat, but Obarski really made it shine. From what I can tell it was one of his only game compositions–Sarcophaser (Rainbow Arts, 1988) is another good one–and the brevity of his works is quite a shame. He made his name known more as a software developer, creating the highly criticized but frequently employed Ultima Soundtracker for the Amiga. Despite having almost no involvement in Commodore 64 composition whatsoever, Obarski’s music sounds just as indebted to Rob Hubbard as the rest of them. This is especially apparent on Sarcophaser, where you can get a feel for how the standard SID sounds and the more original style of Crystal Hammer existed side by side.

Chris Hülsbeck was a bit of an exception to the rule of new names on the new platform. One of his most shining moments was the Amiga 500 port of R-Type (Electric Dreams, 1989). Though Hülsbeck did, to the best of my knowledge, create the loadscreen music to the Commodore 64 version of R-Type as well, he chose two completely different songs. Never fully conforming to the ‘standard’ sound of any system, Hülsbeck was going to forge ahead with his own unique sound, and the product might not be backwards compatible.

That being said, while I have no doubt that Hülsbeck composed the Amiga title screen–it is unmistakably his style–I can’t say with certainty that he actually wrote the C64 one. Ramiro Vaca is additionally credited as a musician on the C64, as is Darius Zendeh on the Amiga, and I am not sure what role either played.

VGM Entry 32: Arcade and C64 in ’88

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 32: Arcade and C64 in ’88
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

Beyond the NES, a lot of great things were going on in 1988 that I am largely still unaware of. Late 80s arcade and computer gaming gets a lot less publicity today than the Nintendo counterpart, and even some of the best require a bit of digging to uncover, but here are a few I found worthy of mention.

Jeroen Tel is a Dutch composer born in 1972. I am not sure when he first got into the business, but his works really start to stand out for the first time in 1988. Cybernoid and Cybernoid II, both developed by Raffaele Cecco and published by Hewson Consultants, were also both released in 1988. The latter’s main theme is particularly catchy. The game was a sort of weird combination space shooter and action side scroller, hedging more towards the latter. It appeared on a number of platforms, but its C64 version is by far the most memorable, specifically because of Tel’s musical contributions. He would go on to be remembered alongside Rob Hubbard as one of the greatest Commodore 64 composers. His Cybernoid II music has even been performed by live orchestras, though the success of converting such an essentially chippy tune is dubious. Suffice to say this track is catchy in its original form, and clocking in at 6 minutes, it provides a pleasant motivation for extended gameplay.

The arcade had long established itself as the primary venue for optimal sound quality. The general lack of great arcade soundtracks in my experience makes me wonder if I’m not missing an enormous and important range of video game music. The works of Tamayo Kawamoto in Ghouls’n Ghosts (Capcom, 1988) certainly upholds the higher standard. The majority of the soundtrack is rather dark and ambient, and quite successful as such, but it’s the unique “Stage Two” theme which really stands out. For a relatively unknown video game composer, Tamayo Kawamoto has quite a history. She began her career on Capcom’s Alph Lyla house band, composing arcade music as early as 1984 to include the classic Commando. A few years after Ghouls’n Ghosts she would move on to join Zuntata, the Taito house band responsible for Darius and quite a number of other arcade classics.

The Ghouls’n Ghosts soundtrack, and “Stage Two” in particular, would ultimately be remembered in the form of Tim Follin’s Commodore 64 arrangement, not Tamayo Kawamoto’s original, and for good reason, but let’s give credit where credit’s due.

Even so, the world of the arcade was fading fast, and Zuntata were one of the few acts still putting their all into it. Some bad research on the part of youtube posters lead me to believe for a time that the music of the 1993 Sega-CD/Mega-CD port of The Ninja Warriors (Taito, 1988) was in fact the original, and it’s this latter version for which the game is probably most famous. But unlike with Ghouls’n Ghosts, the music to The Ninja Warriors didn’t conceptually change over time. It just improved in the light of better technology.

The soundtrack of The Ninja Warriors was headed by Hisayoshi Ogura, who also lead the composition of Darius. The track featured here, “Daddy Mulk”, is the most famous in the game. (I have no idea what the origin of this peculiar name is, and I wonder if it’s not an afterthought in consideration of the apparent sound of the electronic voice in the music.) Now that I am aware of the difference between the 1988 arcade soundtrack and its 1993 Sega-CD counterpart I’m a bit surprised that the arcade quality is quite this low. I mean, it’s outstanding compared to anything on competing platforms, but it doesn’t sound like any technological upgrades had been made since Darius two years prior. Another sign of the arcade’s fading significance? Perhaps. Zuntata certainly weren’t cutting corners, as their live renditions and later adaptations of the soundtrack would show. They were still kings of the arcade in 1988, even if this was a dying kingdom, and their legacy is well earned.

VGM Entry 31: RPGs in ’88

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 31: RPGs in ’88
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

Nobuo Uematsu and Koichi Sugiyama were both at work in 1988, recording installments of the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series respectively. They both maintained their own standards, remaining at the forefront of RPG and adventure style music on the NES.

Final Fantasy II (Square, 1988) was actually a big improvement over the original. Nobuo Uematsu’s fundamental style hadn’t changed (and I would argue that it still hasn’t), but I feel like on this game he really mastered how to effectively arrange his works for the NES. I mentioned that Final Fantasy‘s arrangement felt like a finished product compared to some other genre-related games released that year, but in Nobuo’s later NES works you can start to get the feeling that the original Final Fantasy was also a sort of work in progress. It incorporated a number of slightly distorted tones which really gave his soft, subtle melodies an air of technological primitivism.

On Final Fantasy II you hear none of that. The overall sound is a lot more smooth. It’s immediately apparent in the “Main Theme” following “Prelude” in this sample. The main melody, here carried by a very soft and pretty tone, is precisely the sort of sound for which he employed a grittier, more mechanical tone in the first game. Since Final Fantasy II was released on the Famicom, not the FDS, I can’t imagine that there was any change in the platform’s capacity. I think, rather, he took some lessons from his earlier shortcomings on the production end of the spectrum.

Final Fantasy II was the first game to feature the famous “Chocobo” theme (1:40), and “Main Theme” (0:53), “Tower of Mages” (not here featured), and “Ancient Castle” (2:42) are all particularly noteworthy, but I think it’s the improved arrangement which really makes the soundtrack shine.

Dragon Quest III (Enix, 1988) is a little harder for me to assess, as I’ve somehow completely failed to acquire full soundtracks for this series. What I’ve heard seems like more of the same old, which is absolutely fine. Koichi Sugiyama seems to have continued to focus on rearranging earlier works rather than composing wholly new ones, and he had a decent amount of success in doing so. I’m not going to talk at length about a score I really know nothing about, but I thought it worth throwing out there again.

As I hope I’ve by now established though, the NES had by no means a monopoly on this style of video game music. Takahito Abe and Yuzo Koshiro’s work on Ys I is a soundtrack I’ve frequently cited, and its follow-up, Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished – The Final Chapter (Nihon Falcom), was yet another fine 1988 sequel.

But the music here is pretty hard to come by. Takahito Abe was not a part of the sound team this go around, and Mieko Ishikawa took on the bulk of the load, with Yuzo Koshiro providing some of the more up-beat tracks, such as the one here sampled. Ishikawa isn’t a musician I’ve come across too often up to this point, but she was credited alongside Koshiro and Abe on Sorcerian, and I gather she was involved in future Ys titles. I suppose I should have featured one of her songs and not Koshiro’s, but I can’t find enough of it out there to get a good feel for it. There’s a nice sample of the song Tender People up on youtube that might give you an idea. It lacks Takahito Abe’s gentle touch, but it’s quite pretty nevertheless.

A lot of the difficulty in digging out Ys II tracks (at least in the short period of time I can allot it) stems from a remake of the game having been released for PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16 in 1989, a mere one year later. That release, Ys I & II, featured some outstanding new arrangements from Ryo Yonemitsu, but its success denies us easy access to Ishikawa’s original PC-8801 work. As far as Koshiro is concerned, some of his upbeat tracks come off quite well, but I feel like he lacked restraint on this album and ended up with a sound that just didn’t quite suite the type of game he was composing for. It’s a problem which Koshiro would thoroughly overcome over the next three years, adding such stark stylistic distinctions to his name as ActRaiser (Enix, 1990) and Streets of Rage (Sega, 1991).

Above all else in the RPG/adventure world of 1988 though, I’m most impressed by how my new-found hero Kenneth W. Arnold manages to maintain the high standards he set back in 1983.

This guy’s music blows me away every time I hear it, and his work on Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny (Origin Systems, 1988) is no exception. It’s atmospherically perfect. “Engagement and Melee” might be a simple song, but could it have been any more appropriate for a tense medieval battle? It doesn’t deliver with speed and aggression, but rather with a vision of the distant fantasy world it represents. The distortion sounds archaic in the best of ways.

There are a lot of different versions of it floating around out there, as best I understand because Apple II music is nearly impossible to rip and requires some creative liberty. But I did manage to nab a replica of the original Apple II sound as it was meant to be heard through a Mockingboard sound card, and I present these samples to you now. (Thanks again to Apple Vault.)

The aesthetics here never fail to impress me. The sound quality in “Greyson’s Tale” is exploited flawlessly, using every potential adverse limitation to the music’s advantage. The distortion and the fairly minimalistic, distinctly medieval compositions paint every ideal image you’ve ever had a of a fantasy world. There’s something not quite clear and not quite safe about all of it.

In “Dream of Lady Nan” the distorted bass is so forceful you can feel the vibrations, and the melody is crystal clear, creating an unnatural juxtaposition that’s completely haunting. I normally avoid encouraging the free download of potentially copyrighted material, but in consideration of the fact that the owners of this material have nothing to lose and everything to gain from it being distributed, I highly recommend you go download all of Kenneth W. Arnold’s works in Ultima III-V. You can find them in their ideal form at this link.

Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny. It’s not quite on par with Ultima III and Ultima IV in my opinion, and the tracks don’t loop quite as flawlessly as they used to, but it maintains the series’ standing in a complete league of its own, beyond comparison to the contemporary best efforts of Nobuo Uematsu and company. If there were other soundtracks out there like it, well, I would very much like to hear them.

VGM Entry 30: Mega Man 2

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 30: Mega Man 2
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

I’ve never actually played a main series Mega Man game in my life. I know, it’s embarrassing. We just somehow never crossed paths. I played Mega Man X and Mega Man X2 when they came out, but not the classics. Ah well. I suppose Mega Man 2 (Capcom, 1988) was most people’s first encounter with the series, but it picks up exactly where the first installment left off, both in plot and in music.

The introduction is pretty epic really, for all its simplicity. You start out hearing the end credits music to the original Mega Man while gazing out over a futuristic 8-bit cityscape. As you learn that Dr. Willy has returned with new robots, the pace quickens, the camera begins to zoom up, and bam, there’s Mega Man standing in the breeze with a hero’s anthem pounding out behind him. It’s the ultimate super hero introduction, better than any of that glossy Hollywood stuff you see today. And from this point forward, the music never really stops kicking ass.

If I had to fight a guy with a giant blade saw on his head I’d be sweating it. The music to Metalman is packed with a real sense of danger that I don’t think any previous game–and few since–have so effectively captured. The effect is huge, and that might be the best way to describe the rest of the music in this game too. With nothing but two main tracks and drums and bass, Takashi Tateishi manages to craft music that cements you to your chair and locks you into the action like never before.

And he does it so consistently. He also does so without ever letting on that he did not actually composed the first Mega Man game. The style is completely in keeping with Manami Matsumae’s work in the original, acknowledging every good thing she had going and improving upon it rather than making an independent statement. The two did work together somewhat, I would imagine. Manami Matsumae is not completely absent in this game. She composed the introduction, which quite effectively set the stage for everything to follow, as well as the music for Airman. (She wrote the stage start tune too, though this is the same as in the first game.)

The clock isn’t always ticking, but when Tateishi isn’t chugging out Iron Maiden bass lines he’s still presenting a heroic vibe. The music to Crashman makes you feel like you’re winning, but that’s just another part of the action. Its bluesy rock grooves keep on moving and carry the player along.

It would be impossible to showcase every good song in this game short of literally posting every song in the game, so though it may seem a crime to leave out Flashman or Heatman, I must be moving on.

Because like any good rock star, Tateishi saved his best works for the end of the album. Or close enough. The first Dr. Wily level’s music is so epic it makes all of the previous bosses look like wimps. Total Iron Maiden worship? Perhaps, and so what if it is?

Takashi Tateishi stated in an interview conducted by Chris Greening that he “aimed to create melodies that people could hum along with, or play in their bands”. I wonder if he had any idea just how successful he was. The Mega Man series in general, but most especially Mega Man 2, has been the subject of countless covers and live renditions over the ages. With a real explosion of interest in vgm over the past couple years, some exceptionally successful efforts are coming to the surface.

I’ll leave you with a live speed run of Mega Man 2 performed by Bit Brigade at MAGFest X in January 2012. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the most awesome thing in the history of mankind. Sorry vikings and skydiving. You lose.

VGM Entry 29: Mario’s many sequels

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 29: Mario’s many sequels
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

While the Genesis was just getting started, Nintendo developers were pumping out sequels. Super Mario Bros. 2, Final Fantasy II, Mega Man 2, Dragon Quest III, Super Mario Bros. 3… They were coming out right and left in 1988, and most of them were improvements over the originals.

The first thing you might ask is how Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Bros. 3 ended up being released in the same year. Well, they actually came out a mere two months apart. There is a bit more to this story though, and since Super Mario Bros. 2 has by far the best music among NES installments of the series, there should be time enough to tell it.

The first game to be titled “Super Mario Bros. 2” was released in Japan in March 1986. It seems to be readily downloadable today, but if you’re like me and don’t play games much these days you probably only ever encountered it on Super Mario All-Stars (1993) for the SNES, where it was titled The Lost Levels. As you might recall, it wasn’t particularly interesting; it was pretty much identical to the original, music and all, just with new level designs. This was not originally intended to be the case. A much more unique and creative game had been in development, but for whatever reason Nintendo’s market research lead them to believe that an expansion of the original would have greater commercial success. The project in development was passed off to Fuji Television Network and released as Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic in July 1987. Koji Kondo’s original work went along with the package, and much of what you are hearing now first appeared in Doki Doki Panic.

Nintendo sensed a different interest in the American consumer and went ahead with the original project. You may have heard at some point years back–I know I had–that the American Super Mario Bros. 2 was just some cheaply refurbished port of a non-series Japanese title, but this is not entirely correct. The projects were one and the same for much of the game’s development. In a very peculiar turn of events by early gaming standards, North America (and Europe) got the real Super Mario Bros. 2, and Japan got the ripoff. It took so long for the game to be released in its intended form, however, that it ended up launching in North America at pretty much the exact same time that Super Mario Bros. 3 came out in Japan.

Musically, Super Mario Bros. 2 improved on Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic by integrating peppier renditions of themes from the original Super Mario Bros. The music is also a lot more crisp, though that might be the consequence of differences between the Famicom and the NES. At any rate, it is probably my favorite early Koji Kondo soundtrack. The main theme remains, arguably unlike the original Mario Bros. theme, unconditionally pleasant. The limitations of the NES are a total non-factor here. I wish I could pinpoint what sort of style it is–I get some distant vibe of jazz and ragtime–but it either falls beyond my knowledge base or proceeds from nothing more than Koji Kondo’s incredible talent for writing instant classics. I mean, I never played Super Mario Bros. 2 back in the NES days, but it feels more nostalgic to me than the original Mario theme.

Super Mario Bros. 3 is a little less interesting in my opinion, if only because its generally laid back pace and Latin/Caribbean beats just don’t feel quite in harmony with what was probably the fastest-moving of the NES Mario games. But Super Mario Bros. 3 was also the most diverse of these soundtracks, switching up its style as needed to suit a greater variety of level designs. In some instances, most notably “Level 2 Theme” (1:09), Konjo employs sounds more akin to his work in the prequel. “Hammer Brothers” (4:28) seems to be inspired by rock and roll, and the beat-laden revision of the original underworld theme, here amusingly titled “Super Mario Rap” (2:30), is undeniably cool.

I suppose Super Mario Bros. 3 can be justly regarded as the “best” NES-era Mario soundtrack, if nothing else for the shear variety of styles Konjo successfully employed. But it lacks any particular really stand-out tracks–the sort of incredibly catchy anthems for which he is best known.

VGM Entry 28: Altered Beast

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 28: Altered Beast
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

The Sega Genesis/Mega Drive was launched in Japan on October 29th, 1988. By the end of the year, only four titles had been released on it. Three of them did not have very impressive music. Space Harrier II (Sega) and Super Thunder Blade (Sega) were designed more to showcase the system’s visual capabilities, presenting for perhaps the first time serious three dimensional gameplay outside of the arcade. In regards to audio, they both exploited the system’s sound capabilities towards the end of excessive and rather tasteless sound effects. Osomatsu-kun: Hachamecha Gekijō (Sega) was a bizarre, very Japanese side-scrolling cartoon game which might best be forgotten altogether. But the fourth game, Altered Beast (Sega), was an altogether different matter.

Toshio Kai will forever hold the honor of having composed the first excellent fourth generation gaming soundtrack. Altered Beast might not have been on par with the sound quality achieved by Hisayoshi Ogura on Darius in 1986, but it was getting pretty close, and you could enjoy it in your bedroom.

Or perhaps I am going too far here. It is easy to forget what Takahito Abe, with a little help from Yuzo Koshiro, accomplished on the PC-8801, especially since the computer was only ever marketed in Japan. Xanadu Scenario II, Ys I, and plenty of other titles completely obscure to American audiences, like Taiyou no Shinden (Nihon Falcom, 1988), were all just gorgeous, and the sound quality does not appear to be any poorer than Altered Beast. The brilliant stretch of compositions Takahito Abe crafted in 1987/88 were consistently subtle, however, and his genius may well have extended into writing music which catered to the system. Toshio Kai did not have to worry about being subtle.

Altered Beast has a bass track that actually sounds like a bass, a piano which can at least be identified as such, fuller drumming, and synthier tones which sound so by choice, not out of necessity. It really feels as though the artist was not restricted in any critical sense, and in 1988 that was something of a novelty, or at least a luxury held exclusively by arcade composers.

“Gaum-Hermer” might not be the most exciting track in the game, but it merges with the gameplay in a sort of manner that you just don’t hear on the NES or Master System. It sounds like the sort of thing Hirokazu Tanaka just couldn’t quite pull off on Metroid. It is of course because Toshio Kai does such an excellent job that the ambiance of the song hits home, but I question whether such a track was even possible before.

Altered Beast did appear first as an arcade game. It was not necessarily composed with the Genesis in mind. But the fact that it could be ported without major alterations is something of a first. Developers of ports for the Nintendo had long been in the habit of commissioning entirely new soundtracks, or else altering the arcade music in extraordinary ways, such as in Double Dragon. Decisions to simply replicate the original as closely as possibly, such as in the eventual NES port of Altered Beast, tended to fall flat. You can hear subtle changes between the arcade and Genesis versions, but the NES version sounds terrible, and some of the songs are barely recognizable. Besides, most of the differences feel more like efforts to improve the song than failures to replicate it. The ruthlessly obnoxious drum line plaguing this arcade soundtrack from start to finish, for instance, is drastically subdued.

It’s pretty hard to argue with the “Game Over” song. A lot, perhaps even the majority, of the best gaming music ever written appears on 4th generation platforms. It was an era that offered the best of both worlds. Here the sound is still electronic enough to form a distinct style. You couldn’t say, go hire a symphony orchestra and carry the recording straight away into the game. Musicians still had to work with limitations. But the technology had finally reached a point where those limitations did not deny the possibility of reproducing the same aesthetic appeal as say, an orchestra or a jazz band. The creativity and ingenuity required for good third generation song writing unabated, it was now given a medium in which to reach its full potential. The Mega Drive got a slower start than you might expect, and it wasn’t until well into the SNES era that a large collection of good Mega Drive soundtracks begin to appear, but by 1988 the possibilities were there.

VGM Entry 27: PC-8801

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 27: PC-8801
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

If I want to cover every field, it would be a certain mistake to overlook the impact of the NEC PC-8801 during this time. I have incorporated a few titles into the mix already. Thexder (Game Arts, 1985) by Hibiki Godai was the first noteworthy soundtrack for the platform I’ve found making use of the Yamaha YM2203 sound chip. Xanadu Scenario II (Nihon Falcom, 1986), predominantly the work of Takahito Abe, and Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished (Nihon Falcom, 1987) by Yuzo Koshiro the following year were developed for various platforms, but the PC-8801 seems to have been Falcom’s flagship. Unfortunately I’ve found it nearly impossible, between the language barrier and the myriad ports, to find suitable examples of most of Takahito Abe’s other PC-8801 works, and Yuzo Koshiro’s pre-1988 works seem to be just as obscure. But were they the only composers making the system shine?

Silpheed (Game Arts, 1986) was another product of Hibiki Godai, at least as best I can tell. The only credits I could find were for the 1988 MS-DOS port by Sierra On-Line, which list Hibiki Godai, Nobuyuki Aoshima, Fumihito Kasatani, and Hiromi Ohba. Since the majority of the other names in the credits are Americans, it’s quite possible that all four of these musicians had a hand in the original composition.

In a way, the music feels a little bland compared to that of the European musicians I’ve recently discussed. This is certainly a product of differences in sound chips, but I am at least a little inclined to believe that both the distorted nature of Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum sound and the atmosphere of experimentation and bold composition that permeated European sound programming did in fact inspire better music than competing scenes managed to produce at the time. Even so, Silpheed has some exceptional songs–most notably the one beginning at 13:00–and it’s a good example of what Japanese computer gaming sounded like.

Or so I like to believe. Sorcerian (Nihon Falcom, 1987) is yet another Yuzo Koshiro and Takahito Abe collaboration, with Mieko Ishikawa additionally credited. Kenji Kawai is listed separately as the 1992 PC-Engine arranger, so for once we can at least make some distinction in that regard. But so long as the same names keep popping up, I can’t help but think I’m only getting a very small sample of a much larger field. And furthermore, the significance of the PC-8801 for these titles musically is not a given. Almost all of Nihon Falcom’s games were released across an enormous spread of systems which typically included at least the PC-8801, PC-9801, Sharp X1, and MSX2. As has been shown with Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished, this entailed endless variation and reinterpretation of the central themes. “Dark Fact” almost seemed to evolve with every port, with no clear explanation as to whether Yuzo Koshiro changed his mind about how it ought to sound or port arrangers independently reinterpreted the music at every step, often basing their take on previous ports rather than the original.

If these composers knew that their songs would take so many forms, did they really write their music for the PC-8801 at all, or were they aiming for compositions which could function through a wide array of sound configurations? Or, if they were personally involved in the ports, did they perhaps gear their music towards a preferred system for which the game might not necessarily be released on first? No amount of exploring PC-8801 compositions has helped to clarify these questions.

The problem is compounded by a complete absence of credits for the vast majority of PC-8801 games. In the absence of a PC88 game library (I am eternally in debt to such sites as Lemon 64, World of Spectrum, and Lemon Amiga), I have absolutely no clue what Shinra Bansho (Nihon Telenet, 1987) is beyond the name of its developer. This is my second favorite PC-8801 soundtrack (after Snatcher, which I’ll be addressing later), but I haven’t a clue who wrote it. Perhaps Nihon implies Yuzo Koshiro and Takahito Abe, if they were the only house musicians, but since this is Nihon Telenet, not Nihon Falcom, and I have no idea what that distinction entails, it would be folly to ascribe any artist attribution.

I am entirely at the mercy of grad1u52 on youtube for finding PC-8801 music in the first place, as he is the only member taking active steps to preserve it, but the information he supplies for each game is unfortunately non-existent. Lots of other titles, the music for which is readily available, fall into this same boat.

The only substantial hint I can offer is that composers hardly ever freelanced at this time, and developers rarely boasted a large sound staff. If you can identify a developer’s house composer in the mid-80s, it almost always seems to be the case that they scored every release during their tenure. Square and Enix make a good case in point. Such obscure PC-8801 titles as Cruise Chaser Blassty (Square, 1986) and Jesus: Dreadful Bio-Monster (Enix, 1987) were composed by Nobuo Uematsu and Koichi Sugiyama respectively, not passed off to secondary musicians (not that Uematsu had succeeded in making a name for himself by 1986). Both soundtracks were second rate, with Uematsu sounding completely lost in a non-fantasy setting and Sugiyama cutting corners to the extent of including tracks from Dragon Quest, but that is quite besides the point. With the company consistently identifying the composer, there might still exist a means to figure these old, cryptically credited PC-8801 games out short of learning Japanese.

VGM Entry 26: Tim Follin’s noise machine

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 26: Tim Follin’s noise machine
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

In most cases it’s fairly reasonable to think of the ZX Spectrum as a secondary system for game music. It didn’t seem to have the capacity of the Commodore 64, and a lot of the game themes that ended up there were toned down takes on C64 originals, attempting to emulate the SID sound as closely as possible. But the ZX Spectrum did have its own unique if seldom exploited flavor, and over the course of three years one ingenious artist in particular would develop that into a brilliant new chiptune style to rival anything produced for the SID.

Some time in 1985, or perhaps a bit earlier, Mike Follin scored a programming job at Insight Software. Mike passed the soundtrack of what would be his first commercially released game, Subterranean Stryker (Insight, March 1985), down to his musically inclined younger brother Tim, who thereby got his first taste of programming. The result was fairly simple–little more than an amateur doodle–but for a 15 year old kid with no prior programming experience it was a pretty sound start. Insight Software were satisfied enough to keep Tim Follin around, and over the next year he familiarized himself with the sounds of the ZX Spectrum.

What he probably didn’t do was familiarize himself with the sounds of Rob Hubbard. What emerged from Tim Follin’s early experimentation on the ZX Spectrum was a sound all of its own. Agent X (Mastertronic, 1986) was heavily influenced by progressive rock, a feature which would characterize Tim’s work across multiple decades and platforms, but its uniqueness rested on his productive employment of the system’s excessively distorted tones. Rather than viewing the distortion as an obstacle blocking the path to quality arrangements, Tim Follin made it an essential and intrinsic feature of the music.

Agent X didn’t appear out of nowhere. Follin’s sound steadily improved during his short stint with Insight Software, such that on Vectron (late 1985) you can definitely hear a rough draft of things to come. His better works also coincided with his first real job. Follin was hired by developers Software Creations in 1986 (they developed all of the Mastertronic games I’ll be featuring here); he was no longer tailing his brother and composing for spare change. The compositional quality understandably improved in turn.

Tim Follin’s ZX Spectrum sound was unlike anything heard on the Commodore 64. It was a sort of post-rock prog shoegaze madness before any such notion formally existed, meant to be blasted at maximum volume, encasing the listener in a wall of sound. Future Games (Mastertronic, June 1986), my personal favorite on the system, was a far more intelligent piece than Agent X. The way the song slowly builds up into a glitch-beat explosion at 2:06 is a tremendous feat given how little Follin had to work with. The song essentially ends unfinished at 2:31, but I think that can be forgiven in light of what all he accomplished here.

I think a lot of this style is the product of Follin’s own originality, and fairly unprecedented in its day. Certainly outside influence on some of the progressive rock elements is self-evident, and in an interview probably dated to 1999 or 2000, the original of which is now lost, Follin acknowledged that he was exposed to a lot of Genesis, Yes, and Rush growing up. But the shoegazey layer of static and especially the glitch beats are features I don’t start to identify in other musical scenes until some time later. It’s not like he was listening to Aphex Twin and Venetian Snares at home.

Agent X II (Mastertronic, 1987) was a good deal more accessible than most of his previous works, featuring a bluesy groove and plenty of rock and roll soloing, but noise was still the glue that held it all together. I think it’s pretty telling that when Tim Follin programmed the Commodore 64 port sound–Agent X II and Scumball (Mastertronic, 1987) were his first attempts at C64 composition–he wrote an entirely new set of songs. Follin based everything he wrote around the instrument with which he wrote it, and however much other artists were trying to make the ZX Spectrum sound like a C64, these were two different animals.

Chronos (Mastertronic, 1987) is probably his most famous ZX Spectrum theme, and understandably so. Technically, or so I gather from the comments I’ve read, it is his most outstanding effort on the system. I don’t know enough to recognize technical skill in chiptune programming when it slaps me in the face. But I think the music speaks for itself. Tim Follin was to the ZX Spectrum what Rob Hubbard was to the Commodore 64, and it was only his first of many legacies.