Robots Will Be Our Superiors

I have a WordPress plugin that tracks various statistics about the traffic that visits my site.  It’s interesting to see how much it’s dropped off since I stopped posting.  That’s the thing about the internet – gotta keep coming out with new content or people will stop caring.

I am very excited to say that one of my favorite video games of all time, Secret of Mana (SNES), is being released on the Wii virtual console.  Much like the game Chrono Trigger that I like to go on and on and on about, Secret of Mana has a fantastic soundtrack.  It’s generally considered to be one of the best RPGs ever made, and is one of a handful of games that represents the pinnacle of the SNES as a system.  I’m very excited.  Once I get the Wii set up, I’m downloading it fo sho.

Speaking of which, we just got our internet at the new house hooked up today.  For nearly a week I was stuck with Work Internet, which has all of the good stuff filtered out of it.  Now that I have my wireless network back up and running, life is almost back to normal.  I’ll be posting more often for the handful of people that actually read what I write.  (Congratulations, Kevin and Jen!)

One of the few rooms yet to be done is what will eventually be our office and music room.  Once that’s complete, I can go back to practicing in earnest and recording new music.  Hooray for music rooms!

I have enjoyed the franchise games that I’ve played on the Wii so far.  Mario Galaxy, Mario Kart Wii, Zelda, Smash Bros. – all excellent games.  (The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has been one of my favorites.)

Then I started to play Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.  It’s not a bad game, but I’m only an hour or two into it and they’ve already ripped off Halo, X-Men, to a small degree Quake II, and oddly enough The Lord of the Rings.

Like I said, the gameply is enjoyable enough, but the game is so Halo it almost hurts.  It’s not even doing a very good Halo.

I am also obliged to say that the music’s not very good, either.

In my previous post I talked a little bit about the more memorable scores from the 8-bit era.  The generation of consoles that followed (the fourth gen, for those keeping score at home) ushered in 16-bit hardware like the Sega Genesis and the Super NES.

I will freely admit that I was an SNES guy.  I didn’t own a Sega Genesis, but I did play Sega quite a bit with my friends.  Nintendo did, and probably always will, have the better franchise games, all of which were more appealing to me as a youth.  While it may seem a bit weird in retrospect that Nintendo has been milking the same games (Mario, Zelda, Metroid) with every console that comes out, one has to recognize that most of those games were exceptionally well made.  Sure, there’s a Mario Sunshine in every batch, but overall the Mario/Zelda/Metroid games have been genre-defining since the beginning.

All that is slightly off topic, however.  The 16-bit consoles offered more than just a graphics upgrade, the audio hardware got a facelift as well.  The limitations that were present with the NES went out the window, and video game composers were offered a whole new world of possibilities.  Compared to today’s technology it’s all quite dated, but compare simple sound effects like explosions and instrument sounds from one console to the other and you can hear that the SNES offered many more possibilities.

What resulted were what I consider to be the most well-written game soundtracks of all time.  These truly were soundtracks, not just background music.  There was real composition going on, real orchestral pieces being written and played back through a video game.  Two games, Final Fantasy VI (titled Final Fantasy III originally in the US) and Chrono Trigger exemplify the pinnacle of the video game music are.  Coincidentally, both had soundtracks composed by the same individual:

Nobuo Uematsu has been called the “John Williams” of the video game world, and rightfully so.  Uematsu has created some of the most well-written video game music on any console.  Uematsu was the composer for all of the core Final Fantasy games since FFI in 1987, and 1995 penned most of the music for Chrono Trigger.  Most of his soundtracks have several similarities, all of which are present in the two aforementioned games.  Each character has a theme that is used in different instances throughout the game.  This offers audio cues to the gamer and gives him or her a sense of familiarity and identity to each character.  The music for Chrono Trigger is so good that I bought the official soundtrack, which is a 3-CD set.  I believe there’s an orchestrated version out there somehwere, but what I have is the actual game music.  It’s kind of funny because there are a lot of tracks that are 5-seconds long or so because they’re simply musical cues or interludes.

Two of my favorite tracks, because they’re so memorable, are the overworld themes for 600 A.D. and 12,000 B.C. Both have easily recognizable elements, are meticulously arranged, and sound great despite the primitive technoogly used to play them.  Those are just two of the great songs from the Chrono Trigger soundtrack – as I mentioned, there’s 3 CDs worth of material.  One of the best aspects of the Chrono Trigger soundtrack is that each musical piece does an excellent job of establishing ambience and theme, adding to the overall experience.  Each musical piece helps define what the sprite-based art begins to describe.

Uematsu went on to do almost all of the Final Fantasy games, including the aforementioned FFVI.  FFVI contained some of the best music within the series, and remains one of the strongest overall entries from the two decades that the FF games span.  There’s an opera in the middle of the game, for crying out loud.

Here’s a brief list of some of the 16-bit era games that have what I have always felt to be the best soundtracks.  Not coincidentally, most of them were penned by the individuals that I have mentioned thus far:

Chrono Trigger
Final Fantasy VI
Super Ghouls n’ Ghosts
Super Mario World
Super Metroid
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

So what’s this got to do MTV?  Why the rant at the beginning of my earlier post?  As I was stumbling through Wikipedia one day I came across the entry for the MTV Music Video Award for Best Video Game Soundtrack.  For a brief and admittedly naive moment, I though “cool, MTV actually picked out some of the games that had oustanding music in them”.  What a fool I was.  Each of the games selected are of the kind that use popular music as their soundtrack as opposed to something written for the game, with the exception of DDRE which uses a mixture of original dance music along with “normal” pop and dance songs.  Instead of picking out games that had well-thought-out, thematically appropriate music, MTV took the easy route and picked games that had the latest and most popular rock/pop songs which are used as background music.

There’s a big, big difference between background music and an effective soundtrack, and I guess that’s what all this rambling was supposed to convey.  If anyone has some modern-day video games with soundtracks that they feel are outstanding, let me know as I’m always interested in hearing new music.

In any case, I’m going to play FFVI now.

Let me preface this entry by saying that the MTV Video Music Awards are what’s wrong with the world today and that if the entire network blinked off the air and was never seen again I believe that society as a whole would be better off.  Keep reading to find out what prompted this unprovoked tirade!

I’ve been thinking a lot about video game music lately.  The success of the song “Still Alive” in the game Portal is probably one of the more interesting developments in the relationship between video games and the music that supports them.  Video game music, an often appreciated yet seldom lauded component of every game, has had an interesting evolution from the early years of video games to the present.

The Nintendo Entertainment System spawned what are probably the most popular video game themes of all time.  Who doesn’t know the theme to the original Super Mario Bros. game or The Legend of Zelda?  These themes have seen a massive resurgence of popularity lately due to two things: the fact that the main gamers of that era have aged enough that they can experience nostalgia, and Youtube.  Everybody and their brother who has some modicum of musical talent has recorded themselves playing the Super Mario Bros. or Legend of Zelda themes.  There are marching bands, orchestras, 1,503,236 people playing guitar, a few people on bass, oboe quartets, acapella groups, and an infinite number of remixes all paying homage to those two themes.  Youtube is, of course, the medium through which these various tributes are unleashed upon the world.  I think it’s wonderful, personally, that so many people still love these themes enough to create their own versions of these songs from over 20 years ago.

Why is the music from that 8-bit era so great?  What makes people love it so much?  My knee-jerk reaction would be that the sheer repetition of those songs that occurred as these games were played over and over and over and over has indelibly implanted them into our brains.  I would propose, however, that having songs that are still enjoyable despite the amount of repetition is a testament those their timelessness and overall enjoyability.  I can think of plenty of songs that I have heard over and over again that just piss me off more with every listen.

It’s not the repetition, then, but the quality of their craft that allow these songs to withstand the test of time.  There are a lot of video games from all eras that have what I would call “throw-away” music.  These soundtracks simply act as background music which is usually as forgettable as it is ineffective.  Proper music should be memorable, enjoyable, and directly impact the feel and ambiance of the game.  The themes from the truly classic NES games were anything but disposable music – they were carefully crated arrangements that were the result of hard work and musical good sense.

What makes them rise above the noise of typical background music is the strength of their melody.  Everyone knows what a melody is, but there’s actually very little popular music (especially in the rock genre) that actually uses a melody.  The melodies for Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda are instantly recognizable and the result of the genius of one man.  Ladies and gentlement, I give you the face behind your favorite video game themes:

You can thank Wikipedia for that flattering picture of Koji Kondo, whose works have been played a countless number of times over the past 20 years on video games systems around the world.  Not only did Kondo compose the music for the original Mario and Zelda games, but he went on to compose the soundtracks to pretty much every Mario and Zelda game that Nintendo has put out, all of which have had stellar soundtracks.  (The Lend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is consistently ranked as one of the best games of all time and is often praised on the strength of the music.)

The amazing aspect of Kondo’s original 8-bit epics is the strength of the music that he wrote despite the technological limitations that he faced.  To exaggerate just a little bit, he painted the Mona Lisa with a palette of four colors.  Kondo was able to create lasting themes with melody, harmony and impeccable rhythm (dunnah dunnah dunnah     doo   doo doo chik – you know exactly what that is) with tools that were extremely limited.  Two decades later, this composer’s work is still being celebrated and listened to around the world.  He was able to do with a simple sequncer and a maximum of four tracks what modern hacks armed with the latest technology still can’t do: write damn good music.

I’m just now realizing how late it is and how long I’ve gone on about music from the NES.  I haven’t gotten remotely close to the point I was going to make, but maybe this will be a good point to break and come back with a post in the coming days regarding what I consider to be the Golden Age of video game music.  Also, you’ll find out why I started with a rant about MTV and how they are the bane of all that is good.  Check back soon!

Since its release in late 2007, the game Portal has been the darling of the video game community, winning all manner of awards and generally kicking everyone’s ass.  I had heard about the game from a few people, but like with most things I was late to the bandwagon.  I downloaded the demo today and played through the whole thing in a short amount of time, and I’m already sold.  I’ll definitely be purchasing this game especially for the extremely reasonable price of $20.

If you’re not familiar with it, Portal is an excellent take on the first person shooter genre with the twist that it’s not really violent.  As far as I can tell there are a few automated guns that shoot at you, but there’s nothing that you can shoot back.  The only thing that your gun does is shoot portals (think Acme’s Portable Hole from Bugs Bunny) that you can jump/fall/run through.  It’s tough to describe, but there a a few trailers online that adequately describe what it’s all about.

The thin stretch that I have about this being music related is that the end song at the credits is awesome.  A few friends of mine made me listen to it, and like the game I dismissed it until relatively recently when I listened to it a few more times.   I don’t know why it’s such a great song, but it is.  The first video is the song sung by the computer in the game, which makes it sound very odd.  The second link is the song done by its composer, John Coulton.  It’s a bit more normal.

I love this song because it has a fantastic melody.  If the lyrics don’t make sense, you just need to play the game.  (The antagonist, a computer, is obsessed with cake.)  Part of why the original version sounds good is because it’s being sung by a voice that’s been heavily modified to sound like it’s being sung by a computer.  If you don’t dig that, check out the second version.

The song has become somthing of a phenomona, and is even included in Rock Band, or Guitar Hero 53, something like that.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RthZgszykLs

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxNmeMklFk8&feature=related