MIDI Week Singles: "My Heaven" - Silent Hill (PSX)

"My Heaven" from Silent Hill on the Playstation (1999)
Silent Hill Original Soundtrack
Composed By: Akira Yamaoka
Record Label: Konami
Game Developer: Konami

Confession time.  I have not played Silent Hill yet.  I have the game on my PSP, but I would really like to play the game in a darkened room with headphones and I haven't had too many times available that would not make me look/seem like a creep.  But I did acquire the soundtrack awesomely enough from a Silent Hill community website.

So not having played the game, I have no emotional or nostalgic attachment to any of the songs, which was somewhat nice when I first listened through the soundtrack.  The song "My Heaven" stuck out to me among all the other great styled songs that you would be happy to find on any well crafted horror soundtrack.  I think what it was for me was the static/white noise/drone that ran through the song while rusted metallic drums were frantically drummed in the back/foreground. 

I could probably analyze this song and infer meaning where there isn't, especially not having played the game.  And then there's the obvious contrast between the sounds in the song with the title.  I just think it's a great, unsettling song.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
All I Heard Was An Unearthly Silence

Dead Space: Chronicle of the Red Marker. Chapter 2

Welcome back to Chapter 2 of our short series titled "Chronicle of the Red Marker," a review, analysis and commentary about the stories leading up to and between Dead Space 1 and 2.  This is a continuation post from the article that I put up on Friday which looked at the first Dead Space self titled comic, the first animated movie, Downfall and the Wii/PS3 exclusive rail shooter, Extraction.  Today we will be looking at the stories that continue the story after the evacuation of Aegis VII and the fall of the USG Ishimura.

Dead Space: Salvage is the second comic adaptation in the Dead Space universe and in my opinion, a better read and more visually appealing than the first comic.  Although no specific date is given for the events that happen, we are told that this takes place sometime between the events in Downfall and the following film, Aftermath.

Storywise, Salvage was a much simpler story than that of the first comic.  Salvage follows a group of mercenary and freelance miners who happen to stumble upon the remains of the USG Ishimura.  There is some inner conflict as one might expect to find on board this type of vessel.  The crew boards the Ishimura, not knowing about any of the events that transpired and that is when shit hits the fan.  That is basically the entire story.  Not much meat here as far as overarching story, but the there is quite a bit of Dead Space lore that expands the feeling of the universe which I am always a fan of.  There are hints at the government underbelly; how ships travel to/from star systems at, potentially, FTL speeds; although very little, if any new information in the way of how the remnants of The Marker interact with humans and tissue.  Yeah, there are necromorphs in case you were wondering.

The art style in Salvage is one of the major points of interest here.  I am going to guess that the style is called photorealism, and is then mixed with a lot of blurry watercolor.  I would imagine that some people would find the drab color palette, consisting of mainly blues, greens and greys (with occasional splashes of red for good measure), but considering the universe that this story is taking place, it works much better than brightly lit corridors and sun soaked cargo bays.  Salvage also diverges a bit from the usual blocked formatting of comics using a mix of pages that are told in wide horizontal blocks as opposed to the typical smaller rectangles.

Honestly, I prefered this artistic style to that of the first comic.  I found it easier to follow with the characters, which I genuinely credit to the art style used by artist Christopher Shy.

The second animated movie, Dead Space: Aftermath is probably the oddest of the whole collection.  The story told in Aftermath does a decent job in connecting the events from the first game as well the four previous mentioned stories to Dead Space 2 and the stories associated with that game.  It could even be speculated that the whole reason the team depicted here is dispatched to Aegis VII is from someone within Unitology and Earth Gov. wants a shard of The Marker found and brought back.

The story follows a CEC (Concordance Extraction Corporation) team is sent to Aegis VII to check on their mining investment.  This is after the chunk of the planet that was extracted earlier in the timeline has crashed into the planet and after some farfetched tactics to keep the planet temporarily together (although it makes sense in the context of the movie).  While investigating, one of the crew members finds a shard of the Red Marker and is drawn to pick it up and hilarity (as in horrendous death fueled necromorphic nightmares ) ensues.  When the CEC crew does not make contact with their parent company, a security detail is sent after them where they are taken back to Titan Station, the location of Dead Space 2.

What makes this movie so strange is that all of the events happening in the present are told in a bizarre late 1990s style of computer animation.  They move about as fluid as the characters from the Warcraft II intro movie, but significantly less dramatic.

Now, I feel that if the entire movie were told with this type of animation, you would eventually get used to how wrong everybody moves, but there are four other animation styles that go along with each of the four above characters story about what happened to them on Aegis VII. 

The rest of the movie, the backstories, all use more traditional cell-style animation.  Some of the sequences look very nice, while others, the characters are very stylized and intentionally misproportioned, and I am not just talking about the necromorphs.  It could have been that each different animation team was given concept drawings for the overall look of the film and the universe in the Dead Space series and they took their particular story from there.

Even the design of the RIGs used by the same characters in different backstories are drawn differently.  I realize that this was a stylistic choice on the part of someone in charge, but by the time I felt that I was getting used to a particular style of animation, that story would end and we would go back to the interrogation chamber and the jarring/stilted CG.

Following Aftermath, I should be covering the mobile game simply titled Dead Space, but I had so much fun with that game that it will be receiving its own entry following todays article on Friday.

Dead Space: Ignition follows Titan Station engineer Franco, who may or may not be a Unitologist and which is not-so bluntly stated during the story.  Although the Red Marker does not make an appearance in Ignition, based on the events in Aftermath, you could say that the events happened as a direct result of the Red Marker, which fits in quite well with how Brian Evenson depicted how the various Markers react to Humankind.

I feel a bit like a hypocrite, but Ignition looked (since I was only able to watch a longplay of the game) more like a choose your own adventure comic book with interactive puzzle elements than an actual video game.  The art looked similar to the art style in the first Dead Space Comic and the two animated films, although the in-game animation was straight-up comic book style where dialogue was spoken but the mouths did not move nor did feet/legs move when characters walked.  The game lasted just over an hour and easily half of that time was spent doing puzzles that, in the later stages seemed to go on a lot longer than necessary.  Perhaps it was just to pad the game out.

In the end, I am not sad that I was unable to play Ignition and I probably would have been upset if I had found it and paid more than a couple of dollars for either my phone or PSP.  The story though is what is always important and for that fact alone, I am glad that I only had to waste an hour of my time.

On Friday, I will be putting up my review of Dead Space (Mobile), so stay tuned if you're not yet Dead Space'd out.  Now that was a fun game.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Rushing Through The Emptiness

Book Review: Murakami

As I'm finishing up Wind up Bird Chronicle,  I think I'd like to write a few words about famous japanese author, Hiroki Murakami.  Let's start with a chronological list of his books I've read.

Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Wild Sheep Chase
Dance, Dance, Dance
Wind up Bird Chronicle

I would like to point out that the most recent three books I read over the course of this last year.  The first book I read a few years ago, after my first visit to Austin, TX.  It was given to me by a woman I met, with whom I shared one of the very few times I've had what you might call a 'one night stand.'  And, given that we maintained a phone relationship for months after, it might not be called that either.

I suppose that isn't relevant, except perhaps in the way that it is a part of the story of my reading Murakami.  I really like this author, I like his style.  He is easy to read and yet, I find he stretches my imagination.  In some ways, I find his stories to be very similar to one another (once again, hard boiled wonderland being the exception).  There is a certain dream-like quality of unreality that pervades these stories and  what makes Wonderland different, is that the dreamlike quality is much more pronounced, much earlier in the story.  Whereas in the other three, he dangles this sort of parallel reality just out of view, teasing me with the promise that I will see more, and that it might all make sense.  This drives me to read on.  I won't tell you if any of it ever does end up making any sense.

Murakami is dry, and yet it doesn't bother me.  His control of detail is so strange.  He is so deliberate in his details, it can create a sense of significance.  And yet, he's not a Tolkein-style painter by any means.  Tolkein, in my mind, paints beautiful water-color landscapes.  Murakami is more of a Kandinsky abstract.

Kandinsky

While in the middle of a Murakami story, I can't wait to read the next one.  But following a Murakami story, I usually need a break.  I've been reading a lot more lately.  I find it a more fulfilling way to spend my time than video games.  It is also more flexible - easier to pick up and put down, requires less of my attention, works well as a transition into sleep.    I still think about video games a lot though.  In fact, I just had this one crazy idea about a platform game with three life bars and all these different, multi-colored item pickups which affect the bars in different ways.  But I'll tell you about that later,

-D

Link Dump version 1-2-1.3

Lately I've been collecting links, so very many links. But I haven't really been posting much. So I've got a bit of a back log, and it's time for a link dump. Here are some interesting things:

http://imgur.com/gallery/PJ0sQnc

I love this animation. I imagine you will as well. Speaking of Animation, it turns out Chuck Jones actually had a set of rules for Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons. They're pretty much what you imagine, though maybe not with the same words. On a different note, I really like the enclosed definition of the word 'fanatic.'

http://www.avclub.com/article/fairies-dancing-screen-4-classic-video-game-sprite-215639

Here's an article breaking down four classic jumps from video game history. linked from John B.

http://jpbruneau.tumblr.com/post/115704339194/kturbio-street-fighter-stages-in-real-life
if you needed another reason to follow jpbruneau: Street Fighter stages in real life.

http://theomeganerd.tumblr.com/post/114376010304/little-dovakiin-skyrim-cosplay
the luckiest kid on the planet.

http://www.manaleak.com/mtguk/2015/03/well-this-is-a-bit-of-a-buggerance/
"Well, this is a bit of a buggerance. A Thank You letter" by manaleak author Christopher Cooper. It's a Magic The Gathering tribute to Terry Pratchett, and is full of inside jokes. In fact, it's composed almost entirely of inside jokes, I still thought it might be nice for you to peruse.

If you're still reading this, why not read about some Alien 3 concept movies that never were:

http://www.empireonline.com/features/alternative-alien-3-concept-movies/p6

And, if that's not your thing, this article shares some love for Donkey Kong Country 3, a perspective I found refreshing, despite the fact that I never played the game.
http://kotaku.com/the-best-donkey-kong-country-ever-made-1683495417

-D

Dead Space: Chronicle of the Red Marker. Chapter 1

No, there isn't some new Dead Space game/add-on/DLC called "Chronicle of the Red Marker," I just liked that title for what I'm going to be covering, which are materials in the Dead Space universe that deal with the finding of the Red Marker on Aegis VII and the results thereof; not including the first Dead Space game.  These all include the Dead Space (Comics),  the Dead Space: Downfall and Aftermath animated movies and the Dead Space: Extraction and Ignition games that came out on systems that I do not have access to.

As I have stated before, I'm a sucker for games in a series, specifically games that take place in the same universe that belong to a series and the universe in the Dead Space games is no exception.  After playing the first game, I fell in love with what was being shown to me as well as what could just be glimpsed upon far in the horizon.  Upon discovering that the first game takes place in the middle of the current chronology, I wanted to start in the beginning, ignoring the fact that Dead Space: Martyr, the novel by B.K. Evenson which begins with the finding of the Black Marker on earth and the origins of Unitology was published in 2010, two years after the first game that started it all came out.  The chronology for Dead Space is all over the place.  Starting in 2214 (Martyr published in 2010), another Marker "found/created" in 2295 (Catalyst published in 2012) and compiling in 2508 when the games start (released in 2008) as well as the comic (published 2008) and the animated movies (released 2005 & 2011).

These two articles look to review/analyze/mumble about the stories that revolve around the Red Marker that is omnipresent between Dead Space and Dead Space 2.  In order to not make this article as cumbersome as it first was, I have broken it up into two separate posts with this first post covering Dead Space (Comic) through the first animated film, Dead Space: Downfall.

Dead Space (Comic) takes place in the days leading up to the "outbreak" in the mining colony of Aegis VII.  The story was written by Antony Johnson and the artwork was done by Ben Templesmith.  I bring this up because while I did not find any fault with the story, it was the artwork that I ultimately found confusing.  

The story however was very well told.  Because this story is told in print, it allows the tension to build without jumping right into a necromorph outbreak.  I also enjoyed that the "corruption" that you see a lot of in Dead Space starts out as an anomalous annoyance and only once its possible connection with The Marker is made is it too late for anyone to do anything about it.

In the introduction, there are bios of the main characters along with a brief histories and thumbnail of what the character looks like.  Now I will be the first to admit that I tend to forget characters' names in a story that is chalk full of main characters (it took me a couple of hundred pages and reading the family trees to keep characters separate while reading A Game of Thrones).  There are even two sets of characters who appear similar to their respective doppelganger.  Cortez and Natalia: both are women of about the same age with shoulder length dark hair.  Sciarello and Carthusia are both slightly overweight men with short hair and glasses.  Maybe I am just a bad person, but I had a hard time keeping these people apart, especially with the artwork not being as consistent between chapters.

It basically boils down to the art style.  At times it seemed like the artists had a general image of what the characters were supposed to look like, but then given free reign as to how they wanted/could modify said characters.  I know this is something that can be pretty common in the comics industry, but I found it a bit distracting, especially when trying to keep characters straight.

Dead Space: Extraction is a Wii and ported PS3 game that I am unable to play due to my lack of a video game console post 2001.  Rather than try and find an emulated copy of the game, one designed for motion controls (although using the mouse would work just as well), I looked to youtube to find a single longplay video or one broken up into watchable segments.  Thankfully I was able to find a series of six videos of the PS3 port from World of Longplays and major kudos to them for having no talking or commentary of any kind.

I enjoyed that Dead Space Extraction took place at around the same time as both the comic and Downfall (below), but that it took the story from a different point of view with different characters.  The thing that I loved about what this game did, was that your first character is not the main character, but it plays it off like he's going to be another Isaac Clarke from the first game.  Throughout the tutorial level, you witness hallucinations from a point of view mode.  At the end of the chapter, your character is killed by C-Sec officers (police) and as your hallucination fades/breaks, you see that the necromorphs you were killing where in fact C-Sec officers.  You immediately wonder how many of the creatures you killed throughout that first level were actually civilians and if there were in fact any necromorphs at all.

The game takes you through the Ishimura up the the point when the USG Kellion (the ship Isaac Clarke is on) arrives, although contact is not made, possibly due to debris and what not.  The only problem I had with the story (as well as the parallel story in Dead Space: Downfall) is that the characters cannot be too successful in making their way through the USG Ishimura since the first game takes place in the same space, so there have to be some monsters left over and all of the items cannot have been picked clean.  But continuity aside, it was a fun game to sit back and watch someone else play for just under six hours (multiple sittings mind you)

Dead Space: Downfall takes place shortly after the events in the first Dead Space (Comic).  The animation style I think is what made it a little odd for me. If you've seen EA's animated film Dante's Inferno, the tie-in to their not-too-successful video game, then you'll know what I'm referring to.  If you haven't seen it, picture what you think of when it comes to traditional Japanese animation.  Now take that image and stretch it out a bit so all the characters look a bit lanky. Somewhat similar to Ninja Scroll, but less refined somehow.

Storywise, I enjoyed what I was presented with.  The story primarily takes place on the U.S.G. Ishimura, although the movie begins with the discovery of the Red Marker on Aegis VII (you know the place) with the events leading up to Issac and company arriving at the Ishimura right before Dead Space starts up.  There was no overlap between Downfall and Extraction which is somewhat expected since Downfall was released a year before Extraction, but I really would have liked it if there had been some mention of people, just to keep the feeling that the Ishimura was a single united ship.

This is where I shall leave you for the weekend.  Chapter 2 (on Monday 4/13) will cover three  of the four storylines that bridge the gap between Dead Space 1 and 2.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Soon I'll Be Knocking At Your Door

MIDI Week Singles: "The Penitent" - Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem

"The Penitent" from Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem on the Nintendo Gamecube (2002).

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem Sound Track
Composed By: Steve Henifin

Record Label: Nintendo Power

Game Developer: Silicon Knights

I love the music in this game, not to mention the game itself, but when this song came up, I thought, "Yeah, this song contains pretty much all of the elements of Eternal Darkness."  "The Penitent" taken from Brother Luther's stage in Oublié Cathedral during the time of the Spanish Inquisition.  There's the rain sound effect, the monk chanting, the quintessential Eternal Darkness "doom-boom" drum beat and ambient drones going on throughout the song.  It even has a scare chord.  It's great!

I feel that this is one of those songs that makes you a bit wary at the start, lulls you into a sense of mild foreboding, but that you'll make it out okay, then Pious Agustus chimes in with his dialogue from the game, then horriblescreachingscreamingnoisechord comes in and finally the drones come back and the song ends nearly two minutes later after you have begun to question your own sanity.

I personally love it when a single song is able to capture the essence of an entire game.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Book Review: Dead Space: Catalyst

Dead Space: Catalyst is the second book written by American novelist Brian K. Evenson who had previously written Dead Space: Martyr, being the first in the chronological timeline for the Dead Space universe.  And since we are bringing up chronology, let us put the books into context with the first game.

2214 - 2215: Dead Space: Martyr

2285 - Events in Dead Space: Catalyst take place, although since the book spans roughly 25 years, it can be assumed (Yes? No? Maybe?) that the events at the end of the book take place in 2285.

2508 - Dead Space

So as you can see, if you are looking to read about Issac Clarke's back story, or about what happened on the USG Ishimura during its 60 years in service before it came to Aegis VII or anyone/thing else directly connected with the what you played in the first Dead Space game, then you might be a bit disappointed.

All of this aside, I thought Cataclysm was a well told story that was very well written.  As I stated at the end of my review of Martyr, I am now even more interested in reading other works by Mr. Evenson, although I am afraid that it would be like reading anything else that George R. R. Martin has written that was not A Song of Ice and Fire related.  I guess I would just like to read more of what Mr. Evenson has to say about the Dead Space universe.

What will follow from here may contain spoilers to both this book as well as the first game.  Y'all have been warned.

Dead Space: Cataclysm follows the lives of two brothers, Istvan and Jensi Sato from their early teenage years, up through, what I would assume to be their early thirties.  While reading the book, I cannot recall having any issues with Jensi Sato, the main protagonist and how the reader is introduced to the majority of events in the book.  Looking back now, while I still do not have any real issues, I think I feel that Jensi existed primarily to take characters to important events and to be witness to what happens to Istvan.  But that is the way some narratives work, that is how this narrative worked and it worked well to serve its purpose.

With Istvan Sato, I really felt that B. K. Evenson really excelled as an author.  At least in the first half of the book.  I am not one to diagnose anyone with any type of developmental disability, which is the extent to which Istvan's "mental problems" are described in the book.  In the story, Jensi never states if his brother was diagnosed with any type of disorder or developmental disability, but Istvan's rational for seeing patterns or wanting objects to be in a particular order struck me as exhibiting actions similar to those who find themselves on the autistic spectrum.  How Mr. Evenson justified Istvan's actions to himself was instrumental for allowing the reader to (hopefully) understand why Istvan was acting the way he was, that he was not the bad guy.  It was just that people did not understand the obvious reasons why he did the things he was doing and he personally could not understand why it was not at all obvious to them as well.

One thing that always strikes me with a series that involves really bad things that always seem to be happening, especially when events are instigated by people, is why they keep letting these events happen over and over.  This was a question that I had after finishing the first Dead Space game regarding the devotion of Unitologists.  When your religious icon/object only seems to reanimate corpses into horrible machines of whirling death, why keep worshiping it and how did/would the church maintain its status as a powerful growing religion?  Seriously, how/why do people keep seeing The Marker as a benevolent source of do-gooding?  I feel this is where Brian Evenson has really excelled both in Martyr and  in Catalyst.  A lot of characters, when the story is being told from their perspective have said that the appearance of loved ones creates a overwhelming feeling of contentment and that they may be doing something unrelated to the knife in their hands that ends up killing them.

The last act of the book is where Dead Space the game comes into the story telling; as in necromorphs.  Everything leading up to Act III is primarily character development with premonitions of all the bad things that I have come to expect from the video game franchise.  I imagine this is where some people who want to read a written down account of the game, but this is a different medium all together where you can do things you cannot do elsewhere.  Reading about someones inner thoughts and the reasons why they are jabbing a fork into their face while mumbling something about their grandmother whom they loved as a child is easier in book form than it is in any other format.

Going through the first Dead Space again after having read the first two books gives the characters in the game a lot more depth that I had not realized was not there.  When I come across someone banging their head against a wall or slitting their own neck with a surgical saw, I no longer wonder why they would do this.  Now I wonder who they were seeing that "convinced" them that doing this particular act was what The Marker wanted.  Having read both Martyr and Cataclysm only fleshes out the Dead Space universe and, I feel, has only made the games better.

If you are not into science fiction, then this book probably is not for you.  But, as a well written semi-psychological look at someone with a "mental disorder" who you might end up feeling for by the end all of which takes place in a science fiction setting, then you might find yourself reading a good book.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Deep In The Shadows You Won't Find Peace

Monthly Update: April

Chief Medical Officer's log, earth date 4/5/2015.9:04.  Nice trip to San Francisco.  Visited the Academy of Sciences.The planetarium presentation on the interconnectedness of all life on earth was cool.  Also an Albino Alligator named Claude.

Played Mario Kart 8, was a lot of fun.  Tough game but seems like lots of room for growth.  Very impressed at resolution on the Wii U controller.  Seriously considering Wii U purchase.  Also played card game called 'Bang' that was pretty fun and available online.  In the meantime, on the gaming front, I've also played Mario Kart 64, Star Fox and Turok.  Looking into Magic Online.

I also saw a really cool play called 33 Variations at a local theater.  The story follows both a Beethoven scholar whose body is progressively shutting down from symptoms of ALS, while trying to complete a final study on Beethoven's composition 33 Variations on a waltz by Anton Diabelli.  Concurrently, another set of actors perform the story of Beethoven, Diabelli and Schindler as Beethoven struggles to compose his variations and Schindler struggles to keep him in his sponsors good graces.  It was a lot of fun, I have a soft spot for Beethoven's cranky, crazed genius, and the principle and supporting actors were fantastic.  Not to mention the play was performed with a live piano player.  There were also bits of music theory that I found really exciting, having enough understanding to be interested.

On the subject of artists and performers now past, I wanted to say something about Leonard Nimoy and something about Terry Pratchett.  I almost feel I've missed my window.  But... well, I suppose that's not really possible.  Anyway, it turned out Leonard Nimoy was even more of a badass then I ever realized.  And I also realized that Spock is very much the mascot of Star Trek.  Or maybe Kirk is the mascot, dancing around to keep us entertained, but Spock was the heart and soul.  He was the best character in the original series, bar none.  He was an example of how Star Trek would try new things.  He was an alien, he was biracial, he adhered to a bizarre and mystic code of logic.  He had psychic powers.  He was insufferable and yet he was deeply compassionate.  He's everything Star Trek was about.

It's hard not to make it all about Spock.  Nimoy clearly dealt with that his whole career.  Since his passing, I've learned that Nimoy was a Yiddish scholar, director, writer and photographer.  I'm thrilled that Jaconian and I were both able to see him speak at a Star Trek convention.  Twice.  During those talks, I learned that Nimoy did a one man stage show as Theo Van Gogh, exchanging letters with his Mad Genius brother Vincent.  You might have heard of him.

Terry Pratchett I knew less well.  I've read only The Color of Magic, the first book in the Discworld series.  I would like to say, however,  that when I read The Color of Magic, I felt a certain sense of coming home, as though I had been there before, and I had been reading Sir Pratchett's work since childhood.  And if I had to use just one word to describe his writing, it would be delightful.  Perhaps now is as good a time as any to return to his work.

Looking forward, I'm not sure what to expect.  I'm settling into my new apartment, as is my cat, Enkidu.  He has been very playful of late, and that's been fun to watch.  I'm struggling with my laptop connection to my TV, something went wrong and now my laptop screen turns off when I hook in the HDMI cable.  This is really frustrating because I was excited at the prospect of playing Steam games on a big screen.  The Nintendo 64 still works, and my girlfriend really likes Mario Kart, so I may seeing more of that in my future.  Until next time,

-D