Still Alive

This was a triumph.
I’m making a note here,
HUGE SUCCESS.
It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction…

…with this song. Portal is possibly the best first-person experience on the market right now. Innovative game play combined with a heavy dose of black humor, the game ends with the robot mastermind behind the vexing puzzles and deadly traps singing a song to you. Shortly after giving killing you a go, the Aperture Science supercomputer sings this fantastic little song to you as the closing credits roll. Anyway, this song was a great learning experience for me. It taught me that…

…There’s no use crying over every mistake.
I’ll just keep on posting
‘Till I run out of cake.
And the Blogging gets done
And I write a neat one
For the people who are
Still alive.

I Lived on the Kwoon

Doing some random browsing I came across a YouTube video for Kwoon’s song “I Lived on the Moon”.

Wow.

I’m a sucker for really well done 3D animation as well as animation that appears to combine multiple media. Coupled with music that sounds like Radiohead at their dreamiest, “I Lived on the Moon” is a beautiful walk through a dream scape. As far as I can tell, the song is about a father cautioning his son against letting other people take away his ability to dream and experience the dream world. The music is sublime, the symbolism is great, the choreography is fantastic, and the plant guy reminds me of a character in one of my childhood dreams. I don’t know much about Kwoon, but I do know an awesome song when I hear one.

Low Skies

Long a friend of mine, Brandon Invergo recently released an album entitled Low Skies. For the past few weeks, it’s been my play list of choice while slogging through the Help Desk emails at the District Off-world Technology Mining Complex (DOTMC). Brandon really did a fantastic job with this album. Never adding even a single beat that needn't be there, he creates a wonderful sonic flow both within and between each song on this album. Anyone interested in classic electronic (the kind popularized by Orbital and their ilk) should give this a good listening.

Out of My Brain, Foul Beast!

I can't recall if I ever beat Mega Man 2. I got Mega Man 1, 2, and 3 all at the same time when I was about 10 years old, so they all kind of blend together for me. However, I do remember that Air Man's level was a pain in the proverbial petute.

So what does this all have to do with anything? Well, in my last post, I claimed that my favorite song of TomBobBlender's was Robo's theme song. For the past three days, my head has been telling me otherwise.

Reverberating through my skull since Sunday night has been TomBobBlender's rendition of the song from the first part of Dr. Wily's level in Mega Man 2. Tuesday night, I decided enough was enough. As I do when a song is stuck in my head, I played the music in question time and time again until it gets swept away. Except this time it didn't work like that. Because of YouTube's "Related Videos" links, I was sucked into the never-ending spiral that defines my YouTubing experience. Curse you, YouTube!

I listened to rendition after rendition of Dr. Wily pt. 1. Then I found a couple of good renditions of Bloody Tears from Castlevania, a wicked fast rendition of some music from Kirby, and a friggin awesome video of Tetris's C theme for two classical guitars. Beautiful stuff.

It was about the time I was perusing the many variations on Bloody Tears that my wife asked if I could find the music from Castlevania Adventure for Gameboy. I must have gone through everything labeled "Castlevania" on YouTube. This is a transcript of our conversation Tuesday night:

Rockin' Castlevania music plays.
"Is this one it?" I ask.
"No. It goes like this," says Katie.
Katie makes a lot of noise.
"Oh, OK."
I click around for a while.
Rockin' Castlevania music plays.
"Is this one it?" I ask.
"No. It goes like this," says Katie.
Katie makes a lot of noise.
"Oh, OK."
I click around for a while.
Rockin' Castlevania music plays.
"Is this one it?" I ask.
"No. It goes like this," says Katie.
Katie makes a lot of noise.
"Oh, OK."
I click around for a while.
......I think you get the point.

Anyway, one of the times I was clicking around, I ended up doing a Google search for the song she wanted. In doing so, I discovered a site for the ages -- a site to post about.

Check out www.vgmusic.com. It's an archive of midi files for nearly every piece of video game music imaginable. There's even remixes of the popular ones. Enjoy!

Mario Paint is alive and well!

Before Nintendo's release of Mario Paint back in 1992, I never knew how much fun digital animation could be. I had done quite a few claymations and flip books, but never had I animated anything digitally. Even to the neglect of games that I claim as my favorites (Zelda, Super Metroid, Mario World, etc.), most of my early SNES days were spent slapping flies, making animations, and writing music.

While I've not touched the SNES mouse in nearly 10 years, it looks like a music teacher from New York City has been hard at work. I recently stumbled across a forum saying that TomBobBlender was featured in issue 218 of Nintendo Power for his unique little corner of YouTube. Tom has redone some classic video game music using Mario Paint's music creator. Above is my favorite (Robo's Theme from Chrono Trigger), but follow the link below to check out the rest. The Theme from Dr. Wily's stage from Mega Man and the Tetris Atacks forest stage theme are both pretty awesome renditions also. Heck! Tom just does a great job on all of his creations. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside to see that Mario Paint is still alive and well, 15 years after its initial release.

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=TomBobBlender