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

First Impressions: Mirror's Edge & Bioshock 2

Dr. Potts has already talked a bit about Mirror's Edge so I won't go into a whole lot of detail about the game, just my general thoughts after having played for just about four hours.  And last month (technically in March), SneakyTiki got me Bioshock Infinite for my Nameday so that influenced me to have a go at Bioshock 2 and after five hours, I would like to talk at you about it.  Yes, I ended a sentence with it.  Again.

I can fully understand the appeal of this game as it fulfills one of the core reasons why I play video games: Mirror's Edge allows me to do something I cannot do in real life.  

Presently, I have played through the tutorial and, I think, the first four levels.  The tutorial threw a lot at me, almost too much for my liking.  I agree with Dr. Potts that Portal does a better job of introducing the player to game mechanics and I feel that the tutorial stage should have been a whole series of levels and not just a series of jumps (good, now you know that one), wall climbs (now you know that one), falling rolls (good, you didn't die, moving on) and wall-to-wall jumps (did you accidentally make it up the wall and not really know what you did, that's okay, moving on).  And that's just dealing with the terrain.  You are also given a very rudimentary crash course in assailants, disarming said assailants and avoiding them.  The tutorial/training course takes maybe 10 minutes and at the end, I feel like the game expects that I now have a firm grasp on being able to complete the game.  Not true, at least in my case.

So far, I get the impression that the game is broken up into sections.  First, there are the sections where you are chased by Blues (coppers) and shot at extensively by them and helicopters.  I somewhat understand them being included so that the player doesn't linger and they add a sense of urgency to get through the stage.  The down side is that I am not having fun.  I feel like these stages I could play in any first person video game and are not special to Mirror's Edge.  The other sections are chase stages, where you have to get from point A to point B while following someone who is just a hair faster than you.  There is still that same sense of urgency, but instead of being shot at, you run the risk of losing sight of your target.  This is what is keeping me playing the game, to have the chance to free run through a level with the only threat of death being my own stupidity as I jump a fence only to fall thirty flights down and hear by bones shatter and body splat as it greets the pavement.

One very interesting thing that I had to do with the game was lower a lot of the video settings.  This game came out back in 2008 and I would like to believe that my laptop is capable of running a game that was released four years before  the components were created could handle the graphic requirements.  Initially I had "everything" turned up to max (except Anti-aliasing which was at 2x), but I began experiencing sever lag whenever I was being shot at by more than one source.  The skipping/lag became so bad that I was unable to time my jumps, which is a rather important ability in a game that centers around parkour.  I then went back into the settings and turned down texture detail and graphics quality to medium and was forced to turn off anti-aliasing and "phy sx" support.  I can now play the game while being shot at by five coppers and a helicopter without having to worry if the game is going to start skipping as I approach that highlighted red board leaning haphazardly over the side of the building leading me to that other building across the street and two stories down.

Oh, and lastly, I have noticed, perhaps not too surprisingly, that I get motion sickness after playing for about 3o minutes.  The effect is more pronounced when I play on my laptop, but on the TV, I can play for about an hour.  So there's that too.

I won't talk to much about Bioshock 2 as I ended up talking more about Mirror's Edge than I had planned and I don't feel like editing down or breaking this up into two posts.  In short, I am very much enjoying Bioshock 2.  I have played about five hours and after the initial disorientation at the beginning, I am having a lot of fun.  I enjoy being back in Rapture and once I figured out that the prologue takes place before the first Bioshock and then the rest of the game begins after those events, I was able to enjoy the game even more.

What I find interesting, is that I had a preconceived notion/impression that Bioshock 2 received bad reviews.  That people did not like taking control of a Big Daddy, that the gameplay was redundant of the first game, that the story did not offer anything new to the world of Rapture and that the game needed a constant internet connection all played towards the game being a disappointing followup to the masterpiece that was the first Bioshock.

As it turns out, at least according to Wikipedia, Bioshock 2 was actually a very good game that expands on the universe.  As is the case with any game, there are going to be negative reviews so maybe that was where my pre-playing impression originated from.  So it turns out I am not as alone as I thought I was going to be by stating that I am currently liking what Bioshock 2 has offered in the way of story, game play, voice acting and music.  It feels good to be back in Rapture.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

While I Look Around For My Possibility

My Time In Evoland (PC)

Dr. Potts already did a full-on review about Evoland, which you can read here, and I highly recommend it, and not only because we share the same space here in internetland, but because it's a good article.  I however, after only just finishing the game not 10 minutes ago (upon writing this, not publishing today on Monday January 6th, 2014), wanted to give my own thoughts.

I really liked Evoland, although knowing from Dr. Potts that it was a short(ish) game probably helped in the development of my feelings.  By "short," I expected the game to be somewhere between 2-5 hours in length, and it took me about 3.5 hours from start to finish, although some of that time was spent trying to raise levels only to realize that that didn't matter outside of overworld battles.

As the good Doctor stated, I too wish that more time was spent in the 2D pre N64/PS1 era.  There was an area where you reverted back to Legend of Zelda (circa 1985), but that was only after you had been playing in 3D-Land for a while.  One aspect of reverting back to 2D graphics, was that the music also switched back to the classic NES 8-bit tones, but the music itself was the same.  I enjoyed hearing how the layering of instruments changed based on what "era" you were in.

But game length is very important here.  I felt that 3.5 hours was a perfect length of time for what the game was trying to accomplish.  If the game had been longer, I definitely would have felt cheated by how much time was spent in the early 2000's (Final Fantasy IX and beyond).  If the game were to have been twice as long, I feel that more time would have been spent playing as Gameboy Clink, or maybe even started at an earlier point in gaming history, such as with the Atari or the Intellivision.

All of that aside, again, I really enjoyed Evoland.  I feel that I was able to pick up on most of the references to video game history.  Even non-video game history, but general fantasy works, such as including A'Tuin from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.  Other references  include Super Mario Bros., Diablo, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Final Fantasy VII and a whole helluva lot more, which is where I found a lot of the fun with Evoland.  I'm sure/positive that there were references that I didn't get, but I can't/won't mention them because I don't know what they were, hence the not getting the references bit.

It kind of reminded me of the way that "Weird Al" does his parodies.  They are often shorter versions of the original songs, but he gets his point across with what he's trying to do, although this is not always the case.

I will say that around the time that the game took on it's definite Final Fantasy VII and beyond tone, I did lose some interest.  Upgrades to the look and mechanics of the game became less and less and treasure chests which once held quips directed towards the video game industry and semi-ridiculousness of certain RPG rules, these chests started to contain Stars and Cards (Stars are there just to collect and Cards are used for a TCG, similar to the game card game used in Final Fantasy IX).  I felt as if I had reached the pinnacle of game development too soon as there was at least another hour of gameplay left.

Unlike Dr. Potts, I don't know if I see myself going through the game again, even  knowing what I now know about the overall length of the game.  The story was not very engaging, but I never felt that the story was a driving part of the narrative, or lack thereof.  It would be like playing Final Fantasy IV minus emotional investment and 50 hours of additional gameplay and story arcs.  So then why even play Evoland?  Because it's a game that knows who its target audience is and I like getting the references to other video games that I played 20 years ago.  In short, because Evoland is fun.

You know, I could easily see this concept used for other over-arching gaming genres such as Doom-style FPS' or even a Streets of Rage / Double Dragon type brawler-beat-em-up.  Although at the moment, it looks like Shiro Games is in development of a multiplayer adventuring game called Until Dark, which by the name and font alone sounds promising.  And now, a new video game development company to keep our collective eyes on.


~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
A Future That Ain't What It Used To Be

First Impressions: The Elder Scrolls Chapter One: The Arena

Yes, you read that correctly.  The Arena, being the first installment in The Elder Scrolls series.  Briefly, the game was created by Bethesda back in 1994 and it very much looks like it came out of 1994.  From what I've played (made it through the first dungeon/sewer), the game's graphics haven't aged too well, but that's something that I don't care too much about.  It's the story, mythology and world that I've been playing in Skyrim, that brought me to The Arena and are what are going to keep me here for sometime.

The Arena is available free of charge from Bethesda, which is extremely awesome on their part.  The initial intimidating thing though is that the game is still run on DOS and requires a DOS operated window to play the game through.  So, I had to download DOSBox, a freeware program that took a minute to wrap my head around.  I grew up using an Apple IIe followed by a Macintosh 5125CD and I only started using Windows with Windows98, so I never really had to deal with DOS as a way of navigating a computer.  For this, I had to learn some simple jargon that will make a number of my friends laugh.  For myself, it was a quick test of, "How much do I want to play this game."  So now, every time I want to play The Arena, this is what I do:

This was after I found out that, for simplicity sake, I had to put the folder for Arena directly on the C Drive as opposed to a complicated (normal) series of folders, but it's actually pretty simple, now that I've loaded the game a few times, and I'm sure I could go into the CONFIG file (with step-by-step instructions) and alter the the start ups so that it automatically loads with the C: drive "mounted" so that I don't have to do it every time, as well as running it at ~13,000 cycles instead of the default 3,000 (control+F12).  The point is, doing all this through a DOS window quickly puts me in the right frame of mind for a game that looks like this:

And honestly, I like the way the game looks.  I like that the first game in this series is a POV action/adventure/fantasy game.  I like that to swing your sword you have to hold the right mouse button and move the mouse in the direction you want your sword to swing.  I love that there are different animations based on how you swing your sword: horizontal slash (R/L), diagonal slash (R/L), vertical slash and stabbing.  I don't know if there's a damage difference based on how you swing your sword against a particular type of monster, but I don't care (at least not right now I don't care).  Just the fact that there are six different animations (for the sword alone) to kill something instead of a simple left click, that's the kind of attention I love to see in video games.

At the moment, I'm currently wandering around whatever city it is that you come upon after exiting the jail.  Since I chose to be a Nord, I think it's North Keep.  The game is a bit difficult in that people in towns are constantly moving (as they right should be), but I find myself chasing down someone just to ask them where the nearest place to purchase goods is, since your map of the city only shows buildings, but not what those buildings are.  There's a lot of running.  Thankfully you can make notes on your map and if you're close by a desired building, one of the citizens will make locations on your ,map.  That's honestly all I've done so far: errands for various people in town and was attacked by some crazy guy and his wolf/rats after it became dark.  Then I quickly found an inn and slept until the morning.

Do I like the game?  Sure.  Am I going to plug 75 hours into it as I've done with other video games?  I might, I don't know how long it takes to finish Arena, and by "finish," I mean "finish" the storyline, not every single side quest in the game.  I'm sure to do that you'd have to go through with each one of the eight races.  I am, at the moment, 89% sure that I will finish (at least) the Nord storyline for this game.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Bring It On


P.S.  Apparently, 1994 was a massive year for video games:

SNES
Super Metroid
Final Fantasy VI (III)
Earthworm Jim
Mother 2 (EarthBound)
Mortal Kombat 2
Donkey Kong Country

PC
Warcraft: Humans vs. Orcs
Doom II: Hell on Earth
Marathon
TIE Fighter

Arcade
Killer Instinct
Tekken