Game Scores: Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest (SNES)

Yay, we now have a logo for this series!  What of it, I like logos.  I also like Legos.

I used "Lockjaw's Saga" in Wednesday's MIDI Week Singles article and that song got me to thinking thing that 1) I had not posted a Game Scores article in a while (since April of this year) and 2) that I should do a Game Scores article about the music in Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest because I love the music from that game.

Let us start off with the music from the opening Rare logo and title music, both of which do great jobs with setting the tone for both the rest of the soundtrack as well as the rest of the first area.

Now that is quintessential pirate music if I have ever heard it before and because of Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, everybody has heard piratey music.  Keep in mind though that this game/music/soundtrack came out eight years after this, but the sea chanty in one form or another has been around since the mid-16th century, so let us not go into a "Who did it first" discussion.

Normally, I would have included "Lockjaw's Saga" in this list, but I have already highlighted that song two days ago.  So let us move onto another chanty-esque song with "Jib Jig."

Even though the songs are pretty different, and apologies for drawing on Klaus Bladelt's score for Pirates of the Caribbean again, but this track reminds me a bit of what the cello part plays at the beginning of "Fog Bound," except here, it is a MIDI violin/fiddle.  It is just a great piratey (there's that word again) little diddy (eh!?).  Maybe even a little reminiscent of the Chieftain's score from Treasure Island?  For me, there is also something about the wind sound effect and blowing leaves in the background.  I want it to be October and ready for Halloween.

Speaking of Halloween, "Haunted Chase" is the next song I wanted to showcase.

Yes, "Haunted Chase" uses the theme from "Night on Bald Mountain" by Modest Mussorgsky / Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, but the "Haunted Chase" uses the main theme sparingly but is comprised of specific elements.  Instead of being a direct rip-off, the song takes pieces from such Russian pieces as Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" with it's pounding percussion beats.  What I take from this song is to recall musical triggers that the audience has associated with both danger and the finale from Disney's Fantasia.  Taking all of this into account, the music is played during Haunted Hall, one of the (thankfully few) mine-cart sequences in the game, which I do not find to underscore the amount of danger and stress induced by both the level design and pounding sense of terror.

Lastly, according to David Wise' last.fm page, "Stickerbrush Symphony" is a favorite of his listeners as it is a favorite of mine.

"Stickerbrush Symphony" is just one of those mellow songs that is calming and relaxing to listen to.  The level that the song comes from however, Bramble Scramble, is anything but calm and relaxing.  The song reminds me a lot of the "Aquatic Ambience" from the first Donkey Kong Country.  Coincidentally, both songs have been covered by online acapellist Smooth McGroove as well as other musicians in various styles.  So yes, this song is easily a fan favorite.

Have a happy Friday all.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Engage the Laser Beam

MIDI Week Singles: Lockjaw's Saga - Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest (SNES)

Today's musical selection comes to us from the SNES of 1995.  That year we saw the release of Chrono Trigger, Earthbound and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.  1995 also saw the second installment in the Donkey Kong Country franchise headed by Rare and Nintendo.

So now, down to the tune.

"Lockjaw's Saga*" from Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, Super Nintendo Entertainment System (1995).

Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest: The Original Soundtrack to Donkey Kong Country 2

Game Developer: Rare

Music Composed by: David Wise

From the first time I heard this music in the "Lockjaw's Locker" (Level 1-4), I fell in love with the song, and for me personally, it is one of the highlights on the entire soundtrack.  The epicness of the music is on a much higher scale that what is actually going on in the level, even with the sounds of water sloshing against the side of wherever this song was recorded. (Yes, I know it's digital music created in computer and not really recorded on a pirate ship overrun by a crew of anamorphic crocodiles).  I do imagine the drums in the song being someone pounding on hollow wooden crates in the bilge of massive schooner in order to create that reverberating sound.

Another thing I love about this track, is that it is named after a minor minion named Lockjaw.  Lockjaw is an orange fish somewhat reminiscent of an Angler Fish and it is not even a single one-off fish, but a type of enemy that appears frequently in underwater stages.  Lockjaw is not even a boss nor is there a larger boss version.  But damn it, Lockjaw has its own saga* apparently and this is the music to said saga*.  Very appropriate I think.

Actually, I love this soundtrack as a whole and will probably do a much needed Game Scores article about it on either Friday or Monday.  God damn this is great music!

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

I'll Say These Final Words My Friend.


*Since this game, song and soundtrack came out 17 years before Candy Crush Saga was a twinkle in the pot, King can take their saga-sueing due to saga-copyright infringe-saga-ment and shove it.

Never Too Old For Video Games

I like to visit Cracked.com on about a weekly basis.  Conklederp knows which authors she likes while I usually don't remember who wrote what article.  I recently read two video gaming articles by John Cheese, whom I thought I didn't like after reading two of his articles, although I don't remember what those articles were about.  Anyway, one of his recent articles was titled "5 Ways to Tell You're Getting Too Old For Video Games."  It was a pretty good article, as far as Cracked articles go anyway, in that I was agreeing or disagreeing with what I thought were reasonable thoughts.

Here, I'll list his headlines along with my own thoughts on each topic.

5.  You Think Multiplayer is Bullshit.

While I don't think that multiplayer in its entirety is the collected fecal matter of our tasty bovine friends, I do not find it to be as much a selling point as other people.  Having grown up as a console gamer, multiplayer, let alone online multiplayer wasn't always an option.  The majority of the games I purchased and played were single player games (Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, Eternal Darkness, Dragon Warrior, et cetera), and those that had a multiplayer element to them (Duck Hunt, Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy III/VI, Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Time Splitters), I didn't play to their fullest extent.  Sure I played a bit of multiplayer on Goldeneye whenever Dr. Potts was over, or a couple other friends, but it was never my main purpose for the game.  

With current generation consoles, each have some type of subscription/fee  component (Xbox Live, PSN and Wii Points), which I don't feel that I will ever need, partly because I don't have either system, but also because I don't want to interact with teenage douche bags yelling obscenities at me.  If I'm going to play multiplayer (most likely on the PC), I'd rather just play online with someone whom I know.

4.  You Think Games Are Suddenly Too Long

The three games that John Cheese references in this article (Skyrim, Fallout 3 and World of Warcraft) I have never played so I can't comment directly on any of these games.  I do know what he is talking about when he says that there seem to be a lot more side quests than actual story points.  I on the other hand tend to like side quests, but only to a certain extent.

I didn't do the Golden Chocobo side quest in Final Fantasy VII so that I could earn the "Knights of the Round" materia.  I liked the initial idea of breeding Chocobos, but the amount of time that it would have taken to find Chocobos from all over the world, to me seemed pointless; especially when there was a chuck of rock plummeting towards the planet.  In other games like Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2: Grimoire of the Rift, however, I did as many side quests as I could lay my hands on.  Maybe this is something with more recent video games trying to drag out the length of time it takes to "complete" a game, but then that just reinforces that I'm aging when it comes to video games, but whatever.

3. You Miss Game Storylines That Were Actually Compelling

I'm about 50/50 with Mr. Cheese's views on this point.  While I do agree that some of the Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior  (I'm also going to throw in Chrono Trigger) games had very in depth story lines that would rival that of some of the books that I was reading at the time, I don't feel that I was putting myself into the role of the characters that I was playing, which would be why I felt they were more "in depth" when I was a kid than now that I'm an "adult."

Part of my problem might be that as I don't have any of the "next-gen systems," I haven't played many of the newer games that seem to lack story lines.  However, how many people who played Super Mario Bros. felt that the story line was lacking and how did an Italian plumber, presumably from New York got to the Mushroom Kingdom.  That's never explained in-game.  In The Legend of Zelda, all the back story is told in the instruction booklet and just after the opening titles, which don't even play when you start a game.

But yes, I feel that story, for me at least, is very important if I want to have any emotional feelings towards the game I'm playing.  Sometimes I don't want there to be a story, for example, in the first Doom.  You start the game without any introduction, but you know that you need to shoot anything on the screen, and sometimes, that's all I want to do.

2.  You Think Originality is Dead

Sometimes I'll think "Huh.  I've played this game before, why do I want to play it again?"  Being the person that I am, I will usually look into games before I buy them (although with the Humble Bundles, I don't really care too much, and just think that this type of business model is very awesome).  That being said, I sometimes don't mind playing a familiar type of game over and over again.  

Yes, I do appreciate originality in video games, but sometimes I like to play something that I know, even if it's a "brand new" game that came out the previous year that's based on a platformer from 1990.  Mr. Cheese acknowledges this too when he says "The industry looked just as cookie cutter then as it does now." It's very similar to the movie industry. There'll be a period when westerns are all the rage, or where we're at right now, where anything to do with zombies or vampires will sell millions, just because of the subject matter.

1. You Miss When Games Used To Be "All About Fun."

To be honest, it seemed like Mr. Cheese began to ramble here, as if he didn't actually have "5 Reasons...." but only had four and desparately tried to come up with the fifth.  He starts off about the "look" of games versus the amount of "fun" and then trails off  about how the repetitiveness of games meant they were fun for younger players.

Maybe it's because I've been constantly playing video games for, roughly, the last 24 - 25 years, that I'm able to go back and play Castlevania or Donkey Kong Country and still have fun.  Granted some of that fun may turn into frustration, but I'd rather have that feeling than the feeling that I'm kicking ass at a game because it's too easy.  I actually remember not being able to beat a lot of games, which probably bothered me on some level, but yeah, I had fun.

Conclusion:  No, I don't believe that I'm too old for video games.  Like anybody in any genre in any form of media, I'm not going to like everything out there, but I tend to know what I like.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

The Road Goes Ever On And On....

Baptized in 8 Bit Music

At this moment, I'm listening to "Scene V: ~Prelude~ FFI - Main Theme / Kao's Shrine / Chaos' Temple" from Symphonic Suite: Final Fantasy, which you could say inspired me to write this.

My love of video game music came about sometime in 1991 while playing Final Fantasy on the NES.  I just came to the part where the King of Coneria builds a bridge to the adjacent continent and your characters cross.  That's when the screen flashes and you're greeted with a text-story moment and this music.  I must've sat there and listened to it until either the screen force-ably changed or I pressed "A" and progressed the game myself.  

I'd played quite a few games whose music I really liked by that point (Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Castlevania, Mega Man II), but something about the "Theme" music from Final Fantasy did something for me that the music from video games had never done before.  Maybe it was that I recognized it as something that just wasn't being played in the background, but something that I could sit and listen to for hours on end.

The problem though at the time was that video game soundtracks were practically unheard of in the United States, or as far as I knew at the time, didn't exist at all.  The internet wasn't readily available, especially so on the Apple IIe computer that our family was using, and modems were things that regular households just didn't have; so finding import CD's was pretty much out of the question.  (I don't even think the Apple IIe was modem compatible, although I did convince my older sister that I'd hacked into the DMV and changed test answers on the drivers test).  Once I started going to Star Trek conventions (1992 or 93 I think), I began seeing anime soundtracks from Japan, albeit for anywhere between $25 - $70 a piece, which for a new teenager, was very much out of the question.  So at least I knew that music from Japanese products were out there.

When Final Fantasy II came out on the SNES (or more likely after I bought it), and there was the revamped "Final Fantasy Theme," and I knew what I had to do.  I took my sister's duel cassette tape deck (which had better recording capabilities than mine), propped it up on the two doors of our family's entertainment center and hit "Record" every time a new song came up.  I let the songs play through  2-3 times, depending on the length of the song.  I then did the same thing for The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.  I now had playable video game soundtracks, still unaware that legit soundtracks had already been released in Japan since 1986.  

In 1995, I bought Final Fantasy III for the SNES and it came with a brochure for various items you could buy from Squaresoft.  There was a Mog keychain, an FFIII shirt and the soundtracks to Final Fantasy III (Titled "Kefka's Domain") and The Secret of Mana.  My parents said that for my 9th grade graduation (Woodland still had Jr. High schools so moving to the actual "High School" seemed like a big deal) asked what I wanted.  Looking at this brochure, I knew that I really liked the music from both games, but Kefka's Domain came with 3 CD's.  Three whole CD's of music from a game that I loved.  I told my parent's that that was what I wanted, and bless them, without scoffing or questioning my request, that's what they bought me for my graduation present.

That's what started it all.  Soon after I bought the DK Jamz (Donkey Kong Country) CD from Nintendo Power and the Symphonic Suite: Final Fantasy CD, which had orchestrated video game music, something that I thought would never exist.  I won't list all the game soundtracks that I've acquired over the years, but recently I've been downloading "soundtracks" from NES games that never had official released soundtracks such as Jackal, Ikari Warriors, and Crystalis.  It's been a rebirth of being excited about NES music again even though I don't have the console hooked up.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Que the Orchestra