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.

Cooperative Gaming Coop

Saturday I hopped a train to San Jose and swung by my pal John's Art installation.  This installation is a combination of an arcade and a game swap.  There were lots of cool games there, and some finely decorated cabinets.  I'll see if I can get a list of the featured games, so that we can look up an play the ones that are available.

Alright, that being covered, go ahead and check out the website for the gaming coop.   John also has his own website called ArtFail.  And a Tumblr. He's always doing video games as art events and stuff. 

There weren't many people, so I didn't get the full effect.  However, for the same reason, I got a lot of one on one time with the curator (John) so I got the scoop on a lot of games.  There's a crazy game that is sort of like real-time chess.  Another that was commissioned by occupy oakland, 2-players where you fly through a maze and hit switches to mark your distance.  Great flying controls.  Another game where you rescue beagle puppies, really fun.  Oh man, there was another called like Super Puzzle Platformer, I think.  That game is solid gold.  Then there was a really sweet fighting game that sort of played like smash bros but had an atari look.  Yeah, too many good games to count.  All totally free and independently made with heart and elbow grease.  

I'll fill in more on this event as I get better information.  I do know that they had one of these: A Winnitron, which they called Winnitron SJ. Winnitron is the product of an indie gaming collective in Winnipeg, Canada, and they license out the Winnitron design to others to make their own arcade cabinets full of indie games.  Click the links above if you want more info.

I want to play some of those games again.  Like the platformer where you just walk and jump, but when you die you go to a parallel world where the ceiling is the floor, and then later you kind of jump between the screens and it's a puzzle platformer and the graphics are nice, remind me of cavestory +.   Oh, and the MIT game where you slow down the speed of light and thus increase the range of the visible spectrum, but it controls like complete shit, which stunts the whole experience.  Neat idea though.

Okay, again, trying to end this post.   I would like to organize it into a series of previews, when I can get some titles for yah.   TTFN.


***Edit:  I just remembered one of the games:  Nidhogg!  This game is stupid amounts of fun.  It's two players, so you absolutely must have a second player to have all the great fun available.  I highly recommend playing it in an arcade cabinet if you can get to one.   

***10/16/2012: another edit:  I got the games list.  You can find it here:  List of games featured at Cooperative Gaming Co-op.  I will be reviewing the games I played and looking for links to play them online.

Horror games and preview of the Chzo Mythos

is this mansion... spooky?

Happy Halloween everyone.  Or at least, Happy Halloween month.  Being October, the month of all Hallows eve.

I'd like to review a horror game for October, but unfortunately I am not able to review my game of choice,  due to some platforming restrictions combined with a lack of time, dedication, and computer competence.  But I'll talk about the game, or series of games, and maybe it will pique your interest and maybe you'll try them out for yourself.   In the meantime, I'll also direct you to a previous post about a survival horror game I gave impressions on:  Lone Survivor.

The series of games I would like to refer you to today are called the Chzo Mythos, by Ben "Yahtzee" Kreshaw.  Kreshaw is well known for his Zero Punctuation series of game reviews at The Escapist.  These videos tend to be hilarious, and exceedingly harsh.  I highly recommend them. I was delighted and intrigued to find out that he had tried his hand at game creating, and had produced a whole series of games in the psychological horror genre.  They seem to have received accolades of some kind. 

Ben Kreshaw put together the first game in the Chzo Mythos - 'Five Days a Stranger' - In 2003, long before he began his reviews for the Escapist.  I think it is noteworthy that Chzo Mythos makes use of the Slender Man mythos and imagery. I am very curious to see how these games will play, and even more so, knowing that such a harsh critic was the progenitor for this series of Psychological Horror - Adventure Games.

idunno, looks pretty sweet to me.

Psychological and Survival are definitely my two favorite subgenre's within the larger Horror genre of games.  I don't care much about blood and gore, or action.  What's more important is fear.  Terror.  Some third word I can't think of.  That is the draw to horror games for me.  These games can scare me even when I'm not playing them, like, when you reach a point where you just don't have the guts to go any further, and you turn the game off and despair.  Silent Hill did that for me.  I ran like a sissy and hid the game at the bottom of stack of heavy boxes.  Then I crossed myself and begged forgiveness for all of my sins.

But to create and maintain such a strong psychological response to a game takes real skill.  We've talked before on this site about losing immersion in a game.  Some games can lose immersion and it never really comes back.  Like when there's just too much ammo, and you don't fear running out anymore, or when you figure out the trick to a game is to just low kick everybody.  Or when the enemies die in only three different ways, and they bleed out the neck when you shoot them in the foot.  

A careful management of the known and unknown is important.  As the player adjusting to a new game, you can't know what you can get away with.  If you are susceptible, like me, this will lead to you moving very carefully and jumping at every shadow.   But eventually, you might get tired of being scared, and just get suicidal.  Running headlong into the night to see if there is, in fact, anything down that alley.  This can break immersion pretty heavily, if you find out that there really isn't anything to be scared of.

This is why the games flow is important.  At different points along the way, the designers will have to put the smack down on the cocky fucks who think they don't have to be scared anymore.  GIVE them something to be scared about.  Make it different from what has come before, and thus unpredictable.  The Unknown is where the fear comes from.   Exploit it!

Okay, I think that's all I have for right now.  On a separate note, I just watched Cabin in the Woods.  That movie was great fun. 

First Impressions: Amnesia ~ The Dark Descent (PC)

I've been playing this game for a bit.  Steam says that it's been for about three hours, which is pretty decent amount of time to get a general feel for a game.  Some might even say, that it's the first impression of the game.  Eh, eh?

I started this game a few weeks ago, one night because Conklederp wanted to watch me play a game.  Any game.  And I had this game called Amnesia: The Dark Descent from the Humble Bundle 5 and all I knew about it was that it was an FPS survival horror game.  Sounded like fun considering it was probably around 11pm and I didn't have work the following morning.

Upon booting up (do people still say that?), the game lets you know that there will be enemies in the game and that it would probably behoove you, the player, to run the fuck away from them as you are unarmed and they will most likely kill you.  That's always a good thing to know.  And as the game was progressing, it gave out hints/reminders that running away from "monsters" will keep you alive even though I spent three hours in the game before I came across anything that could kill me, outside of the invisible bipedal water monster bastard.  But that's getting ahead of ourselves.

Once the game started, I had to acquaint myself with the controls and basic mechanics so that I wouldn't go spinning in circles instead of sprinting forward at the first sight of danger (a la Slender: The Eight Pages).  Your health meter is represented by a physical heart that subtly decreases in size and healthy-looking-ness as you accrue damage and you're given a textual example, such as "A wound is bleeding quite badly."  I was also excited to find out that the game implemented a "Sanity Meter," which, to my own knowledge, has only existed in one other game previously.  I believe the game also said something about if your sanity dropped too low (by witnessing horrific events or by being in the dark too much, that crazy shit would happen and you would die.  Now you're able to regain sanity and health by completing puzzles in game, but that just usually means that you'll be healthy for the next set of darkened hallways.

That brings up another point about the game: the Darkness comes.  Ho-fucking-boy does the darkness come.  Throughout the game, or at least the first four hours of it that I've played, you will periodically find tinder boxes to light candles/torches and lamp oil to use in your hand lamp.  This must be some pretty thin oil too as your lamp will burn through a half-full canister in maybe a minute; probably less though.  I rarely would have my lamp "on" for more than a couple of seconds in order to preserve what little oil I did have left.  And the tinderboxes, I would hoard those like ink ribbons.  The early areas in the game tend to load you up with tinderboxes making you think that you'll be able to find one in every bookcase or desk drawer.  If only we knew then what we know now four hours in.  The game will also give many options for lighting things to give you light.  In a single hallway, you'll easily find three or four torches that you could light and while it would make the hallway nice a pretty, it would not be advisable as you would be out of tinderboxes and left in the dark.  This did in fact happen and I was scared near shitless the entire time.

At the moment, I'm currently in a large hall area with a fountain containing either a corpse or just the statue of one.  The only sanity effects I've witnessed have been warbliness of the screen and once cockroaches were crawling over the screen for about 20 seconds then disappeared. I'm enjoying the game, but sometimes I'll get frustrated with not having any lantern oil and having to sprint between lit candles, so much so that I feel like it takes me out of the game.  So with four hours of game play in (I played another hour since I began writing this article, hence the one hour discrepancy), I'd like to try to finish and figure out what the hell's going on.

First Impressions : Slender

Hey, it's October! It's getting cold, people are putting fake spiders on their houses, and Army of Darkness is playing in theaters. You know what that means- Halloween is near! I am a horror junkie, so I never pass up a good excuse to scare myself.

Jaconian has mentioned a game called Slender in some previous blog posts, and a few days ago he got me to play it. I'd watched him play before and it was creepy but it wasn't anything I couldn't handle. I'm a pretty big fan of all things horror and I don't frighten easily, so I figured why not?

How do I say this? Slender scared the crap out of me. The first thing I learned was that being the one behind the controls suddenly makes everything more real. I realize this might seem obvious, but I'm usually the person watching, not playing. Suddenly I had to make all the decisions. And if "Slenderman" shows up, he's here for me, not somebody else. And as a person who doesn't do a whole lot of PC gaming, having a poor grasp of the controls made it even more horrifying. Like I can't run away even if I want to. It also doesn't help any that the game design bears an uncanny resemblance to the woods where I spent my childhood summers.

Exhibit A : Vendée, Quebec

Exhibit B : Terrifying Slenderman-ville, Ohjeeztown

Yeah, I'm never going out there at night ever again. Slender definitely takes the minimal approach to horror. With the exception of some distant rumblings, a low, barely noticeable drone, and a super rare "scare chord" there isn't much of a soundtrack. You don't fight any enemies. You don't solve any puzzles. Your one and only goal is to collect eight pieces of paper that are randomly scattered throughout the game. The thing is, the more papers you get, the more you risk running into Slenderman. The game runs entirely on tension. It doesn't waste time with blood or violence. It elegantly accesses our deep-rooted fear of the unknown.

 Anyway, here are some notes I jotted down immediately after playing :

 Heart was pounding, mouth was dry, body temp. dropped a good 5 degrees, definitely screamed out loud when Slenderman popped out unexpectedly. Reminds me wayyy too much of Vendée. Okay guys, let's just go home now, okay??? HUGE difference between watching and playing, although watching is also pants-shittingly terrifying. Animation for when you get caught will haunt my dreams probably. Great!

The only negative I've heard about this game is that if you play it for too long it's possible to become desensitized, since the "caught by Slenderman" animation stays the same each time. Personally? I have yet to muster the courage to play for long enough to become desensitized in the first place.
Overall rating: 5/5

Angry Birds

So, now that I've gotten three stars on the first four stages of Angry Birds, I think I'm ready to post about this game. (This is not to rub it in, Jaques, I'm just pretty into this game).  I realize that volumes and volumes must have already been written on this game.  Oh well, here’s one more.

This is a game I only play while taking a crap.  And occasionally while waiting for something.  This means that I play it for at least five minutes every day (sometimes longer).  In fact, there are definitely times when I'll be sitting on the pot at work, and I'll realize "oh wait a second, I didn't come in here to play angry birds."

But what i want to talk about, apart from taking dumps, is my experience with Angry Birds.  After playing through Angry Birds and several of the expansion stages, I began to get tired and bored with the new levels and started over from the beginning with a goal of getting three stars on each level.  I think that playing the game so extensively prepared me for the three-star challenge, and I found my interest renewed and reinvigorated by this greater challenge.  Now that I've gotten three stars on the first four stages, my interest is waning again (prompted in part, by how very different the "ham 'em high" stage is from the other stages).  But I'd like to share the strategies I learned along the way.  

The first and most basic strategy to Angry Birds success is to familiarize yourself with the "restart" button.  I usually restart a given level a minimum of ten times before getting three  stars, and sometimes many more times than that.  Once I get a feel for a level, I'll restart it after the first bird if it doesn't do exactly what I want it to do. Some levels will only take five minutes to beat, and others will take days.  I've definitely played myself cross-eyed trying to get three stars on some of these Angry Birds stages.

Okay, with an intimate familiarity with the restart button, you are ready to proceed to the next Strategy.  Which is to try and beat a level using the minimum number of birds possible.  Any leftover birds will be worth a whopping 10000 points. This usually means finding the best possible "breaking point" for a given level.  Or at least close to it.  The game can actually be forgiving in this department.  So launch your first bird into said breaking point, and mayhem will ensue.  Take note of how many points you made with this first shot, and be prepared to restart any of your subsequent turns if they do not match or beat this number.

This strategy will work for a while, but after a certain point, it gets harder and harder to get the three star rating with just the 10k bonus for preserving birds.  The last strategy I have discovered is employed at this point.  This is the strategy of total destruction.  Rather than preserving birds, spend them trying to destroy as much of the level as possible.  You can sometimes get more than 10k points in a single turn based on destruction alone.  Ultimately, a combination of these approaches seems to work best.   

So, that's about it.  Pretty simple stuff.  Restart Frequently, Destroy as much as possible with as few birds as possible, but don't be afraid to spend a bird on destruction if the spare-bird-bonus isn't doing it for you.  Happy Birding,

-Dave

The Final Chapter

This will be the final post in the adventure to purchase 6d10 dice from Epic Gaming, a gaming store I located through Yelp because I didn't want to travel 28 miles round trip.  There'll also be an epilogue about ordering pizza, although that's not really game related.  But anyway.

After driving somewhere around 4 miles from Dutch Bros. to Epic Gaming, I sat in my car briefly pondering if I should take in my half finished espresso boosted coffee drink so that I could have something in my hands to keep them busy in the off chance that they didn't have dice or more specifically, individual d10 dice.  Then the etiquette part of my brain said that I shouldn't bring in a drink to a store.

The store itself was pretty empty once I made my way in.  And by "empty," I mean empty in two ways.  The first being that there was a lot of space in the store and not a lot of it was taken up by actual gaming materials.  I later noticed that most/all of the gaming materials were up against the walls while the middle was left open for the activity of gaming itself.  The second "empty" was that there was only myself, one guy behind the counter and four others playing Magic at one of about six large collapsible tables in the middle of the room.

This brings up another thing that will get to me.  For some reason, people playing Magic intimidate me.  Always have.  If there's a group of people sitting at a table (or multiple tables) playing any iteration of Magic, I will avoid that area.  Most of it is because I never got into Magic and have no real idea what is going on.  I "understand" that each player has a deck with a certain number of cards and those cards do things or can undo things.  There's something called "tapping" in regards to cards being in/out of play.  And if you have enough money, you can build yourself a near unstoppable deck.  Is there even such a thing?  I don't know.  I've also heard (as in physically heard in person) shit-talking in regards to people's decks that to me just isn't cool for gaming.

Back to to the store.  I noticed the people playing Magic, and my brain immediately transitioned from "search mode" to "just buy the fucking dice already."  Once at the counter, I stumbled out the question about individual dice because in the display case, all that I could see were prepackaged Chessex dice.  It turned out, like another games store I frequented in Sacramento, the dice were behind the counter in a gumball-type plastic hand-grab container.  I quickly picked out 6d10 of different colors, but still colors that I thought people would actually want to use for Munchkin, made my purchase and then, was able to calm down.  

I then walked over to where it looked like there were some miniatures and as it turned out, some of the expansion decks for Munchkin.  By this point I had already used the $5 I had in cash for the dice (they were  75¢ each) and didn't want to break out my credit card having already made my purchase.  I had also read on Yelp that Epic Gaming also sold video games, which I would have liked to check out, but again, being the odd person that I am, felt that I needed to leave the store having already made my only intended purchase.  Again, I know it's odd behavior/line of reasoning, but that's just how my brain functions.

Then I left the store and drove back home.  That's the whole story.  Yes, I lead a very exciting life.

Epilogue

I don't know how long this has been around, but Pizza Hut allows you to place orders online.  Without having to talk to anyone!  I'm able to pick out what type of pizza(s) I want, toppings, side orders and such.  Then pay with a credit card and have my pizza delivered.  The only talking is upon greeting the delivery person, and that's only to tip the driver and sign the receipt.  I love not having to talk to a person on the phone and explain what I want, turn down hearing about specials or be put on hold for a couple of minutes.  In a similar vain, it's like going into Little Caesar's Pizza, ordering two large pepperoni pizzas and walking out  with them less than two minutes later using only a minimum of the known English language.  Yes, it's all fast food pizza, but it's perfect for what it is, cheap semi-tasty pizza.  Except that Little Caesar's Pizza is actually really good.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Everything Remains As It Never Was

Never Stopped Feeling Like a 12 Year Old Geek.

Last Thursday, Conklederp and I were having Coolman over for a game of Munchkin and I had previously thought that a d10 die would be perfect to keep track of your level, which apparently Steve Jackson and Company had previously thought of, but are no longer producing.  Now between the two of us, Conklederp and I have three full sets of D&D dice (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20 & d100) and I didn't want to take the d10's out of each little box and possibly lose them.  I wanted dedicated dice for the sole purpose of being used in Munchkin.

The obvious solution was to go to a pseudo close by gaming store, except the closeness of said gaming store meant driving through a downtown area of a smallish yuppie-ville, over an apparently crumbling bridge and then all the way back.  So a 16.6 mile round trip for 6d10 worth of dice.  Enter Yelp to see if I could locate a closer gaming, or even a comic store that might sell d10 dice.  As it turned out, there is a gaming store less than five miles away.  I'll go there, and pick up some Dutch Bros. coffee on my way back, because I have a horrible love affair with caffeine.

We'll now jump ahead to the part when I'm at Dutch Bros., after I was convinced that I had been on the wrong road for Epic Games and made a U-turn, only to discover 3/4 of the way to Dutch Bros., that I was, in fact, on the correct street.  So I pull up to the ordering window, order my iced ER911 and sit back.  Then the  guy at the window turns to me and says, "So, what are you doing today?"  It's a simple/normal enough question.  I just wasn't expecting to be talked to after the initial ordering.  I also took a moment to answer.  My first thought was, "Well, I'm going to a gaming store to buy some d10's for a game of Munchkin that I'm going to be playing with friends later tonight."

For some reason, I felt mildly shamed at possibly replying with that sentence.  And that bothered me.  The fact that I'm 32 years old, and I felt even the slightest bit like I'm being judged in that I was out to do something incredibly geeky as buy dice  Not to mention that it wasn't a six sided die either, but one with ten sides!!  So I ended up just saying that I was going to a store to buy dice, not bothering to mention the Munchkin part of it in fear that I would have to talk to this person further and try to explain what Munchkin was.  Don't get me wrong though, he didn't seem like a bad/intimidating person, I just get uncomfortable talking to people, mainly when they're people in public.  Or people on the phone, but that will come up later in Friday's post.  So naturally (??), the guy said "You're buying dice?  What're they for?"  Now, I get that he's just trying to be nice and trying to make conversation, but in my head I was thinking "God damn, please stop talking to me."  I instead say, "They're dice, for um, like Dungeons & Dragons."  He then said something about needing coffee for that, I said something like "Yup."  I then received my coffee, I thanked him, then drove off blaring Russian folk metal, because that's what I was listening to before I drove up to the window.

As I drove away, I thought, "Holy shit, that was similar to part of Ken Levine's keynote from PAX 2008." 

The entire keynote can be watched here.

 Granted in Ken Levine's story, he actually was being laughed at and I felt like I could've been laughed at.  

The point is, I shouldn't have to feel like that.  Ever.  And I shouldn't let myself feel that way just because the purpose of my leaving our apartment was to buy coffee and buy 6d10.  I guess it's something that I'll still have to learn to get over.  And in the meantime, I'll listen to this song again:

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Part III of Munchkin Will Be Published On Friday.

Confession Time:  I was actually working backstage in the main theatre at PAX when Ken Levine was giving his keynote address.  At that time, I hadn't played Bioshock and didn't even know who Ken Levine was.  And it wasn't until I got the PAX08 DVD's after working PAX09, that I watched his keynote that I finally saw what all the visual jokes were.  I'm pretty slow on some fronts.