Journey’s “Any Way You Want It” in SID form

I’m quite comfortable admitting that I love Journey in all their cheesy arena rock spectacularity, so I’m understandably chuffed that someone hooked up two SID chips and brought Journey’s “Any Way You Want It” to life, C64-style.

Isn’t that all sorts of awesome? You can indulge in more 80s covers at kevinleerose’s channel. It’s okay, you’re allowed to admit to enjoying 80s arena rock.

And while we’re at it (on the topic of SID covers), I should also post this one up – it’s “Title Theme (Subsong 2)” from the C64 port of Turrican:

Yes, for those playing at home, that is an amazing SID track by the great Chris Hülsbeck… but it is actually a cover of the epic “The Escape” by Vince DiCola, from the animated spectacular of 1986 – Transformers: The Movie.

Fun fact – for our first X-mas, Wifey bought me the OST of Transformers: The Movie. Yes, she’s that awesome.

Oh, and if the name Chris Hülsbeck sounds familiar, its because he was a master of the SID. His original title track for R-Type on the C64 was also the inspiration for the first (and only :P) remix I’ve put together, which I posted up two years ago. I should get around to making a video for that with me failing horribly on R-Type or something and post it on YouTube. If nothing else, it’ll be funny 🙂

This post has turned into a gushing love-fest for the SID. This is a good thing. I blame it on Frank for getting me started on thinking about SID music after my previous post. But it’s the good kind of blame, because every time you listen to a SID, the world becomes a better place.

Truly.

Squeenix, why isn’t RayStorm HD available outside Japan on PS3?

RayStorm HD

I don’t quite understand why RayStorm HD isn’t available outside Japan on PS3. So I went and grabbed a pre-paid card and bought a copy through the Japanese store. Probably cost a lot more than it should when you consider the markup assigned to obtaining a Japanese PSN card, but I reckon it was worth it. Plus, I was able to get the Playstation port of Thunderforce V – I’ve played that to death on my Saturn and was always curious what the port was like, so it was a convenient arrangement.

Anywho, Square Enix’s idiosyncrasies aside, how’s the remake? Very nice indeed (as Yakumo over at Retro Core would say!). I haven’t put a stack of hours into it at this stage, just fitting in the occasional session when not hammering through Afterburner Climax or other gear on the PS3. The HD visuals look clean, uncluttered and the 16:9 playfield works really well – this last bit was my biggest concern going into it as breaking out the boundaries of a horizontal shooter already squeezed to a 4:3 aspect ration (rather than tate, or 3:4 ratio) to an even broader ratio may have messed up the balance RayStorm managed to achieve from back in the day.

While the decision to forego any crazy/fancy new effects may turn off the new breed who haven’t spent much time with the original FX-1B version or the Playstation “port” (though the FX-1B shares its hardware design with that of the Playstation, not unlike Namco’s System 11/12 or Capcom’s ZN-1/ZN-2 platforms, hence why I’ve put the word ‘port’ into quotations), I think it’s a very tasteful update to a solid game… though I still prefer the original Layer Section to its sequels (i.e. RayStorm, etc). So instead of having all sorts of filters, high polygon counts, motion blurring and so forth, we’re presented with slightly updated models and textures that reflect the exact same aesthetic as the original, only without jagged polygones or blurry textures. This is especially noteworthy with the low-poly waterfalls in level 3 🙂

And that’s pretty much it – there’s an arranged mode and some unlockables to keep things interesting, but probably the best feature introduced to take advantage of the current hardware platform are the leaderboards that not only post your high score (mine will be down the bottom if they register at all! 😉 ), but also allow you to save and upload your replays. This is excellent, since it allows rubbish shmup fans (like myself) to see how it really should be done 😉 Aside from this, it’s still RayStorm, so if you didn’t like it before, you probably won’t now unless your tastes in gaming have altered accordingly.

The only question left is – why the worldwide snub for PS3 gamers? Hopefully this’ll be rectified in time. The PS3 needs more Japanese shooters on it – I’d love some Otomedius on our machine, as well as the R-Type remake that came out a while ago, then there’s the Naomi ports (like Ikaruga and Triggerheart Exelica), and so on.

Still, we do have the Söldner-X games which are pretty awesome, but I wouldn’t mind sharing with XBLA if PSN can get a couple of those exclusives in return 😀

Gaming sessions – 1 November 2009

Another belated image gallery post 😛

This time around I fired up the Sega Master System 2 for some retro gamage since it hadn’t had much love of late. There were a couple of games I wanted to have a quick play at, but ran out of time, so they’ll make it into a future session I’m sure!

Picks of this one are actually working out where to go in Shadow of the Beast (I’m going to have to track down the Mega Drive port of this one), playing more R-Type and discovering the awesomeness of Sega’s brill Gain Ground port. This last one if the game I was most surprised with given I didn’t think it would fare well on the little 8-bit system, but it held up extremely well.