Bonus Embedded Reporter!
This fan-made music video of “Robocop” by Kanye West evokes some serious 8-bit Mega Man awesomeness. Enjoy!
Kids are stupid. It’s really not their fault, how can they know anything about the important things in life without any real-life experience. Take my music-habits as a kid as a prime example. It’s not like I was listening to The Wiggles or anything so terrible, but among the real musical gems that I was listening to (The Beatles, The Rolling Stones) on Majic 102.7 (WMXJ) was some questionable material. Sure, Alvin & the Chipmunks singing country music (Urban Chipmunk, lovingly referred to as “a piece of shit” by Rolling Stone magazine), Bugs and Friends Sing the Beatles, and Kermit Unpigged may have featured music by legitimate artists or actual classics in their genres, but, did you notice that it’s all marketing trash?
That was what I spent most of my time listening to, laughing like an idiot and thinking they were the greatest thing ever. Little did I know that I was far closer to musical perfection than I realized by another way I wasted my time. Of course, I apply that phrase liberally, because we all know that spending hours playing video games certainly seems like a waste of time, but is 100% legit. The year was 199X and I was manning the controller to save the world from Dr. Wily’s Robot Masters as they threatened humanity in the year 200X. Did you know that, with an easy gap of a decade between when I last played Mega Man and back in January of this year I can still remember and point out tunes from that game? Wait, did Dan just go and say that the soundtrack to Mega Man 2 is equivalent to great rock music? Just roll with me on this one, I’m making a point (a correct one).
It’s been said that necessity breeds innovation and nowhere was necessity more evident than the 8-bit sound processors encased within the video game systems of old. Ok, it was more evident in the previous generation of sound processors, but I wasn’t alive then and I don’t really care. Necessity bred one of the most kickass soundtracks ever to grace the 8-bit era. Takashi Tateishi, Manami Matsumae, Yoshihiro Sakaguchi made the Nintendo sing. Sure, they’re not quite as iconic as the works of Koji Kondo or Nobuo Uematsu, but they were really catchy, hip, and cool tracks.
That spirit of innovation was a requirement during the days of the NES and SNES, but by the time the Playstation hit most developers had moved onto Red Book audio and if they weren’t shelling out for full orchestras they were using MIDI synthesizers and the like. The art of what would eventually come to be called chiptunes was no longer necessary. We were better for it, right?
Last year I remember listening to an episode of Retronauts and the subject of video game music came up. The hypothesis was posited that in-game music had actually declined in quality and had become somewhat same-y. Iconic tunes were a thing of the past. There are a lot of things that could really affect this, I mean, do we ever really think that new media we come across as better than what we discovered in the past? For most people the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia prevent new, quality media from being better than what we used to watch/listen to/read in our youth. Things just aren’t the same anymore. To tell you the truth, that argument doesn’t even really matter in the context of this post, so we’ll move on.
All I was trying to say is that we, the video game-consuming public, have strong feelings of nostalgia with respect to chiptunes. So much so that musicians began to voluntarily restrict themselves just to see what they could musically produce. The chiptunes scene was born, social networking allowed it to grow, and we’ve arrived at Anamanaguchi.
Let’s face it though, just how much can a genre of music that involves 8-bit chirps, bleeps, and bloops penetrate the mainstream? I love video games and video game music, so something that sounds like it is naturally going to be attractive to me. Anamanaguchi can’t get around the fact that there are 8-bit samples in their music, but what they can do is try to broaden their sound by adding in real drums, guitar and bass. It’s brilliant. Limiting yourself to 8-bit samples will keep the audience equally limited.
There are definitely two names mentioned far too often on this blog, but I’m going to still mention Leigh Alexander of Sexy Videogameland, Kotaku, and Gamasutra fame, because her SVGL and Kotaku articles are the ones that alerted me to this band rising in the Brooklyn indie music scene. Her article mentions that the band has been listed as an up-and-coming band and not just among other chiptunes (or bitpop) artists. They cite their influences as real rockers, not 8 Bit Weapon, and it shows.
Of course, it’s still on the awkward side to share with random individuals who you can’t be sure will jive with chippy music. I picked up the albums this weekend hot off of watching a video, but I balked at exposing my visiting friends to it and opted to play it quietly in the background, but all that did was let the occasional muddled chirp sound through. Definitely not what I wanted anyway, so I just put on some FOB when I got tired of quiet bitpop.
Once I had some privacy and the ability to listen in depth, I found a great punk sound that totally blew me away. There are two small albums available on Amazon.com: Dawn Metropolis and Power Supply EP, with the former being the more recent release. At their website, Anamanaguchi.com, you can listen to all of Dawn Metropolis and you can also check out an interpretive video that plays in the background of their shows at this site. The little videos show an interesting mini-epic that the music is trying to convey and are pretty cool and trippy.
The best tracks to check out on each album are:
Power Supply EP
- “Video Challenge” - “Helix Nebula” - “Air Base”
Dawn Metropolis
- “Jetpack Blues, Sunset Hues” - “Tempest, Teamwork, Triumph (at Sea)”
There’s just a great sound to these discs and I think it would be a definite challenge to keep your toes from tapping to these beats.
Below are some videos, one of “Jetpack Blues, Sunset Hues” and another from Blip Festival 2007
Anamanaguchi – Jet Pack Blues, Sunset Hues from Dr. Limelight on Vimeo.
Anamanaguchi // Blip Festival 2007: The Videos from 2 Player Productions on Vimeo.
Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen.
King of Fighters XII, yeah that’s still coming out. I’m having a hard time caring without Mai :hint hint: See the episode below to catch the trailer.
Explosive
Remember last week when I told you all about that Giant Bomb achievements feature? Seems I’m not doing that well. I’ve only got ‘A’s in Mass Effect, Castle Crashers, and Lost Odyssey and a good chunk of my rare achievements are World of Warcraft achievements available only to those who were playing the game way back in the day. That being said, I do have a lot of Lost Odyssey and Mass Effect rare achievements and I think I’m going to ignore the DoA 4 rare since it’s probably the anti-achievement I got for losing tons of matches.
If nothing, this has inspired me to start hitting up those achievements harder. The easy targets would be more Mass Effect, Rock Band 2, and Lost Odyssey for the S-Rank. but I think that I will be playing Fallout 3 once I finish Persona 4 next, so it might have to wait a while. That’s a respectable endeavor too, since I only have a C in the game.
It’s raining, but is it heavy?
The oddly named Heavy Rain promises to bring mature, serious gaming to the PS3. I’ve heard much about the game’s merits, mostly from Shane Bettenhousen back when he was on the 1UP crew, but I’d yet to see any footage of the game in action. Lucky for me, GTTV, or Gametrailers TV, is featuring Heavy Rain in their latest episode:
(Sorry about some of the stupidity of the interview, I don’t write the immature questions)
As the episode mentions, Heavy Rain is developed by the same folks who brought us Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophesy back in the day. That game had a narrative that quickly fell apart near the end, but was an otherwise solid piece of storytelling. Heavy Rain has serious promise not to fall into that trap.
How cool is it that if one of your characters dies it becomes part of the story. You lose control of that person and the game continues. Seriously, all they have to do is not get stupid ridiculous like the end of Indigo Prophesy and they already have me as a customer.
Wii Secrets
Guess what? You can export Miis to the DS!
The previously hidden feature doesn’t do much for games that don’t support it, but it’s crazy to learn this little secret. Pressing A, B, 1, and then holding 2 will bring up the export dialog. Useless, but cool for the future.
Do me a Solid, will ya?
New Metal Gear game announcement at E3? Seems likely. The teaser site is apparently flashing 5@E3…Seems pretty self-evident there.
The Pigs are keeping us down!
First Capcom, then Koei, and now Square Enix have restricted all Japanese travel to E3 this year citing the H1N1, or swine flu, pandemic as the reason they are limiting their travel. Considering that Japan is actually facing quite the problem on its shores, you’d think that the execs would want to get out of the country sometime soon, but then again, I guess it’s the ethically responsible thing to do not to have them travel around. That being said, I’m sure the last thing Japan is doing in this case is worrying about US safety. All jokes aside, hopefully this swine flu pandemic slows down and goes away soon.
[Thanks to Kotaku and Gametrailers for the links]
If you’re trying to find the common thread that weaves all of these games together, don’t keep racking your brain, I’m just covering a ton of different stories and experiences.
Tangled Up in Blue
Street Fighter IV created within me something of a fighting game…well I hesitate to call it a renaissance, cause there was never a naissance, so to speak, but, should naissance actually be French for birth, it did birth in me the fighting spirit. I haven’t played the game in a while, mostly because I’m trying to save the world and attend high school (Persona 4) at the same time, but I figure I’ll get back to it soon, especially with that new tournament mode in.
The reason I even bring that up is because of the upcoming game BlazBlue has got a pretty sweet pre-order bundle set to launch alongside the game. Buying the game early, at no added cost, will yield soundtrack CDs and, my favorite feature, a DVD with top players going over the moves and strategies for each fighter.
Being the fighting game newb that I am, I find this kind of thing to be an invaluable help in creating strategies and managing opponents. I just hope it’s not too high level that I can’t understand or implement the things they’re doing. It should also help me to find the most bizarre, obscure character to master. I don’t always go for the strangest guy, but I definitely make an effort to try and choose lesser-used characters in fighting games mostly because I tire of seeing Ken all the time.
Source: Kotaku
Royally Screwed
Staying on track with fighting games, the two extra King of Fighters XII home version fighters were announced and they…don’t include Mai?! There’s still time to announce Mai in the game, but the release date is rapidly approaching. Why they didn’t have her in the arcade release baffles me in the first place, but why they’re not including the absolute fan favorite in the home version absolutely blows my mind. We’ll see how this continues to play out.
Oh yeah, the new fighters are Elizabeth and Mature. Stupid name on that second one, if you ask me.
Stats 4 Me
If you know me decently well, then you know that I love stats. Very few things excite me more than seeing a nice, clean breakdown of how I did in certain aspects and how I fare against certain situations or match-ups, etc. It’s why I hate the stats section of SFIV (Why don’t they have stats for how I perform against each character as each character? Why don’t they have stats for each opponent I face?) and of SSBB (Actually, kind of the same things here.)
Leave it to Valve to satisfy my every craving with the detailed Left 4 Dead stats page that you can check for any player. Where else would you be able to see that I have 100% accuracy with an assault rifle or that my favorite Tier 2 weapon is the hunting rifle?
Can’t say “Screenshot or it didn’t happen” anymore, can you?
Granted, these stats were collected a few weeks (months?) after the game came out, so I probably don’t really have 384 Assault Rifle kills or 100% accuracy, but you can bet I probably won’t pick up an assault rifle again for a long while until I’m sick of looking at that sweet 100% mark.
It’s interesting too that my Zoey count is so low (only 55%) considering that I always prefer to play as her. I blame quick games, where my character choice is not left up to me.
Oh yeah, here’s a link to my stats page.
Stats I will be working on:
-More Zoey! -Increase revive:revived ratio (currently 1:2) -Improve finales survived (sitting at 12.5% right now) -Drop average damage to teammates (this one ballooned after I spent a whole game on easy shooting my partner for fun) -The fact that I’ve only shot one cartridge with the pump shotgun makes me laugh. So long as I’m never Francis or Bill, I doubt that number will increase too much. -Want to know why my hunting rifle headshot rate is only 5%? It’s not cause I suck zoomed in, it’s cause zombies die in one hit with the hunting rifle, so why aim for a small target? Don’t expect that to rise. -More versus! The new maps are out. I need to play them. I need to have a more lopsided (in the wins direction) record. -I should throw more rocks as the tank. -More survival mode medals. I need more! -More achievements
Darek’s got more friends playing, so I should be able to find people to continue to play with and keep improving. I’m excited.
Gotta Catch ‘Em Again
Nintendo announced today (but in the Japanese today, which is still going on, but at 2230 or so right now) that they would be re-releasing Pokémon Gold and Silver as Pokémon Heart Gold and Pokémon Soul Silver on the DS Generation IV engine. Exciting news for Pokémaniacs, since Gold and Silver were perhaps the longest, and neatest games. Not only did you go through the new region in those games, but your quest actually required you to return to the original region and collect all those badges too. With one fell swoop, the geniuses at Nintendo have managed to bring all of the regions, minus the Gen III region into the future. It’s an exciting time for someone who wants to catch ‘em all, but we’re all wondering out here in the West when Nintendo is finally gonna get around to letting us import our Platinum dudes into Pokémon Ranch, much less our new Gold and Silver buddies.
Source: Bulbanews
“You must be a master of sales”
If you got the obscure and kind of lame Resident Evil reference there, go you. For everyone else, let’s move on.
Capcom has released a listing of its top-selling game franchises to give you an idea of how well its game series sell and are popular relative to each other. Here’s the list:
Resident Evil – 40 million (56) Mega Man – 28 million (124!) Street Fighter – 27 million (62) Devil May Cry – 10 million (11) Monster Hunter – 8.5 million (11) Onimusha – 7.8 million (12) Dino Crisis – 4.4 million (13) Ghosts ‘N Goblins – 4.4 million (16) Final Fight – 3.2 million (10) Ace Attorney – 3.2 million (12) Breath of Fire – 3 million (15) Lost Planet – 2.7 million (7) Commando – 1.2 million (2) 1942 – 1.2 million (3) Sengoku BASARA – 1.2 million (10)
Note that there are numbers in parentheses. This is the number of games released in that series, which gives me a great idea. You see, this list, in and of itself, does not accurately represent how well each game performs on a per-game basis. It’s not really accurate to say “Wow, Mega Man is way better than Street Fighter” when Mega Man has had 124 releases to SF’s 62 and only outperforms it by one million. Here’s the adjusted list in sales per game:
Devil May Cry – 909091 Monster Hunter – 772727 Resident Evil – 714286 Onimusha – 650000 Commando – 600000 Street Fighter – 435484 1942 – 400000 Lost Planet – 385714 Dino Crisis – 338462 Final Fight – 320000 Ghosts N’ Goblins – 275000 Ace Attorney – 266667 Mega Man – 225806 Breath of Fire – 200000 Sengoku BASARA – 120000
What does my expert analysis show? Well the top three series are all more modern A-list Capcom games. Games have become far more serious business in recent years, so this makes sense. Expensive games plus the increased numbers of buyers make these franchises more successful. The most glaring change in this list is the move of Mega Man to the near bottom of the list. What else can you expect from a series that got its start on the NES and has released 124 (!) games, many of which are portable or spin-offs not meant to sell. In fact, the last real Mega Man release was Mega Man 9 and that was released digitally.
This list really doesn’t prove anything, but it’s at least fun to look at.
On 24 April Street Fighter IV will never be the same. We’re getting a free Championship Mode which will allow us to take part in tournaments. They will be double-blind selection (FINALLY!) and reward Grade Points (GP) which will allow users to enter higher and higher level tournaments. Winning tournaments will yield Championship Points (CP) which are apparently like prize money. These CP will allow the top players in the world to upload replays that other people can view and comment on.
Can’t wait for this to hit the PSN.
As for L4D, well Survival Mode promises to be a challenge. The idea is that each level group will survive approximately 10 minutes. It seems that beyond that, the game gets pissed, cause it starts spawning tanks every 45 seconds. At 15 minutes…you’re looking at a new tank every 15 seconds.
The waves are designed to regiment reloads and revivals and supposedly each round of Survival Mode will have more zombie deaths in it than a typical campaign. Sounds intense!
Deep from the trenches, it’s time for your Monday video feature: Embedded Reporter.
If you were following GDC and Nintendo’s press conference, you know that all the attendees got Rhythm Heaven DS carts. A lot of people are saying good things about it, so the question remains, is it any good? Let’s ask GT:
If that was too boring…
Ok, now that we’ve finished with all the villains of Final Fantasy, let’s do all the Heroes!…Just kidding, we’re gonna stick to some hard news for now and maybe come back to features sometime in the future.
That doesn’t mean we won’t be talking about Final Fantasy, though. It seems that the much better Japanese PSN store got themselves FF VII released for download for about $15. I’d say that’s a pretty cool win and hopefully it will lead into them finally creating that PS3 FF VII that everyone wishes was real, but will probably never happen.
Famitsu is teaching you how to take upskirt pictures in Monster Hunter Frontier. Instead of implying that it can be done, the Famitsu-run Monster Hunter rag printed an article called “The Way To Take The Screenshots You Want ~ What a Pantsuful world ~” to show you how to take the screenshots that you so desire.
Wanna learn about boxart design? Go to Valve’s page about Left 4 Dead’s cover to see evolution of their boxart from red with the heroes all the way to green with just a hand. A pretty neat evolution there and proof that the iterative design process that Valve is so famous for extends far beyond game design.
And last in news: Flock is out! Go try out the demo, I know I will. It’s supposed to be quite good…
UPDATE: Need the secret key in Pokemon Platinum? Here’s how to get it
Not much interesting to say about today. We’ve got a few things and we’ll combine in some highlights.
Gary Sheffield was released from the Tigers. Not altogether a bizarre move, but definitely unexpected. Unimpressive hitting last season and this spring combined to motivate the Tigers to instead field more defensively able players on their field. He’ll probably be picked up on the cheap somewhere, so no worries there.
Not quite sports, but only the heartless can’t appreciate adorable hadokens into babies.
And finally, SportsCenter top plays. My favorite: obviously the Marlins one!
UPDATE: The video continues to be “inaccessible,” even though I copied the embed code right from the page. Just click next and select SportsCenter top plays.
UPDATE 2: Working for now.
Capcom’s upcoming arcade game Flock seems pretty interesting. Who wouldn’t want to play an alien abduction puzzle game? Enjoy!
Ever wonder what Street Fighter IV sounded like before they got the localization down pat? Here’s your answer:
