HG101 Top 1000 VGM: 1000 – 991

Thanks to the sophisticated men and women about town who frequent the comment sections of the AV Club, I recently discovered a gaming website called Hardcore Gaming 101.  It’s a fantastic website and you should all definitely spend the next several days and weeks plundering its vast archives.

I’m not here to shill for the site and explain its mission in exhaustive detail, however.  My reason for bringing this up is that recently, the site held a vote on its forum to determine the best video game songs.  Users were allowed to nominate up to one hundred songs, with the option of selecting their top five to be given more weight, and the top one thousand were selected for the list, with a few unranked extras (honorable mentions, presumably).  I looked at the finished list and found, as I often do when reading HG101, my own experience to be sorely lacking.  So many songs I’d never heard, from games I’d never heard of.  A whole world of game music out there, going unlistened to and unappreciated by me!

So, to broaden my video game palate, I’ve decided to listen to every one of the songs on the list in ascending order and write about my experiences with them over the course of one hundred entries featuring ten songs apiece.  And there’s no time like the present, so let’s get started.

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1000. Last Story, “Toberu mono (Instrumental)”
System/Year: Wii; 2011
Heard It Before Now?  No
Runtime: 5:15

I had never even heard of this game before listening to this song.  Evidently it’s an action RPG released early this year for the Wii, so there’s a good chance I might actually play it someday when the Wii is a dusty old piece of outmoded technology and I can get the system and the game for a combined $40 or so.

The “(Instrumental)” part of the title suggests that there is a version of this song containing lyrics, which I’m generally not a fan of finding in my VGM.  (Over on good old OC Remix, I’ll often tuck ‘n’ roll out of a ReMix immediately if I hear vocals.)

One thing about this project is that, having not played many of the games in question—even many of the ones I’ve heard of—I’m going to be listening to them without any awareness or knowledge of their proper context; that is, I’m not going to have any idea where in the game many of these songs appear, so I’m going to try my best to determine where they would fit into their respective games.  That said, as this is an instrumental version of a song probably containing vocals in another form, I would guess it’s probably an end credits theme or something—definitely somewhere near the end of the game, or a climactic moment thereabouts.  (I am more than willing to be corrected on these guesses, FYI.  Don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you have information that can fill my gaps.)

I am not much of a music analyst, so I’m not going to be much on the technical side of things, but I will make the attempt if I feel confident in what I’m saying.  I can really only talk knowledgeably about how a song makes me feel, along with what adjectives it immediately brings to mind.  If that means I end up giving a beloved song of yours the short shrift, I sincerely apologize.

If this song is indicative of what the whole list is going to be like, then this is going to be a very fun project indeed.  It was quite nice, even though for the most part wholly orchestral VGM bores me.  I like the things that VGM is capable of that more cinematic movie music isn’t, and when you have orchestral pieces, that signifier of uniqueness is missing.  I will always try to be fair and not say like “oh yawn another boring strings piece when are we going to get back to the 8-bit stuff”.  And being fair and listening attentively, this is a really good song.

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999. Twinkle Star Sprites, “Love Me” (aka “Schmitt’s Theme”)
Systems/Year: Arcade, Neo Geo AES & CD, Dreamcast, Saturn; 1996
Heard It Before Now?  No
Runtime: 2:08

I’ve heard of this game by reputation.  It’s one of those trademark Japanese games that hides an unrelenting intensity underneath an exterior of disarming cutesy-poo-ness.  It’s half overhead shooter, half Tetris Attack-type versus-puzzle game.  That’s all I know about it, having never played it.  Incidentally, the description on the YouTube page linked above has a link to the HG101 article about the game.  It’s all like, connected, man…..

Best part for me is the pounding drum beat driving the whole thing forward.  This is exactly the kind of thing I would just barely register as playing in the background if I was playing a shmup (which I rarely do).  I wouldn’t add it to a list of favorites any time soon, but it was neat.

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998. Zero Wing, “Open Your Eyes (Stage 1: Natols)”
Systems/Years: Arcade, 1989; Genesis, 1991; PC Engine, 1992
Heard It Before Now?  No
Runtime: 2:24

Yes, yes, “all your base are belong to us”, “you have no chance to survive make your time”, “move Zig for great justice”, blah blah blah, get it out of your system now, because apparently this is supposed to be a really solid game beneath all the viral Engrish, not that I’ll ever know because shooters are totally outside my wheelhouse and I don’t go out of my way to play them.  Music transcends language though, so it’s easier to give this a fair shake and not have to deal with any pesky terrible translation.  I hate that I’m going to be picturing CATS’s stupid head in my brain the whole time I’m listening to it though (and you will too, thanks to that picture—if I’m going to have to suffer, you are too).

Despite that image in my head and on the screen, this song is pretty flippin’ awesome.  The fine folks at Toaplan were obviously putting a lot more effort into music composition than English localization, and it shows.

This is definitely a great stage-one theme for a shooter, because when you have a game where bullets are flying everywhere and monolithic spaceships and structures are hell-bent on killing you in a single hit, it’s important that you have a great song right out of the gate to establish the mood and get the adrenaline racing right away.

I’m actually kind of glad this game made an appearance on the top-1000 list, because you can tell its presence here is the result of the efforts of someone who is really interested in making sure that people know there are good things about this game that get buried beneath the craziness of the intro.  Maybe that meme thing worked out for the best though.  Who but the most hardcore, after all, would even know what Zero Wing was if not for that catastrophic cutscene?

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997, 996. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, “Title Theme” & “Overworld Theme”
System/Year: NES, 1988
Heard Them Before Now?  Yes
Runtimes: 2:42 and 1:40, respectively

A quick pre-project perusal of the near-bottom of the list yielded almost nothing I had ever heard or heard of previously, so I’m a bit surprised to find these songs (especially the overworld theme) all the way at the bottom of the list.

While I’m aware that they’re technically just at the alphabetical back end of a nearly 325-way tie, I’m still nevertheless a little saddened by this, because whatever feelings one may harbor about Zelda II, it’s pretty much inarguable that it has excellent music.  Fair or not, however, people still foster a lot of residual resentment against the game for trying to do something different and instead ending up just balls-ass-hard, and while I don’t think anyone would say the music in it is awful on account of some lingering hatred of its difficulty, I can certainly see why overwhelming memories of the negative aspects of it could cause them to overlook the positives in their haste to resume blocking it from memory.  I myself don’t hate the game, but by the same token, I don’t think it’s the cat’s galoshes, either.  The music is wonderful across the board though.  I can only hope the palace theme and the Great Palace theme scored higher, because they’re even better than these two.  (I haven’t looked.  I’m trying to keep as much of the list as possible a surprise to myself.)

Apropos of nothing, I really like that these were posted by a guy who calls himself “jumpropeman”.

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995, 994. Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim, “The Depth Napishtim” and “Ernst”
Systems/Years: PS2, 2005; PSP, 2006
Heard Them Before Now?  No
Runtimes: 4:44 and 4:41, respectively

Didn’t get much of a chance to guess as to the nature of the first song, as the top-voted comment revealed that it’s a final boss theme.  I got a strong Mega Man X4 vibe from this piece, so much so that I actually had to go to GameFAQs and look at the credits data for the two games to see if they shared composers.  (They don’t.)  Final boss themes should have a lot of intensity, and I feel like this was a little too breezy to really convey that; it feels more like an opening cutscene or mid-level song to me, but I should stress that I still liked it.  The second song fits the final boss bill much better, with its faster tempo and its guitars and shrieky percussion throughout.  I’d still guess it’s a boss theme of some sort, as it’s way too busy and lively to be a character’s theme, as the person’s-name title might otherwise suggest to me under other circumstances.  I’m not out to letter-grade every song in the batch, really just am trying to give whatever few thoughts listening to them calls to mind, but if I had to grade these against each other, I’d give “The Depth Napishtim” a B- and “Ernst” a B+.

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993. Ys Seven, “Palace Where Souls Return”
System/Year: PSP, 2010
Heard It Before Now?  No
Runtime: 4:01

I have a feeling there are going to be a lot of Ys songs on this list, which makes a certain amount of sense to me, because Ys (pronounced “eez”, in case that’s been tripping you up) is one of those series I associate with a particular type of gamer, a type that would indeed be likely to be found frequenting a site like HG101.  A profession of love of the Ys series immediately tells you what type of gamer you’re dealing with, and odds are that gamer has forgotten more games than you’ll remember.  That said, I’ve never touched not one of them in my life, so beyond only the most rudimentary knowledge that the Ys games are in fact RPGs and there are a few characters that recur throughout them, I’m otherwise approaching all these songs with fresh ears and eyes.  Anyway, I notice that the guitars have returned from Ys VI, which is cool, although the Mega Man vibe isn’t as strong.  The main melody doesn’t last really long in each loop, and when it passes, it doesn’t feel like there’s much happening in the song outside of some nice choir work.  It’s really easy for me to relegate this to the background, and there wasn’t much about it that stood out to me.  It certainly hasn’t surprised me pleasantly in the way that many of the other songs I’m being introduced to here have.  I can see why this made the list but not very high.

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992. Ys Book I & II, “Theme of Adol”
Systems/Years: TurboGrafx-CD, 1990; DS, 2009; PSP, 2011
Heard It Before Now?  No
Runtime: 1:55

The preliminary results list on HG101 plays kind of fast and loose with the game names at times.  I’m not familiar with the series, so I didn’t understand where exactly this was supposed to be coming from until I clicked the YouTube link.  Sometimes you just have to clean up other people’s messes and get on with your life, I suppose.

You know, sometimes simplicity really works in favor of a song, like here.  It’s got a pretty basic but groovy beat and great instrumentation.  I dig it.  The first half is definitely where it shines, and it starts to kind of go off the rails when it gets into the weedly-wow keyboard stuff toward the end.  The clip ends kind of abruptly; I wish it had gone on longer.

I think I am probably going to have to play one of these games sooner or later.

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991. X-Men: The Arcade Game, “Junk Factory”
System/Year: Arcade, 1992
Heard It Before Now?  Probably(?)
Runtime: 2:27

X-Men: The Arcade Game is one of the cornerstones of my childhood arcade experience, along with The Simpsons, Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, and Primal Rage (one of these is not like the others).  I certainly remember playing all those games, but arcades were generally so loud and teeming with noise that cultivating an atmosphere of being able to actually listen to the music in the games was impossible, and so as a result I don’t remember any of the songs from any of those games.  So it’s really nice to revisit a game like this and discover that it had major ass-kicking music.  This is easily the best of the songs I’ve covered today, and though I didn’t set out with the intention of saving the best for last, that’s certainly what happened on this inaugural day.  This song is so perfectly representative of the early 90s, with its turntable noises and pump-up voices.  You could seriously breakdance to this.  It’s amazing.  I listened to it three times back-to-back.  Total greatness.

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Next time: 990 – 981.  I’m pretty sure most people know I haven’t played just that many RPGs, but this project will no doubt reveal just how woefully lacking my experience really is.

Today in “Holy Shit” Speed Runs: Myst

Found this in a Google search when someone mentioned it in the comments of the AV Club’s Legend of Zelda Memory Wipe article.  Prepare to have your mind blown.

Roundthewheel Does Not Support Terrorism

This morning I woke up to a gut-wrenching comment in my YouTube inbox.  You will not be able to find this comment now, because I flagged it as spam, deleted it, and blocked the user who posted it.  What it basically said was that the commenter had flagged the video in question (Legend of Mana, episode 27, “Blue Eyes White Dragon”) on the grounds that I “promote terrorism” and that I should be ashamed of myself.

Needless to say, this allegation is patently absurd.  I have no interest in hurting or killing anyone, nor do I go out of my way to make offensive statements just for the sake of it.  However, longtime fans of my work are no doubt aware of my frustrating suspension history, and the grim spectre of account shutdown has never quite fully receded from my paranoid mind since the events of last summer, so I felt I should check and see what I might have said during that video to give someone the impression that I approve of terrorism.

I didn’t have to search for long; it was right there in the description.  I have since altered this, but here’s what it originally said:

Remember kids, it’s okay to take a fertilizer bomb to your job or mow down a park full of kids in a spray of automatic gunfire, as long as that’s what you WANT to do.

At face value, yes, that’s a terrible thing to say.  But that statement didn’t exist in a vacuum.  It was written in a YouTube video’s description field, which, in case that jargon is a little too advanced for the layman, contains words that describe the video.  I don’t use the description field for a general summary of the events of the video being viewed, but I do almost always make a joke or crack about something that happens within the duration of the video.

In the case of Let’s Play Legend of Mana episode 27, the above-quoted description is a riff on the philosophy of one of the characters in the video, a mermaid named Flameshe.  One of Legend of Mana‘s recurring moral themes is the appalling idea that it’s perfectly acceptable to do what you want and love to do even at the expense of other people’s lives, and that furthermore, if you deny yourself participation in that activity out of consideration for the feelings and lives of others, you are actually behaving immorally.  Flameshe is one of many characters in the game who supports this position.  Call me crazy, but if anyone here is implicitly condoning terrorism, it would have to be the mermaid chick.

Even though the flagger completely and utterly ignored the context necessary to understand where the description was coming from, I will grant that it was worded in a tasteless fashion, and in order to reflect the fact that the sentiment originated from within the game itself and not from my own personal beliefs, I have altered it slightly to what you now see both on the video’s page and in the block quote below:

So, according to Flameshe, it would be okay to take a fertilizer bomb to your job or mow down a park full of kids in a spray of automatic gunfire, as long as that’s what you WANTED to do. Riiiiiiiiight.

(As you will see if you click the link, I also appended a C.Y.A. note to the description, with a touch of indignation as the cherry on top.)

Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that this would be something I would be forced to lay out in no uncertain terms, but just in case this flagging incident takes a turn for the worse, let me just say this now: I do not support, condone, espouse a belief in, or approve of terrorism in any way, shape, or form.  Terrorism has cost many innocent people their lives and cruelly taken family members, friends, and spouses away from each other, and there is absolutely nothing about it I find good, acceptable, or worthy of proliferation.

I love doing Let’s Plays on YouTube, but the thing I hate the most about it is people like this, who are just out to be total dicks, fucking with my innocent hobby.  Hopefully nothing bad comes of this, but YouTube hasn’t exactly shown the human touch with my travails in the past. I suppose we will have to wait and see.

Having settled that, I’d like to close by sharing two scrumptious morsels of irony with you.

1.

The person who flagged me, a user by the name of Hallaladies, should himself have been flagged numerous times by now.  His channel is a minefield of copyright infringement, full of Li’l Wayne music videos and what appears to be his own shitty underground hip-hop.  Yuck.

2.

I probably wouldn’t have known I had been flagged had the culprit done his deed in silence.  Instead, he brilliantly announced both himself and exactly what he’d done, presumably with the intent of shaming me and scaring me into doubting the future of my channel.  Do you know what it’s called when people use your fear against you like that, like a weapon?  That’s right: TERRORISM!

So there you have it: a hypocrite with poor contextual comprehension.  What a spaz.  If this causes my channel to become suspended, I am going to be seriously fucking pissed.

RIP Amy Winehouse

Regardless of how you feel about it, Amy Winehouse is in fact dead.  In light of this development, I give you a tribute to her most famous song.  Recommended if you enjoy bluegrass and/or really goofy shit.

Another Unsolicited Amateur Thesis on Facebook and Friendship

Earlier today on Facebook I did some seriously wrongheaded douching about the Vancouver riots, mostly fueled by the righteous anger I feel when people react so violently to something as insignificant as the outcome of a sporting event. Said douching culminated in two notable things: 1) a headache, and 2) me “unfriending” or “defriending” someone or whatever the hell you’re supposed to call it. It was a bit of an ugly affair, though the bridge was more toasted than torched. Regardless of the circumstances, however, whenever I subtract a friend from my list, it always gets me thinking about the nature of Facebook friendships.

Usually about once a year I do a little spring-cleaning on my friend list. The kinds of people who get deleted in these audits are: coworkers I no longer work with and wasn’t particularly close to; high school classmates I had little or nothing to do with back then but couldn’t muster the resolve to deny a friend request from; and those prone to long periods of FB inactivity. Rarely do I have to delete someone because I no longer like them. But I realized today that in the same way that Facebook has warped the meaning of the word “friend”, it has also distorted our true feelings about some of the people we call our friends.

Of course you can’t delete anyone from your Facebook without them throwing a big ole hissy fit, and sure enough our conversation spilled over into private messaging. In the course of those PMs, I found the strength to be more forthright with that person today than at any other point in our lives. I have thought of this person for almost half a decade now as an arrogant blowhard and a shit-stirrer and an all-around doucheberry, but it took that long and a last-straw situation to make me snap out of it and realize, “Hey—this person shouldn’t be on my friends list.”

Being Facebook friends with this person caused me to default to a passive acceptance of his obnoxious qualities. This is the danger in calling people you don’t really like all that much your friends, and yet another reason why I hate Facebook’s insidious “friend” nomenclature. I much prefer how Twitter, which harbors no such delusions about friendship and which I vastly prefer to Facebook exponentially more with each passing day, calls them “followers”. By having this person on my friend list, I was implicitly communicating to outside observers that I liked and enjoyed this person when the truth is that there is almost nothing I find redeeming about him, and by defriending him, I make it known that I do not accept those qualities in people I call my friends.

I advise anyone who uses Facebook to think critically about what the word “friend” means to them. People who have five, six, seven hundred friends and more have lost sight of it and devalued the meaning of friendship to themselves. I have approximately 130 people on my Facebook whom I call friends, all of whom did a number of things to earn the title, and even that feels like an overwhelming amount at times. Just because a person is not your enemy does not mean they are your friend. Friends share a bond that requires time and maintenance. If you or your friend or both of you aren’t willing to put the necessary work into keeping that bond strong, perhaps you should reevaluate whether you should remain friends or not. Words have concrete meanings for a reason, and when they are used improperly, as Facebook and its user base so irresponsibly manhandle the word “friend”, our perception of our reality begins to skew. And in the end, that’s really all we have.