Men Working!

I'm busy cookin something up!






Bwahahahaha!

Remember, if something in the kitchen either smells AWESOME or BURNT, it's probably a man doing all the work. wink wink nudge nudge

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The Retro side of Pengo

I adore a lot of retro games. My very first "game system" was our Tandy 1000 computer (I missed out on the C64 sadly). On this I played a sort of side-scrolling shooter (I haven't re-found this one yet, but it had a top down view and a side view at the same time and you blew up trucks and planes and stuff) and a couple of games that my grandfather programmed straight in assembly code. He was an engineer and could write directly in assembly, so they ran very fast, even back then, but that's a story for a different time.

Some time after that I received a NES from my dad for one of my birthdays or christmas or something. I think I had just turned 8 and they were still relatively new. I played the hell out of my Mario/Duck Hunt cartridge and I wore out my Legend of Zelda cart (the shiny gold one, I wore the gold right off of it in places). Around this time I had a mini-tape recorder and me and a friend of mine would record game music off our tv's and take it to school with us.

This started my addiction to video game music. At my lowest point, I borrowed my friend's copy of Taboo: The Sixth Sense, a tarot based NES game (which was HORRID) and recorded music from it because frankly, while the music, the graphics, and the game were all horrible, the music COULD be a little catchy and I had tons of tapes. Mostly my friend and I laughed and laughed and laughed at the horrible, horrible grammar in the game.

So eventually I moved on to a Sega Genesis that I bought half of, my dad bought the other half, just because I wanted it so badly. This is where I really started playing games and letting the character sit there just to hear the music. Sonic the Hedgehog, that came with the Genesis, had very good music at the time. Genesis had a much better music chip than the NES did, being 16 bit and all, but the real kicker was when one of my friends let me borrow his SNES in exchange for my Genesis (which we ended up doing a lot after that). At this point I got to play Final Fantasy II, which as we all know is really FF 4 but named 2 because of the transfer over to us poor RPG-less Americans.

All in all, I've been a real freak for old school chip-based music, or chiptunes if you would rather.

My blog-buddy EV over at The Forgotten Gamer has posted a couple of things about game music, go read his posts. But I have something he doesn't! HAH! Take that EV! In yo' face... or something.

I have the Videogame Music Preservation Foundation in my speed-dial... I mean favorites list.

So today I was playing the new Bionic Commando game again, just for the nostalgic feeling that the music gives me, since Bionic Commando's music is awesome... and I got SO nostalgic that I went over to the VGMPF and loaded up Bionic Commando. You can also listen along here. Just click on track 6 and let it play. It's arguably one of the best chiptunes on any NES game. Fun Fact about Bionic Commando. In Japan it's called Top Secret: Hitler's Revival and has swastikas and nazis and you get to blow up zombie-Hitler's head.

So then I started reminiscing about all the games I used to play, and one stuck out in my mind. It was a little known game for the PC, dos-based of course, called Master of Magic. This was a strategy title in the vein of Civilization and it was amazing, if mostly unheard-of at the time.

It was a swords and sorcery type of strategy game. You are a wizard who knows different amounts of the 5 types of magic (you got to customize if you wanted) and you are leader of one of like 10 races of people, all with their own unit types and strengths/weaknesses. It was an incredibly deep game with many different strategies and a couple of different ways to win. There were some game-breakingly unbalanced racial units (paladins with flight/invisibility cast on them) and some horrendously powerful magical units you could summon (Great Drakes) that let you stomp all over everyone else. All in all though, it was terribly fun and definitely worth all of the trouble it took me to configure my autoexec.bat and config.sys in just such a way as to open up 600ish kilobytes of memory out of 640 and still have my soundblaster working. And I did it too. I was a DOS God, lol.

If I remember correctly it was nearly 20 1.44MB floppies to install. It took forever. I didn't get my hands on the CD version sadly. Be careful, there is a tiny bit of nudity in this game. The witch-doctor looking female wizard is topless. I don't know how they got away with that back in the day.

You can play this game for free now. It's Abandonware, which means the company has given up the rights to it to the public domain. You can find it here on Abandonia along with a solid review of it, and it plays on DOSbox, which is a DOS emulator for windows which you can find here in 16 different languages if you are into that sort of thing. Remember kiddies, SoundBlaster has better sound effects and AdLib has better music (though not much better). But the music in this game was pretty good. At this point I had stopped recording music on my tape player because I used it into oblivion. That's right, I used my little Radioshack mini-tape player so much it died.

So I ended up thinking about what other nostalgic games had good music. I remembered a little game called Flashback (also on Abandonia), by the same company that made a little gem called Out of This World. I remember the intro music to this day, and it's really a very interesting little intro if you take into account the era the game was in:



Oddly enough, this game doesn't have much music in it. Only during the animated cutscenes is there any music. The game just has ambient sound in it. It's punishingly difficult, but masterable, just like Out of This World before it.

For fairness' sake:



Out of This World, called Another World everywhere but the U.S., had a sequel on the Sega CD (and other platforms if I remember right) and was just as brutal, but more action oriented than platform oriented, again if memory serves. They have re-released Another World in glorious high resolution here.

I ended up acquiring a Sega CD from a friend of mine after staying the night at his place. His parents had bought it for him, not realizing it wouldn't hook up to his new style Sega Genesis. It hooked up to mine though, so he just let me have it. The Sega CD was my video game platform for years later, through great games like Shining Force CD and one of the penultimate games of the system, Lunar: The Silver Star Story. Lunar was remade on the Playstation in a much better version, but the one on Sega CD was the one that I played over and over and over. It was a lot more difficult too. I also played one of the best rail-shooters of all time, Silpheed.



An interesting little piece of info on this next one. There's a dude that goes "They got the carrier!", but in the sound test you can hear the full voice file and he says "Shit! They got the carrier!" but they edited it in the game by cropping the audio file instead of removing the file completely from the cd.



(Really I think it's just an awesome all around SHMUP [Shoot-em Up] that got less credit than it deserved. It had cool music too, sorta...) Silpheed is BLISTERINGLY difficult.

Note that I played PC games just as much, if not more, than my console games.

So that's just a few of my Retro Credentials for ya. I've got more than I can even list really without taking up hours and hours of your reading time, so I'm going to leave it there. Go check out DOSBox and Abandonia and get your retro-fix like I'm about to do. :)

Edit: I almost forgot. One of the greatest space-simulation games ever is one I played a lot. Frontier: Elite II. Sadly this one is not abandonware yet. It's sequel, Frontier: First Encounters IS however, so go grab that one. It's even bigger and has some of the best graphics of it's day, considering it's target PC's were 386 models. Make sure you find the patch for it though, it's INFESTED with bugs.

Edit:

Frontier: First Encounters is not abandonware, it's shareware put out by the original designer.
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The Responsibility Project and the link with the FTC.

So Liberty Mutual is essentially calling out everyone, not really just bloggers (but bloggers are a huge means to their end), and trying to get people to "do the right thing".

This is drawing interesting parallels with what the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) wants bloggers to do. More on that in a second.

Liberty Mutual wants bloggers to be responsible and do the "right thing" but there is no legal obligation tied to it. People are going to say what they want, and I think that as long as they are true to themselves and speak in their blog the way they speak at home, they are blogging responsibly. If people don't like what they say, they'll go somewhere else. I do NOT think, however, that someone who is blogging and lying about who they are and how they think is being responsible. But that's the problem with the responsibility project: Freedom of Speech will enter it. Everyone has their own view of what is responsible and they will follow that.

Now then, what the FTC is doing DOES have legal obligations put into it. Bloggers are doing a lot of reviews and a lot of give-aways. With reviewing we have to look at it this way. Reviews are a sort of viral advertising. We put out an opinion on a product and then a bunch of people see it and go hmm, i like/dislike/don't care about this product. All this costs the company is the product itself. Now here is where bloggers are getting tripped up and freaking out.

The FTC doesn't care that we got something for free. They have stated this. What they DO want us to do, is report in the review that we received the product for free. This is called "truth in advertising" and it's a legal obligation for all advertisers. All that fine print at the bottom of any ad on tv you see is part of Truth in Advertising and they HAVE to put that info on there.

The FTC just wants bloggers to do the same. So why not do the fine print route? Put something in small text or have some sort of button linking to your fine print. Say something like, "Reviews here was based on a products that were received for free solely for the purposes of reviewing" and make it sound all legal-ese. Something! It really only makes sense.

So following the FTC might fall in line with Liberty Mutual's "Responsibility Project" but they are in no way tied together. But Truth in Advertising is definitely the right thing to do. Every other advertiser has to do it, bloggers should too really. Just don't force us too quickly or some people might stop blogging, and we don't need that.

What we do need, is truth in our reviews though. These companies have to understand that if we must follow the truth in advertising rules, we are going to review products HONESTLY. If we don't like the product, they are going to get some bad press. And at that point, tough shit. Any company needs to understand that they may or may not get bad press from any reviewer, not just a blog reviewer. But they should have the peace of mind that we will have our truth in advertising in place.

So why not put simple small text lines or a button linking to your policy as a reviewer at the end of our reviews? Something to let your readers know that you have standards, good ethics, and are a credible and honest reviewer? What's a couple of more seconds off your day?

It's worth it.

Websites of Interest:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,512457,00.html
http://www.walletblog.com/2009/07/ftc-to-regulate-blog-endorsements/
http://www.responsibilityproject.com/

My fiancee does this now. She has an Ethical Blogger badge linking to her agreement to be an ethical blogger and review policy at the bottom of every review post. She is at:

http://www.reviewsandgiveaways.com/
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My random journey that brought me to the Vocaloid Fields of Awesome

What the EFF is a Vocaloid you ask?

What's with the language? Jeez.

Anyway: A Vocaloid is essentially a singing synthesizer that was developed in Japan by the Yamaha corporation. Their new version, Vocaloid 2, can actually support voice samples, so you can have a synthesizer that sings with a certain eerie, chilling, soul-less perfection. Sort of like the singing A.I. in Macross Plus (EV, you'll know what I mean, so will any other anime dork).

Warning: This is a LONG post with lots of videos. You should watch them if you can handle it. If you do it will take quite some time.

I'll talk about Vocaloids in more detail in a minute. This is sort of a two part post. The first part is my ABSOLUTELY RANDOM journey that actually brought me to the Fields of Vocaloid-halla.

I was on You're The Man Now Dog dot com as I am often wont to do. I was wondering what the crap the song on THIS page was. (click on it. it's cool and addicting)

So I went to my old friend and mentor YouTube. Wait, YouTube isn't a dude. Damn.

Anyway, I looked up Loituma as that was the only word I had to follow and it turns out Loituma is a Finnish singing group and the song is "Eva's Polka". Everyone just calls the song Loituma though.

Here is the Incredibly Epic Official Video:



Remind you of anything?


Jim Carrey - What is Love - Original Version - For more amazing video clips, click here

And this led me to the techno version:



Which then led me to this little gem of randomness:



I'm a HUGE fan of leeks for some reason, so this piqued my interest (the facial expressions are crazy). The previous video led me to this insanity (thank you YouTube Japan):



At this point I HAD to figure out who this singer was and I noticed (2 videos up) in the comments that it was a Vocaloid named Hatsune Miku. So I went out and looked up what Vocaloid was and learned quite a bit.

I learned that the first truly voiced Vocaloid in the Vocaloid 2 system was Hatsune Miku. (Keep in mind that the Japanese are all about these new "idols" and the vocaloid community has drawn them up and created very intricate backstories for them all that I won't go into here. I'm just going to list the ones that have really impressed me.)

PLEASE keep in mind that these vocaloids are mostly singing in Japanese and in the J-pop style. I will warn when their voice is too sharp or anything. Also they are typically anime styled (except for the english speaking ones for some reason). I will be posting videos with English translations in subtitle when I am able to.

protip: Japanese names are typically last name first then given name.

Hatsune Miku is well voiced and sound quite a bit like a real 16 year old singer. (her avatar is supposedly 16)

Here's a song from her immense portfolio. Many people make many songs with each vocaloid and Miku is the first and most popular. Warning: sharp voice.



After they created Miku, they went on to create Kagamine Rin and Kagamine Len who are a brother and sister duo. They were designed to compliment each other but Len, the brother, tends to compliment all female vocaloids. Also Rin and Len are a parody of Left and Right, which they are supposed to represent (as far as I understand).

Here is a song by Len, and it is one of my favorites. After it I will post the same song sung by a real person so you can compare/contrast. Len has a very robotic-sounding voice, but in this song they also applied some filters over top to make it old-radio crackly sounding.



Human version by Choucho who is a female Japanese singer. This was made after the original song above, so the song is credited to the vocaloid and writer who used it. (these things work out semi-strangely)



So Rin is Len's twin sister and has a fairly haunting voice, even though it can get a little sharp. Most people can't use her synth properly so it's hard to find a good song. This one really struck a chord with me for some reason. Of course the lyrics in English look a little weird, but it's a nice, dark song.



Now we come to two English speaking Vocaloids. Sweet Ann is up first. The vocals are very good if the artist can sync them up properly.



Also speaking English and with the same song is Megurine Luka (Scarborough Fair is a great song). Notice how the art styling on Ann and Luka is different from the Japanese speaking Vocaloids. Again it's hard to find properly synced vocals for her. The problem with Vocaloids is they are programmed syllable by syllable, so you can get some pretty choppy voices out of them if you don't know what you are doing.

Luka is actually a dual-voice Vocaloid. She does both Japanese and English. I will post a second song by her after Scarborough Fair. You might notice some differences in design from her English version to her Japanese version.





Next up is the most recent Vocaloid, as in, released in late June of '09. Her name is Megpoid (strange) and she probably is the most refined of ALL the Vocaloids. Her voice is smooth enough to sound nearly real and her Engrish is very good (not a typo, go to http://www.engrish.com some time.) Anyway, if Megpoid is any indication of where the Vocaloids are going quality-wise I think we're in for a shocker when we finally see the first A.I. singer ever.



Now for one of the couple of other male Vocaloids, I don't like the males much besides Len. This guy is named Gackpoid or Gakupo and he is apparently a samurai. His voice is very good (the samples were recorded from the Japanese singer Gackt, a big star over there) but still isn't quite as high quality as most of the female vocaloids and a tiny bit choppy.



So that's it for my main points about vocaloids. They're an incredibly interesting step in the right direction I think. You can get so much range and perfection out of a synthesized voice. Though they sound a little... soul-less. I don't believe they'll ever take over the music world, but they'll end up with a place in it.

Ok, now for some Vocaloid Randomness. Most of these are either game related or silly. You don't have to listen/watch these if you don't want to :P

Pengo Out!






BEGIN LOITUMA OVERLOAD PROGRAM:

START:

RUN>










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