Topic: Video Game OSTs

You know what I love? Video game music. So it really curls my figurative tail when people insist to me that it doesn't matter, that it's a trivial part of a game. I feel that video game soundtracks are a versatile medium that, like classical music, is capable of conveying a lot of different emotions all in one piece.

That seems like a really bold claim, but hear me out before ripping me a new one. Music by itself is an art medium that transcends a lot of barriers: time, language, age, you name it. Anyone can feel the emotion in an opera, even if they don't speak Italian, for example. The same thing can be said for a video game soundtrack. Even listened to out of order, even if the listener has no idea about the setting, theme, or feeling of the game, they can guess by listening to its soundtrack.

Take this, for example. It's a piece from Namco's Tales of Symphonia. It's a specific character's theme. To be exact, it's the theme of Zelos Wilder, one of the party members that you pick up along your journey. Let's jot down a couple things we notice about his theme as we listen to it:

1. It's got a fast tempo. It's upbeat.
2. It's a major chord. It sounds happy. Listening to it, in turn, makes you feel happy.
3. We can pick out a couple of instruments in there. Steel drums and ukuleles are two of the first things that we hear. Both of those instruments are associated with laid back attitudes.
4. The song isn't all that serious sounding; it's lighthearted and almost fun.

So, if we had to guess anything about this character, it'd be what we learned just from listening to the theme here. He must be a laid back, upbeat, cheery kind of character. He must be someone who can keep the group going even when the going gets rough, right?

Okay, that was a fun exercise. Now, let's listen to that again, with a little change.

What do you notice now? It's the same song. It's for the same character, from the same game. But its presentation is completely different. Let's name the ways.

1. It's very slow. It's down tempo.
2. It's still a major chord, but played with a harmony in minor. Minor harmonies and chords are indicative of feeling sad. This song is no exception.
3. We can still pick out a couple of instruments here. One of them seems to be a guitar. Another appears to be a cello. The brass is synthesized, but we can tell that it's supposed to be a brass section, and we can hear some bells. Together, they paint a picture of sadness.

The tempo and the choices of instruments are important; they let us know what we're supposed to feel. The song itself can reveal more about the story, or the point in the plot, than any amount of dialogue or animation can. Most importantly, the music can tell a person who's never even played the game before that something happens to this character, or that this character does something that is going to make us feel something. It has to, or the change in song wouldn't be there.

Music in video games can tell us a lot about the environment of a specific place, too, not just about character. Let's move away from JRPGs and move onto a western game. (As in, a game made in the west, not a game about gun-slinging and horseback riding.)

Let's use Assassin's Creed 2 for an example. This is the theme for Venice Rooftops. It's atmospheric, and sets the mood perfectly for a few key points in the game. We can tell that it's evocative of being in the air, or at least off the ground. It's flighty, in a way, and has an almost uplifting feel to it. But it's rooted in the sense of urgency that it carries in its undertones. Even with the desperation that's present, it carries a push to it that makes you keep wanting to move forward. It's the perfect song to set the mood for a game like AC2, because even though you'd like to explore what's probably the best virtual recreation of Renaissance Italy, you still have to be careful and keep your head down. By this point in the game, you're a wanted man. The music alone is able to remind you of this while seldom letting you know with words how important it is that you be careful. 

The entire soundtrack is like that. Hauntingly beautiful, awe-inspiring even though it carries a heavy weight within its notes.That's important in a game, especially one with as much atmosphere as Assassin's Creed. Trying to convey all those emotions with only words would be tiring. Music hits a resonance with us on a primal, almost subconscious level. Effective music is as important for setting moods and making us feel things as connecting with characters and an interest in a story. Everyone has that one song that they can't listen to without tearing up. (Admit it, you do.) 

Why? Because it resonates. Music is able to intertwine with our emotions in a way other art forms - written words, acted events, painted scenes - can't always connect with us. It's why we can feel the sadness in Zelos' theme up there but we can't always feel sad for Aunt Bertha when she sends us her monthly letter from prison. Maybe if she composed some sort of concerto, we'd be able to feel bad for her.

Try playing a video game with no soundtrack sometime. Just go into options and turn off your background music but leave your sound effects and voiceovers on. See how invested you are in the story then. I can almost ensure that you'll think that there's something missing. You'd be right, because a good chunk of the story can only be found while you're listening to the music, even if you don't notice it consciously. 

Weekend Flashback #1 - Ratchet and Clank (2002, PS2)

Title: Ratchet and Clank
Original Release Date: November 4, 2002
Platform: Playstation 2
ESRB Rating: T

There's a couple of reasons why I've decided to choose Ratchet and Clank  as the first "Weekend Flashback" installment. First off, it's because this year is the franchise's tenth anniversary. (Oh my god, I'm so old.) Second of all, it's because the Ratchet and Clank Collection is coming out later this year, and it's a re-release of the first three games in the series in pretty high-def. (I've included a link to preorder it at the end of this post.) I'm just not patient enough to wait until then to play R&C again. I'm like Veruca Salt; I want it now.

So, I reached into the handy gaming cabinet and got it.

I have a lot of fond memories of playing this game with Dave when it came out. Parts of it were frustratingly difficult, and others I breezed right through. There were moments that I would eventually give up on and actually have him complete for me because I was sick of spending days stuck on the same planet and watching him progress way ahead of me. To me, this is the perfect game to revisit first because of both its anniversary and because of the memories that it evokes.

And the greatest thing about this game, I think, is that it's aged fairly well. It's definitely cruder than the pretty R&C: Future installments we've grown used to seeing, but it doesn't - by any means - look outdated, old, or poor. Even being played on my PS2, on the family's flat-screen HDTV, the game looks nice. I've seen modern Wii games that look worse than this does.

Though that might just say something about the Wii.

And the gameplay, while sometimes more irritating than I remember it being, also isn't bad. It's mostly being used to tighter gameplay mechanics than the PS2 could really offer ten years ago. The rest of it is just being used to the way the series works now and forgetting how it worked when I was thirteen. It's sometimes tough to get my jumps timed right from platform to platform or over a long distance. That's gameplay mechanics. But the rest of it is me trying to shoot with the R1 button instead of the circle and getting my ass unfortunately handed to me. It's led to a lot of laughing and good-natured swearing between both my father and myself as we tried to play through the game, recalling the places that gave us a hard time ten years ago.

I did happen to notice a couple things now (probably because I'm older) than I did then. The biggest one, for me, was how completely obnoxious Ratchet is. In later games, namely the Future arc, he took more to the battle-weary hero archetype. In R&C, I found him to be selfish and childish, and found myself fairly short-tempered at his attitude - the constant backtalking, his needless overuse of snark - and honestly couldn't wait for him to shut up. After the original R&C, he was much more likable, more "mature" I guess, and it's his current personae that I attribute with today's Ratchet. If he'd stayed the same from this game to the next onee, I can't imagine the series being nearly as successful.

Verdict: Overall, the original Ratchet and Clank, the one that started it all, is still a solid game. It's still fun to play, getting all the hidden golden bolts still drives me crazy, and unlocking all the skill points still keeps me up until ungodly hours of the morning. Some of the controls seem clunky and awkward in retrospect, and moving around in the overworld doesn't seem as tight now as it did then. But it's still a great way to pass a couple of days to revisit the story if you don't have anything better to do and you can stand Ratchet's douchebaggery for more than a few hours at a time.

Notes:  You can pre-order The Ratchet and Clank Collection from Amazon.com.

Welcome to the Weekend Flashback!

Welcome to the very first Weekend Flashback, where I take a game that's a decade or older and replay it for funsies. We all know that not all games age gracefully, but looked pretty damn good at the time they were released. Well, between the totally amazing Dave and myself, we have plenty of classic games between us. And, more often than not, we sit around and continue to play old games together rather than tackle the massive amount of newer games facing us.

Why is that? Because many older games have so much fun built into a simple game mechanic that we find a lot of other games can't compare. So, I've decided to revisit a lot of the old games in our library to see if they're still fun. I'll be dusting off the games that Dave and I wasted days on when I was a kid to see if they're still as playable now as they were then, and all to answer the question: Is this game still fun?

There's a few criteria that I'll be using in my judgement:

1. All games that I'll be looking at have to be ten years old or older. Why? Because that's given the graphics a chance to age, given game mechanics a plenty long time to evolve, and given the game enough time to both be forgotten and for me to forget how good/bad it was overall. I'm more likely to punish myself through a bad game again if I forgot how frustrating it was the first time aroung.
2. It doesn't matter if a game has been re-released on some kind of "virtual console" platform. Chances are high - and I'll tell you otherwise, I promise - that I'll be playing it on its original system. So if something was released for the PSone, I'll be busting out my PSone and playing it. If something came out on the N64, that's where I'll be playing it. I'll stack it up against its re-released version if I happen to own it, but for the most part, this is truly classic gaming being played true to its roots.
3. Finally, in the case of games that have been localized to the US, I'll be using the game's US release date as my definitive guide for age, unless I'm using the imported version of the game. If I'm using a non-US version, I'll say so before I start my write up.

You won't see games like Super Mario Bros. or the original Legend of Zelda on the Weekend Flashback. Why? Because we already know that they've 1) aged gracefully and 2) are still fun. Games like that regularly show up on "Best Video Game" lists of all sorts, and it's clear why: they were industry leaders in their day, and we're still seeing their influences on modern gaming. I'm looking pointedly at games that might have gotten themselves overlooked when they came out, or that might have fallen into the sands of time only to be forgotten as newer games overshadowed them.

This week, I'll be starting with Insomniac Games' Ratchet and Clank from 2002. That post will go live in about an hour, so check back later and see if the first game in the best-selling installment is still worth a play.

Review: Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe Issue #1

Picture from Marvel.com

Little known fact: I love comics. I have since I was a little kid. Here's another little known fact: Deadpool, the Merc with a Mouth,  was my first ever superhero. I discovered him around issue three or four of his '97 run and it's been love ever since.

So I was understandably excited when news of Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe started to circulate. It took the same 'Pool that I'd grown up reading and gave him a decidedly dark, sinister turn. My only hope was that it was going to be convincing, that all of Deadpool's wit and snark could still fit within a darker universe.

All my dreams have come true within the first issue. Wade is still witty and snide, but thanks to the writing and his own underlying insanity, he's just short of completely despicable. We're introduced to the same Deadpool that most readers will be used to, but thanks to the "intervention" of the X-Men, we get to see a side of Wade that isn't usually apparent. By the end of the issue, all the pieces are in play and, thanks to Deadpool's trademark fourth-wall breaking, the reader gets to feel the threat level of the Marvel 'verse rising to critical levels firsthand by being indirectly addressed themselves.

We don't get to see a lot of bloodshed yet, but the promise is there for much more to come in the following three weeks as the series plays out. Given how it's started, I've been hooked and I'm ready to go along for the ride.

Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe #1 is written by Cullen Bunn, drawn by Dalibor Talajić, and colored by Lee Loughridge. Issue one is available now, and new issues will be released weekly.

Why I Hate the Start of New Semesters: An Introspective Look

The new semester started for me on Monday, and it marks a few big things. Firstly, it kicks off my last semester in my Associate's program. Secondly, it beats my ass down into a rhythm and schedule that it's gotten used to not having over winter break. And thirdly, it opens that old can of worms that is, in a nutshell, all my phobias and paranoias at once.

You might think that last part sounds silly, but the start of a new semester brings me more stress than it does anything else. And I'm not talking about things like getting lost on campus (it's small) or not being able to get my books (because my aunt buys them online as long as I keep my grades up) or thinking my professor is going to be a dick (because they're all pretty decent people.) I'm talking about big, panic-inducing things like:

• Obsessing over the male/female ratio of the class I signed up for.
  That might not seem like a big deal, the male/female ratio of a class of students, especially when I talk so casually about hanging out with friends and meeting people. But the first day of class presents me with more stress than anything else because being in a room with strangers makes me feel vulnerable to begin with. Being in a room full of strangers who are all men amplifies that tenfold, even though I've historically gotten along better with men than with women. I feel more comfortable when there's at least four to six other women in a classroom with me, even though chances are I won't talk to one of those women. As it stands, for the first two weeks of classes, I won't talk to anyone unless I absolutely have to, and that leads me to...
• I hate having to make new connections and meet new people.
  This is where it starts getting sticky. When I go into a classroom full of other people, I go there to learn things and listen to what the professor has to say, and read my Facebook if he starts getting boring. I don't go into class to make friends. So, nine times out of ten, I'll be sitting in class minding my own business and someone starts talking to me and I'll freeze. I'm not exactly socially awkward, but talking and meeting new people has never been my greatest skill. So when someone does talk to me, I have to mentally reboot and think of something to say back while trying not to look like some kind of socially stunted community college kid. Half the time, the response I give out is prickly, short, or offhanded. That's not because I don't want to know you, per se, it's just because I'm dealing with so much stress that I don't know what to do with myself, let alone this person next to me who just asked what my major is.
• Not knowing if there's anyone else I know in class.
  This is a good one. I work in my college's greenhouse, and one of the things I've heard my professor say before is, "You act differently in here with me than you do out in the hall or in class." When I asked him to clarify, he told me that outside of class, unless I'm with a friend, I'm more prone to flee from groups, avert my eyes from contact, and sit away from central locations and just be by myself. But when I'm with people I know (as well as when I'm in the greenhouse,) he pointed out, I'm more likely to be open, to tell jokes and meet new people. So his question was, why the change in personae? Because having people with me who already know my personality makes it easier for me to act like that in front of other people. My friends already know that I'm prone to sudden song and dance, that I like to tell jokes and tell anecdotes. They don't give me a whole lot of grief for who I am, because we're fairly like-minded people to begin with. So when I'm already with a group of people "like me" it's easier for me to apply that to group settings. It's easier for me to do the things that I do, because I won't be "that weird girl who bursts into song." Instead, I'll be "that weird girl who bursts into song with those other guys." So when I walk into a classroom and see people I know, that stress level goes down by a whole lot, and it makes it easier to adjust to a new setting.
• I contemplate dropping a class depending on what the room looks like.
  And by "what the room looks like," I mean that whole male/female ratio thing and the friends in class thing, not "this room is yellow and it sucks, so I'm not taking this class." I'll stay in a class for a week before deciding if I'm going to stay or not. If the male/female ratio doesn't work itself out, or if there's no one in my class that I know, I'm more likely to drop that class than I am if there's a lot of women in the room, or if I have a friend I can sit next to.

My classes this semester are a really great example of this. I'm in three classes that I need to finish my degree: a lab science, a social science, and an English elective. Each one of these classes pretty neatly describe all the points that I noted above that make me really nervous.

In my lab science, the men far outweigh the women almost 2:1. But I know a woman in the class who was nice enough to sit next to me. She's not a friend in the strictest form of the word, but we've had a class together before and we got along well and I felt comfortable in her presence, so when I saw her walk into the room, it was a complete relief.

My social science, by comparison, is mostly women with just a few men. We outnumber them at a fairly high 3:1. I have no problems with those numbers, I sit beside a bunch of girls, and I've already started talking to a few of them. It's a more comfortable atmosphere than my lab, and I feel like I can cope better.

Lastly, my English class has two people that I not only know, but that I'm good friends with. And I know these two people well enough to know that they'd get along well together, to boot. So even though it's mostly men in the class, I have two people I'm really, really close to in class with me, and no one else matters. We can sit in a corner and chat before class, and then communicate through our series of eye rolls and grins during class. I wouldn't even consider switching out to another class, because this one is fun.

It doesn't seem like it'd be a big deal about who would be around you in a classroom, but those are the first things that I take note of every semester on the first week of classes. I become a week-long nervous wreck until I can calm down and start communicating with people like a normal human being. In a week, I'll be fine, but until then, I'll be a trainwreck.

Well, it's a new year...

This year, I'm going to try harder to update. I'm realizing that there's a lot of stuff I've been noodling around with that I could/should/wanted to put up here but never did. So, this year, there's going to be more posts from this guy.

Here's hoping I can maintain that enthusiasm.

Topic: Gaming - Tales Series

February 2012 is going to be a big month for me. Honestly, I'm excited. No, it's not because there's a major life event coming my way, nor is it because I'll be in my final semester of college. Remember when I said that gaming was a big part of what I did? That it was my "thing?" February is going to be a big month because my all-time favorite game series is releasing two new US titles that month: Namco-Bandai's Tales series will be releasing Tales of Graces F on the PS3 and a remake of 2005's Tales of the Abyss for the 3DS.

I'm so excited that I can hardly contain it.

In the US, the Tales series is overshadowed by the Final Fantasy series, and we hardly ever get to see Tales titles here in the US. The last one that came out here was 2008's Tales of Vesperia on the Xbox 360. (True facts: I bought a 360 just so I could play Vesperia. I'm not kidding.) In Japan, four Tales games have come out since Vesperia. Those are Tales of Vesperia (remade for PS3 with new playable characters and a deeper storyline to coinside with the movie), Tales of Hearts (DS), Tales of Graces (originally on the Wii, and remade for PS3), and Tales of Xillia (also on PS3). US fans will never see Hearts, and there's a decent chance that we won't see Xillia, either, which is a damn shame.

Namco-Bandai has been hinting that, if Graces and Abyss 3D sell well enough, we might see a localized version of Tales of Xillia. "Might" is the key word there. I said it once up there, and I'll say it again: that's a damn shame, because the Tales games are some of the finest JRPGs I have ever played, and I've played a lot of them.

For starters, every mothership title to date has had an extremely strong storyline behind it, with a cast of extremely strong (and well-voiced) main characters to drive it. 2004's Tales of Symphonia had Lloyd Irving as its leading man - kindhearted, strong-willed, a bit slow, and a strong sense of justice - and Colette Brunel as its leading lady - polite, quiet, and overwhelmingly kind. The rest of the main cast was just as strong and believable as its two main characters were, and even when the story hit a cliche that would otherwise make you groan, it somehow worked within the game's universe and kept you pulled in. It's been seven years since that game has come out, and I still sit down to play through its story. That alone should tell you something. 2006's Tales of the Abyss on PS2 was just as strong. Main characters: Luke fon Fabre, selfish, bratty prince, and Tear Grants, a disciplined, tough soldier. Storyline: gave me a mindfuck the first time I played it. Did it again the second and third time, and I knew that it was going to happen.

I could run through all the Tales games that I've played and tell you why it's a strong game while trying not to give away the plot, but we'd both be here all day. The best way to see for yourself is to go down to GameStop, or go over to Amazon, and get yourself a used copy of Tales of Vesperia on the 360. Play it, give it at least until you get to Capua Nor to make up your mind. If you like role playing games, the Tales series will never disappoint.

If you're too lazy to go out there and play a game, or you don't have the necessary time, go watch an anime. Phantasia, Eternia, Symphonia, Abyss, and Vesperia all have anime adaptations. Phantasia and Abyss are out in the US.

Don't just brush the Tales series off as another run-of-the-mill JRPG. It's so much more than that, I promise.

HEY! 
Do you maybe already know all about what I said about the Tales series up there? Do you want to help out - as a fan - to try to get more of these games over here in English?

Then hop on over to Facebook - I know you have one - and go "like" the Aselian Movement. It's the headlining page in a fan-created movement to get Bamco to acknowledge that yes, Tales fans exist outside of Japan, and YES WE WANT GAMES DAMMIT. And then go like the other pages involved in the movement. You can read about what the Aselian Movement is all about, as well as find about the other games involved in the movement by reading about them here.