The Rocket Knight Adventures revisit looks promising (new trailer!)

Posted Wednesday, 14th April 2010 under New old games
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Rocket Knight Adventures on the Mega Drive was/is awesome. When I was reading up via 1up and heard via their awesome nerd podcast Retronauts earlier this year that it was getting a revisit via PSN/XBLA, I was mildly excited. Some of the early promo artwork looked like it had potential, but I was still sitting on the fence.

However, after checking out an update over at PALGN and watching the trailer, I’m pleasantly surprised by how it’s shaping up:

I’m really loving the visual aesthetic here – there’s a classic storybook fantasy feel to the visuals that looks great, and the animation and particle effects are spot on. I didn’t have the speakers on while watching it though, so not sure on the direction with the audio. Hopefully it’s not poxy!

The original Mega Drive game in the series featured everything that made Konami such a powerhouse back in the 16- and 32-bit eras, with loving attention to detail on the visuals, great music perfectly suited to the hardware, plenty of colour, passion, spot-on controls, innovation and even a little story to boot! While the sequel on the Mega Drive was in comparison pretty disappointing (I’m guessing a different team handled it), the concept was still fun. The only game in the series I never got a chance to play was Sparkster on the SNES. I really should track it down though, Konami made some brilliant games on the SNES.

So yes, new Rocket Knight Adventures game for May. Can’t wait 😀

Unofficial piano nocturne – themes from Streets of Rage or Street Fighter on the piano

Posted Monday, 5th April 2010 under Video game music
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A while ago I grabbed the piece of awesome that is Sega Piano Nocturne – as the world’s worst piano player despite loving the instrument dearly, I absolutely loved hearing a lot of my favourite Sega tracks rolled into the piano and bring out some really interesting melodies from some great tunes. I think there should be more piano renditions of classic chiptunes and game themes, I absolute love a good arranged version of a classic song from a game. Because I’m a tragic nerd 😀

Anywho, after checking out some footage of Yuzo Koshiro doing his thing in a Tokyo night club, I did the usual click-click-click-click YouTube thing you normally do to see what other Streets of Rage stuff was on there, and I stumbled across the following – it’s from the third stage in Streets of Rage 2:

Awesome, huh? The same user (Yuzoboy) has an upload playing the ending theme to Streets of Rage 2 which was really cool… but again, YouTube/Web2.0 strikes again, and I found the following interpretation of the ending theme from Streets of Rage 2:

This one’s from mymorningjackets, and is an amazing, bittersweet piece of awesome, lead by piano with a bit of classical guitar thrown in for good measure. There are also a couple of other great interpretations in his list, so might have to come back to him in a later post after I’ve had a chance to check out his blog.

So, with all things “street” on my mind, I started seeing results for Street Fighter 2 gear on the piano! Here are a handful of videos I found that I thought were worth a look into!

First up we have Ken’s theme from SF2 – this one’s a pretty “standard” interpretation of the song without too much embellishment, but you know what? It’s still played beautifully and with more skill than I can ever dream of having when I sit down at my piano 😀 Plus, given how awesome Ken is (yes, I’m a Ken scrub!), it’s all good 🙂

The day my mate McAdam and I accidentally unlocked the vocal theme of Sakura’s song (in Japanese at that!) on the PAL version of Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo on the Saturn was a glorious day, because she has such an amazing theme song (I got goosebumps playing through Sakura’s story in SF4 with her theme recurring throughout!), and this one’s a great version of her theme. Nothing’s embellished, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Remember, Sakura is awesome. Very important fact.

If Ryu’s theme doesn’t go down in the history of awesome of chiptunage, there’s something wrong with the world. If need be we can get rid of Sephiroth’s theme, as that’s starting to annoy me, but that’s because I’m an irrational fan of Phantasy Star and have yet to play through a Final Fantasy game based purely on principle. The exception to this is Final Fantasy III on the DS, which I really enjoyed (thanks Hamez!), and Final Fantasy IX always looked fun, as did FFVI. Anywho, enough of that – Rastapulse is responsible for the above, and I’ll be referencing him again too, as his interpretation of Ryu’s theme is brilliant. There’s a deliberate slowing of the tempo and some great phrasing in there – very expressive, and the little intro/outro he’s added is cool!

Fun fact – I used the melody of Cammy’s theme in an early megamix I made when I was first learning how to program stuff in a MIDI-sequencer. It was actually completely rubbish, but good fun at the time. MIDI sequencing programs confuse me now, I was quite happy with Evolution MIDI back in the day, it was choice. Now, if I was able to program something akin to the above on the aforementioned program, I would have been much more proud of myself. Akin to the Ryu theme that Rastapulse was responsible for above, this one’s slowed the tempo and emphasised the melody really nicely – again, great phrasing and execution. I haven’t checked out the rest of the material in his YouTube channel yet, so might have to get onto that later.

Last one – Guile’s theme, and I left this until last as it has elements from each of the styles I’ve linked to, with some of it emphasising 1:1 phrasing compared to the original with lotsa piano-passion, and then there are other moments where the melody’s been played around with a bit of artistic license and takes on the languishing character of the themes Rastapulse did above with just the right amount of melodrama to make things interesting.

Raving to Yuzo Koshiro in a Tokyo club

Posted Monday, 5th April 2010 under Video game music
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A friend posted a link to this in a discussion we were having via a message board online, and since I’d never heard of this being possible, thought it deserves some linkage:

For those not in the know, Yuzo Koshiro is an absolute genius when it comes to getting the Mega Drive’s Yamaha YM2612 chip to do some amazing stuff (though to be honest, Koshiro had a habit of making the entire chipset do some amazing stuff). The music for Streets of Rage 2 is probably my favourite of his work, though big ups should go to the amazing work he did creating a symphony out of the Mega Drive for Story of Thor, and for some amazing early work on Revenge of Shinobi.

I always thought back when I was younger that the quality of the audio in Streets of Rage 2 demanded more attention. Thanks to the magic of YouTube, it’s nice to see it was a success 😀

Sally in… Sonic 1???

Posted Friday, 2nd April 2010 under Game hacks
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I’m on a roll today 🙂

Whilst hunting for the footage on YouTube on Sonic 4, I started doing the whole click-click-click thing you do on YouTube when looking up related videos, and came across this little awesome Sonic 1 hack:

Isn’t that cool? I used to watch the Sonic cartoon when I was a kid that had Sally and all those other weird auxiliary characters, and this is a really cool hack of the original Sonic game! Might have to see if I can find a copy of it to cram onto the cart I use for playing imports on my Mega CD since it can also act as a quasi-gimped flash cart.

Has Sega finally got it right with Sonic 4?

Posted Friday, 2nd April 2010 under New old games
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Catching up on all things nerdy, there have been some leaked videos of Sonic 4 on YouTube:

…

Okay, I just checked and they’ve disappeared off YouTube 😛 So, thanks to the magic of Kotaku, they’ve hosted it themselves and it’s looking really good. I also agree with others that have stated his walking animation looks a bit goofy, but otherwise it looks fantastic. I’m really looking forward to this release 😀 I believe the Lost Labyrinth levels are the best demonstration of how “right” Dimps have it, as it’s fusing elements from the Labyrinth Zone in Sonic 1, Hydrocity Zone in Sonic 3 and Tidal Tempest Zone in Sonic CD with all sorts of awesome. Thumbs up.

You know, it reminds me of a great column (well, comment within a review, as I just found out thanks to Google :P) over at Dave’s Sega Saturn page in a Sonic R review that suggested that if Sega weren’t comfortable doing a 3D Sonic on the Saturn, they should have pushed the 2D envelope and made an amazing 2D Sonic game. I just think it’s amusing that they’ve gone back to 2D for Sonic when there has been a push since 1999 for 3D Sonic games, and while I’ll admit that I really enjoyed Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast (and the sequel as well, though there was some douchebaggery with aspects of it), the rest of the games since have been really disappointing.

I mean, just imagine a super-awesome 2D Sonic game on the Saturn – great audio handled by the machine’s magic audio chip (shame about the lack of hardware compression though :P) that continued in the electro-synth style of the original Mega Drive games, great sense of speed and massive playing fields, copious animation and colour, lashings of alpha blending (remember that the Saturn had no troubles doing transparencies in 2D [see Guardian Heroes, Silhouette Mirage and Keio Yugekitai 2] – it was applying them to 3D objects where the problems came in), the mind boggles.

Anywho, I’d better finish up this ranting as there’s one more entry to add before I head off to play some classic Mega Drive games to celebrate Easter (remember yesterday’s rant?), but before I go I’m going to add a plug for sega-saturn.com (i.e. Dave’s Sega Saturn page), because that was one of the greatest Saturn resources online when I first got the internet circa ’96/’97, and was the place I used when I gingerly dipped my toes into the wider waters of imported games 😀 It makes me feel very nostalgic checking it out again. That, however, is a topic for another post in its entirety!