MIDI Week Singles: "John's Theme (A Sharp Miner)" - Rochard (PC)

"John's Theme (A Sharp Miner)" from Rochard on the PC (2011)

Digitally Released Album

Composer: Marcus Kaarlonen

Game Developer: Recoil Games

I'm sure I've talked a bit about this, not specifically about Marcus Kaarlonen's Rochard soundtrack, but about realizing that you find a song to be amazing the first time you listen to it.  It's something special when it happens with music from video games.

For me, a fair amount of video game music is about nostalgia, that I can remember times playing those specific games based on the music.  You play a game and the songs, while they may not be the best song outside of the context of the video game, hold a special place in your heart.  With that in mind, I love that feeling I get when listening to video game music for the first time and all I can do is sit back and take in the beautifulness that is assaulting my brain.

"John's Theme (A Sharp Miner)" did that very thing to me the first time I heard the song.  I haven't even played Rochard, which says, to me at least, that the music is able to stand alone from the video game.  This piece has epic space saga written all over it.  It's a love child that John Williams and Alan Silvestri would have had in the late 80s early 90s, and what a child it is too.

The point is, "John's Theme (A Sharp Miner)" is a great song which also happens to be from a video game.  So poo-poo on all the nay-sayers of the quality of video game music.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Dig This Sound

Foruming Exclusivity

First of all, sorry for not having this up yesterday and while I'm at it, sorry for not having something up last Friday.  Now, on with the show.

The Last of Us came out a short while ago (Well, almost a month ago) and from what I've heard about, it would be a game that I would love.  Something about a post-apocalyptic world (and the title suggests something akin to The Road) which if done correctly, will get me pretty much every time.  Once I started hearing good things about The Last of Us is when I tried looking the game up on Steam.  That's when I found out it was a PS3 exclusive.  That's also when I became annoyed.

Console exclusivity has been a thing since the beginning of video gaming so the concept/practice is anything but new.  Personally I find it to be annoying, especially if there exists a game I would like to play, like The Last of Us, but I do not own a PS3 and the two people I know who do own them probably wouldn't be too keen on having me sit in their living room for the 14-20 hours it would take to complete the game.  Which then makes me wonder how often people buy a gaming console because a particular game is not released on any other system.  I understand the draw/appeal when a console is launching, but for exclusivity this late in a console's life, I can't see as a selling point.

Admittedly however, I did buy a PSP because Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions was coming out and I bought a PS2 from Doc Torpotts after he won one from a Coke bottle cap back in 2005 because I wanted to play the upcoming Final Fantasy XII..  All the other systems I've bought (Nintend0) were because I liked the company and liked the games that were being released, exclusive or not.  And, while it's true that I do have a number of exclusive games (Eternal Darkness, The Legend of Zelda, Shadows of the Empire, Timesplitters, Bushido Blade, et cetera), I bought the games long after I owned the consoles.

Now onto message boards.  I get message boards.  I get why they exist and why there's one up for almost every company that says they care about how they interact with their fans/the public.  I've posted on a handful of message boards, each time thinking that the experience will somehow be different and I wouldn't be as much of a thread/post killer as I have been in the past.

Turns out this is still the case.

Back in June I joined the forums for the Shadow of the Eternals game that Precursor Games is in the process of developing.  I started posting pretty early on in the forums and all was going well.  Then I didn't visit for a couple of days and when I returned, it was that lost feeling I used to get when I went back to school after being sick for a couple of days.  Threads had taken off, new topics six to seven pages in had started, developed and been completed.  In other cases, I would add my thoughts to a thread and the thread would then die/not be replied to.  I'm not saying it was a bad/negative/insulting response, it just happened to be the end of the conversation.

This kind of thing has happened a number of times before, on the Reaper Miniature forums, the IMDb message boards, the Draconian forums and even the [Enforcer] forums.  And then there's Reddit. . . blarg.

Often times, I don't respond as I become very self conscious about what is being said and how my response will be over analysed.  There's a part of me that would like to be more active in forums, especially with companies that I really like and would like to promote, but often times I get distracted or forget to visit the forums and when I came back, I would feel disconnected from whatever the discussion has been about.

Maybe this is just me sounding sorry for myself, but it's been something that I've been thinking about recently, especially with the games that I've helped fund via kickstarter and Indiegogo, each having a forum/message board/discussion area.  I just don't have the time/energy/chutzpah to be as active as I want to be with all the things/people/places that I like.  As it turns out, time is a commodity.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Leave It All To Me Because I'm Feverish, Devilish and Irrelevant

Bleep Bloop - Achievements Unlocked

Achievements, as they are currently known, began three years before I became aware of their existence with the already established terminology.  The fact that I've never been a big fan of "achievements" could in part be from the fact that I've never owned an Xbox or PS3.  I understand the concept of achievements just as well, but again, they're not really my thing.  My prepared rebuttal to the almost inevitable discussion that not liking achievements must mean that I suck at video games and that I should get back to sucking dick goes something like this, "Whatever."

When I first watched the Red vs Blue PSA "Small Rewards" back in 2008, I was introduced to the concept of Achievements in their present form.  I had mentioned in a previous post that I consider the cheats in Goldeneye 007 to be "functional achievements," but calling them as such is only as recent as the writing of that article.

With the acquisition of games via Steam, being my main source for PC gaming, I now have an avenue to acquire achievements.  What I sort of like about the achievements via Steam is that what you have earned is not posted on the front page of your profile.  Maybe they can be with a bit of tinkering in the profile settings, which is fine I guess, but it's not something that I'm going to actively look for.  Yes I can go and find out which achievements Dr. Potts has obtained/acquired/unlocked in LIMBO, but I've got to make at least 3 mouse clicks in order to find out.  To me, this says that the achievements on Steam are not as important to other people as they are on Xbox Live or the Playstation Network.  That you have to actively go looking for someone else's achievements says something about that system.  And whatever it's trying to say, I like it.

One other thing that somewhat disappointed me about the concept of earning achievements is the fact that you know about them before you even play the game.  In Portal 2, one of the achievements is titled "You Made Your Point" with the subtext "Refuse to solve the first test in Chapter 8."  It tells you how to earn the achievement.  Granted some other achievements aren't so easily accomplished or even tell you how to accomplish them as in the "Transmission Received" in the first Portal which lists the subtext as "..?".  I like the idea of achievements being totally ambiguous or just having no description at all.  I'd personally felt a sense of  pride when I figured out what that achievement entailed.  Do I have that particular achievement?  Nope, I've got 7 of 26, which is just fine with me as I know what to do to acquire the achievement, I just haven't done them all yet.

I like the idea that you would be playing a game and all of a sudden the game lets you know that you achieved something that you didn't know was there, that you did something cool that the programmers also had thought of, but again, that just might be me.  Or maybe in the case of multiple part achievements, trying to figure out what it was that you just did and have the game say that you need to do the same thing nine more times at other parts in the game.

The last thing, and I know a lot of games do this, is offering achievements for either passing a level or reaching a checkpoint in a level.  If it's something you're supposed to do like collecting fully powered portal gun, I don't see a reason for there to be an achievement for it.  I can almost imagine what achievements would have looked like in early NES games.  Get an achievement for beating the game on any difficulty level (if the game has difficulty levels)?  Sure, give out an achievement for Easy, Medium and Jedi level difficulties or for just beating the game in general.  Maybe they're around to show other players your progress through the game.

Someone who has a larger degree than I do might say that achievements are the product of a society that has become one based on instant gratification, that if there weren't achievements in games (except that most/all of Nintendo games don't have an achievement-type system) that people would feel that their progression in the game isn't worth anything.  But, I'm not that someone, so I won't say that.


~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
My Gamerscore is 0, If Anyone Wants To Know.



P.S.  I couldn't figure out where to put this in the main body of the article, so a post script will do just fine.  I get that some achievements are challenging to unlock, but some are just plain bitch-cake crazy (I'm looking at you True Form).  I have yet to come across a game on Steam that I feel compelled to unlock all of the achievements in order for me to feel like I played a game to its fullest.

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....