achilleselbow – Page 3

The Best Video Game Music You’ve Never Heard

With the recent success of the PLAY! concert series and a Grammy win for Civilization IV’s theme song “Baba Yetu“, it would seem that video game soundtracks are finally beginning to be taken seriously as music. But whether this heralds an era where video games themselves are considered a legitimate artistic medium on par with film remains to be seen. After all, the pieces of video game music that have received the most attention so far have been the classical and New Age-style compositions of Civilization and Final Fantasy rather than the iconic looping synthesized tracks that have long been admired by video game nerds, spawned countless remixes, and influenced and inspired various music subgenres.

It is the firm belief that these are just as deserving of recognition that inspired me to create this list. And while it would be pretty easy to throw together a list of the most well-known and acclaimed pieces, I wanted to highlight some amazing tracks you may not have heard from some rather obscure games, lesser-known sequels to classics, and Japan-only exclusives. In the spirit of my own generational prejudices, I’ve also attempted to limit the list to games from the nineties. Some of these games are great, others are laughable, but all of them are rockin’.

*****

10. Captain Commando: Enemy Spaceship

Conceived as a brilliantly cheesy homage to classic pulp sci-fi and B-movies, this Capcom beat-em-up featured a mummy, a ninja, a mecha-piloting baby, and the titular Captain fighting hordes of scuba divers, aliens, cross-dressing samurai, mad scientists, and fire-breathing homeless people. This invigorating track follows the common trend at the time of video game composers mimicking the sounds of progressive rock and 80’s metal, which is a pretty good fit for walking down the city streets and beating the crap out of everything you see.

9. Skyblazer: Storm Fortress of Kh’lar

Aside from being one of the best games on the Super NES that no one played, this criminally overlooked action-RPG was one of the few games of the time to utilize a Middle-Eastern motif, which made for some amazing boss monsters and a uniquely beautiful score, particularly here and in the end credits.

8. Alisia Dragoon: Stage 1

This beautifully designed game was animated by a little studio called Gainax, later responsible for a little series called Neon Genesis Evangelion. Although the repetitive and limited arcade-style gameplay didn’t quite live up to the quality of the art, ethereal fantasy-themed tracks such as this one did wonders for the game’s atmosphere.

7. The King of Dragons: Cave of Hydra

The music in this completely cliched and thoroughly enjoyable fantasy hack-and-slash is exactly what you’d expect, which is to say it’s awesome medieval-style fanfare that will make you want to draw your sword and charge forth into battle.

6. Gourmet Sentai Bara Yarou: EXBunny

In this bizarre game that only the Japanese could make, an odd assortment of flamboyant villains has taken over the world’s food supply, and you must defeat their hordes of walking light bulbs and giant heads that sneeze on you in order to obtain ingredients that you will then give to your robot cook to turn into delicious meals. Here I am fighting a playboy bunny that turns into a power ranger that turns into a giant tanuki, complete with giant testicles, all set to a keyboard-laden speed metal soundtrack. There isn’t much more I can say about this.

5. Eternal Champions: Character Bios

Some of you may recognize this track as the one sampled by a certain Bone Thugs-n-Harmony in their song “Eternal“. In fact, they loved this game so much that they sampled another track from it for the more well-known “Crossroads“. Not only was Eternal Champions chock full of great tunes, but it boasted a great storyline, unique characters, a complex fighting system, and a Sega CD remake with gruesome fatalities that made Mortal Kombat look like Sesame Street.

4. Streets of Rage 3: Yamato

While the first two Streets of Rage games are considered Sega classics, few cared for this final installment, released late in the 16-bit era and lacking the stylish spark of its predecessors despite having superior graphics and a wider variety of moves. One of the main targets of criticism was acclaimed composer Yuzo Koshiro’s decision to shift to a more aggressive electronic industrial sound rather than the upbeat and melodic club disco tracks that had made the first two games so memorable. Nevertheless, there are a few gems in here, such as this killer Japanese-flavored techno track that serves as the theme for one of the game’s most annoying bosses.

3. Segagaga: Final Battle, Part 2

If you so much as think about making a Lady Gaga joke, I will end this article right now. I’m not kidding.

A strangely prophetic game released in Japan shortly before the Sega Dreamcast’s unfortunate demise, this simulation RPG has the player attempt to guide a failing Sega Corporation back to market dominance, though I’m not sure why that would involve blasting your own company’s gaming systems. Anyway, this sweeping neoclassical metal track was originally written for the cancelled Dreamcast release of Thunderforce VI, later released on the PS2. Listen to this every morning when getting out of bed and be inspired by the notion that even if you fail in your endeavors, you probably won’t fail as badly as Sega’s last two consoles.

2. Guardians/Denjin Makai 2: Stages 1 and 2

Both the best and most obscure game on the list, this stylish mid-nineties arcade beat-em-up boasted seven selectable characters and more combos and special moves than any fighting game of the time. The stage 1 and stage 2 BGMs at 0:14 and 3:35, respectively, perfectly complement the insanely fast-paced futuristic anime-style gameplay with dueling guitar harmonies and wailing crescendos.

1. Golden Axe 2: Boss Theme

Though this console-only sequel failed to attain the classic status of its predecessor, it was an improvement in almost every sense, including the soundtrack. This hair-raising boss music will immediately make you dread the coming battle. The only drawback is that they will probably never make a boss epic enough to deserve this dramatic an introduction.

*****

Well, that’s it. I hope you enjoyed reading this list as much as I enjoyed making it. Just remember – no matter how good these tracks are on their own, they are almost always better combined with the sounds of you kicking the enemy’s ass.

MSN Homepage Documents Our Cultural Nadir

The end of our civilization is nigh.

A look at today’s MSN Homepage reveals a varied representation of either the nadir or the zenith of our socio-political media culture, depending on which way you hold the chart. This sort of thing would normally upset me, but I am too busy looking up the location of the nearest IHOP to care.

Lara Logan and the Media Ouroboros

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I like to imagine Nir Rosen as he typed those fateful tweets last week, smugly pleased at his cynical prediction of the media response to Lara Logan’s assault, yet completely oblivious to the response his own comments would draw – a response that was all too predictable to the chorus of Twitter followers who immediately snapped screenshots. Sophocles himself could not have written a better scene. Not only was Rosen brought down by his own hubris, but his remarks in fact served to catalyze the very attention he was railing against. For as we’ve learned repeatedly in recent years, if there’s one thing that gets more media focus than an awful event, it’s the controversial and insensitive statements that various media figures will inevitably make about it.

Consider the Arizona shooting. Certainly it made sense, in the wake of a bitter and divisive campaign season, to question whether violent rhetoric by politicians and commentators could inspire violent acts. Then, before we knew it, we were somehow talking about whether Sarah Palin had said something anti-Semitic and whether the ADL’s response to the inappropriate choice of words in her response to the liberal media’s response to the shooting should have been more strongly worded. It’s like if David Foster Wallace had been a writer for National Enquirer.

This cycle becomes particularly predictable in cases dealing with race, religion, gender, or sexual assault. Thus, when the Lara Logan story broke, all the stock characters came out of the woodwork. There were the political hacks who can never pass up an opportunity to complain about the attention received by white victims of assault, as if doing so somehow helps minority victims. There were, as always, the delightful internet commenters who were quick to blame Islam (a strange thing to say, considering nearly 20% of the Egyptian population is Christian) or to ‘compliment’ the victim’s appearance in less than ideal ways.

And there were the almost-as-delightful internet crusaders who jumped on comments like “CBS should have provided better security” with cries of “Victim-blamer!” In the near future, someone will create a script that will generate these entire conversations for us, leaving us all with more time to tend to our virtual crops. Until then, despite what some may say, we will continue to air our invaluable opinions. That empty comment box isn’t going to fill itself.

This brings us back to Mr. Rosen. What makes his meltdown somewhat novel is that he was neither remarking directly on what happened nor on what others had said about it but merely on what he thought they would say. The process is now so familiar that reporting on it before it happens is only the next logical step. But this phenomenon is not limited to talking heads. Take the mini-uproar over the choice of photo in a recent Gawker article, where commenters complained that the picture of Logan in a somewhat flattering dress inappropriately sexualized her and would invite comments to the effect that she deserved it. Whether or not such concern was warranted, expressing it did in fact steer the conversation towards a discussion of her sexuality. And just as some media outlets report every single thing Sarah Palin says and some people follow Jersey Shore under the reasoning that ‘this is what everyone else is going to be talking about’, justifying one’s own reaction or opinion by attributing it to hypothetical future others creates the very situation it claims to anticipate.

In The Precession of Simulacra, Jean Baudrillard described the four successive stages of the image as representation: reflecting a basic reality, perverting a basic reality, masking the absence of a basic reality, and finally bearing no relation to any reality, existing as its own simulacrum and representing nothing but itself. Our media culture has long passed the fourth stage (though it still engages in the second from time to time). But somewhere behind the map, one can still occasionally make out the territory – a real territory where people die, dictators fall, and female journalists face dangers that most of us are only now beginning to imagine.

lara logan

Recipes for People Who Can’t Cook Good

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As a typical aimless twenty-something, my busy schedule of wasting my life on the Internet and staring meaningfully into the distance often makes it hard to find the time to eat properly. Unfortunately, articles with titles like “20-minute Meals” or “One Pot Dishes” appear to be written for people who don’t know how to cook yet have a kitchen stocked with fresh sage leaves, something called “cumin,” and a whole bunch of other stuff that sounds totally made up, along with the standard spouse and 2.5 kids. They do not address themselves to the concerns and lifestyles of those whose tiny pantry is mostly taken up by their roommates’ pretzels and boxes of mac n’ cheese, and whose part-time blogging job does not allow them to purchase fancy ingredients most of which will inevitably spoil.

Clearly, what is needed is a series of recipes for people who are willing to cut up and/or mix some things and put them on the stove, but not much else. The idea is to keep it as simple and minimalist as possible while still turning out things that are hopefully a step above reheated pasta with a can of tuna dumped into it. No ingredients that you wouldn’t be able to find at the crappy Associated or Key Foods on your street, no long instructions for making your own sauce if you can buy something similar in a bottle, no perishable ingredients that only come in larger quantities than you can reasonably use by yourself, and no unnecessary garnishes or decorative crap.

With that in mind, I give you:

Creamy mushroom chicken and potatoes with spices and herbs and junk

Makes one serving. If you’ve got a problem with that, maybe you should ask your loving partner to help you with the multiplication. Jerk.

Ingredients:

-1/4 can cream of mushroom soup
-1/2 boneless, skinless chicken breast, diced
-Marinade (lemon pepper, herb garlic, or Italian dressing)
-Some chopped fresh onion
-Some vinegar or white cooking wine

-2 red potatoes the size of small fists (if you’re a real cheapskate and insist on using regular brown potatoes, go ahead, but don’t say I didn’t warn you)
-Some salt, pepper, oregano and other random spices
-Some olive oil or vegetable oil or whatever
-Fresh garlic or garlic/onion powder

Cut up the potatoes into small pieces, like eighths or something, and put them in a bowl. Then pour some oil and whatever spices you have in your pantry on them. I don’t know how much, just go crazy. If you’ve got some real garlic, chop it up real small and toss some of that in too, otherwise just use garlic or onion powder. Then stir all that shit until the potatoes are coated. Put them on a baking tray lined with tin foil and put that in the oven at 550 degrees for like 25-30 minutes, depending on whether you remembered to preheat – I never do.

While those are baking, heat up some oil on a frying pan, and dump in the chicken that you should’ve had marinating for at least an hour. Sprinkle some salt and pepper on it. Toss the chopped onions in there too, what the hell. Fry it for like 5 minutes or until it looks fairly solid. Then add in the 1/4 can of mushroom soup and like half a tablespoon of vinegar or a dash of white wine, and stir that all together. Sprinkle that with some garlic powder if you want, because there’s no such thing as too much garlic. Fry it for a couple more minutes, stirring occasionally, until you see the creamy sauce start to turn brown and sticky, then TURN OFF THE FLAME WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU DO YOU WANT THE WHOLE GODDAMN THING TO BURN?

If you have managed to get this far without hopelessly screwing everything up, dump the creamy chicken goop on top of the potatoes that you hopefully remembered to take out of the oven and OM NOM NOM NOM. But not right away, because it’s hot and stuff.