Zelda Fan Art

Well, I don't have a post for you all, so I thought I'd just go through some of my bookmarks for some sweet video game art.  Fan art, on a whole, is an incredible thing.  Some amazing stuff bubbles to the surface on the internet.  Like that sweet Ganon picture up there.  Isn't it totally awesome?  That image is part of a series of of Legend of Zelda images I found over at this place called the Zelda Dungeon.

I really appreciate the art style, and I also appreciate that it is all images from the original Legend of Zelda game on NES.  We've waxed about nostalgia for this series before, and about the potential it may have lost over the years.  Images like this remind me of that potential, of how these simplistic critters could look totally sweet and how there could be a rich mythology behind the happenings in the Zelda games.Also, it reminds me of all the cool names the baddies in Zelda have:  Gleok, Dodongo, Keese.

The artist is called Deimos-Remus at deviantart.com.

Also at Zelda Dungeon, I found an interesting article about Skyward Sword that used terms like 'skill scaling'   'sub optimal dominant strategy' and the like.  I love this game theory stuff, and I harbor dreams of being that kind of a smarty pants and getting to talk about video game design all day.

The writer for this article GaroXIcon, and I like him so far.  In addition to the above article, he pitches a direct sequel to A Link To The Past, and says that Majora's Mask is his favorite game of all time.  How do you like that?  GaroXicon is my new video game critic crush.  and Deimos-Remus is my new video game art crush.

-D

Introduction to a Theory about Video Game Music Composers

"This is the first entry in what I hope to be a series of posts about composers/programmers of music in video games.  And not just any composers, but composers that we either don't know much about or have miss-attributed soundtracks to.  What do I mean by "miss-attribute?"  Okay, when you think of the music from the Legend of Zelda series, who comes to mind?  Right, Koji Kondo.  Except that he didn't write the music for Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.  That soundtrack was composed by Akito Nakatsuka.  Who is that you ask?  In short, he also wrote some of the music for Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!"

The above was my going into what was originally planned as a series of about nine to ten posts, focusing on individual composers and why some soundtracks are miss-attributed to them.  As an avid collector of soundtracks, I had thought that knowledge of video game composers would be about as prevalent as knowledge of film music composers.  Granted I only know of a couple by name, and those're some of the big guns: Nobuo Uematsu, Koji Kondo, Koichi Sugiyama, Hitoshi Sakimoto, Yasunori Mitsuda, Robin Beanland and David Wise.  

As it turned out, this happened to be one of those instances where when you grow up with a particular thing, like a dad who collects and chops/cuts and stacks firewood, that you think that all dads do that.  Turns out a lot of dads do not drive out on county roads looking for felled trees or asking people who have had trees cut  down if they would mind if their wood was taken out of their gutter.  Who knew that wasn't normal?  Turns out knowledge of who the composers of video game music are and what games they've composed for is not common knowledge.

I found this out when I put up a survey seeing if 1)  If people knew who wrote the music to a particular video game and 2)  If they knew, then they were to put down their answer by name.  My theory was for example, that if someone would think that because Koji Kondo wrote the music to Super Mario Bros. that they might think he wrote the music to Dr. Mario.  Or, as in the first mentioned example of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link and Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!. 

In the following post I will give the results and my initial analysis of the data that I collected from the survey (which when I last checked was only 20 people).  So with this in mind, I will now leave you with a couple youtube-ified tracks from various video games soundtracks that I absolutely love:

Tooth & Claw by Robin Beanland : Killer Instinct

Overworld by Koichi Sugiyama : Dragon Warrior

Sacrifices by Yuzo Koshiro : ActRaiser

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
I Can Just Hear It Now

P.S.  If you would like to take the aforementioned survey, here is the link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/XSYPF3N  And please do not look up any information before taking the survey as I am/was trying to find out people's existing knowledge.  Thank you.