Adventures in Red Book Audio: Don’t Play This Disc!
In the early days of CD-ROM gaming, a lot of games made use of Red Book audio, the same audio standard used by audio CDs. This meant that many of these games had crisp, digital audio that was light years ahead of the 16-bit MIDI audio that was commonplace at the time. It also meant that you could put the game disc in your CD player and play the music off of it like a regular CD.
Sadly, that didn’t last long. In Japan, game soundtracks were (and continue to be) a pretty big deal, so allowing gamers to just pop the game disc into their CD player and rock out to the soundtrack kind of cannibalized that market. Additionally, there were some games that could never use Red Book audio because of size limitations, or other technical concerns. Simply put, most games you’ll find for any of the early CD systems have no Red Book audio of any kind.
If you ever tried to put any of these games in your CD player, you would just be treated with one long “data track” where all the game information was stored. In my personal experience, this track was usually silent, but apparently some CD players would try to read these tracks as audio, causing loud digital garbage to be played out of your speakers.
If developers were smart, they would have tried to sell that shit to Lou Reed, but instead, they decided to try their best to make sure that gamers never attempted to put those discs in their CD players, lest they blow speakers or cause some other damage to their home audio system. To this effect, they would usually put warning in instruction booklets advising gamers against putting CD-ROM gems like Gex into their car stereo.
However, to really drive the point home, sometimes they would also stick in an audio warning on the disc itself. It was a tactic that was entirely pointless though, since the “data track” with the potentially damaging audio had to be the first track, meaning that any warning about the hypothetical damage caused by putting the disc in the system would play AFTER the possibly dangerous track had already finished playing.
Also, for me at least, these warnings created the unintended effect of actually making me want to put game discs in my CD player even more, just to find out if they had some weird warning on them. In effect, I was actively doing what they were warning me not to do specifically because they were warning me not to do it.
That was how teenage me stuck it to the man.
Anyways, I was digging through my old games and thought it would be fun to show off some of these goofy warnings, a strange byproduct of a bygone era in gaming. Hope you find them interesting.
Game Review: Rogue Legacy
Rogue Legacy is one of the most addictive games ever made. How addictive is it? Well, if it wasn’t for the fact that I was at my father’s house right now, sitting in front of a laptop that is not capable of gaming of any sort, I’d probably be playing it right now.
This is a song about Dig Dug by the guy who sang Dream Weaver
I have no idea why.
I need to know more about this song. I need to know how this happened. Someone, anyone, help me. Someone out there has to have inside information as to why Gary Wright (The Dream Weaver) was so moved by motherfucking Dig Dug that he decided to craft a pop song about it,but then decide to release it as “Digital Air” and not his own name (but while still giving himself the writing credit under his actual name).
This is the kind of shit that keeps me up at night.
Heartbreaking sidenote: the b-side is labeled as “Berzerk” but it’s really just “Dig Dug” again! I would murder someone to hear Gary Wright’s take on “Berzerk.”
Click here to download and WATCH OUT FOR THE ROCK!
Mostly-Retro, home of the real shit: songs about motherfucking Dig Dug.
Microsoft’s “Fuck You” to Consumers – An Obscene Reading of an Obscene Proposal
Whenever a new gaming system is announced, gamers immediately have more questions than the developers are willing to answer. How many games will be coming out at launch? What are the technical specs of the system? Will it be backwards compatible? How much will it cost? And so on and so forth.
But with this upcoming generation gamers have been forced to ask a question that they never thought they’d have to.
Will I have the right to play the game that I bought?
Last month, Microsoft announced its new gaming system, the horribly named Xbox One. In the wake of that announcement, various heads at the company made conflicting statements about the system’s used games policy. Some said used games will remain the same, while others said that gamers wouldn’t be able to trade-in their disc-based games without paying some sort of processing fee. It was a mess.
So last week, Microsoft finally caved to pressure, and issued a statement explaining how the Xbox One will (and won’t) work with used games.
And it’s a bunch of motherfucking bullshit.
On Doug TenNapel, Bigotry and supporting Hate
Doug TenNapel, co-creator of the beloved Earthworm Jim franchise, is currently trying to fund a new game, Armikrog, a spiritual successor to his cult hit The Neverhood.
It’s not surprising. Ever since Double Fine proved that you can bank on gamers’ desire for retro-flavored projects, other developers have been coming out of the woodwork to try and get their own projects funded and released. And good on them. Kickstarter has proven that sometimes people really do put their money where their mouths are, and that when the chance comes along they’re eager to support something they believe in.
But when you support someone’s project, you’re also supporting what they believe in, whether you like it or not. And when you’re supporting Armikrog, you’re supporting the work of a person who has said some truly troubling things.
Review: Final Fantasy Vinyls
The plural of “vinyl” is, in fact, “vinyl.”
Now that I got that out of the way, Final Fantasy Vinyls (sigh) is a a 5LP box set featuring music from the first ten Final Fantasy games. Each song was hand picked by series composer Noburo Uematsu and specially remastered for this vinyl release.
The box set came out in Japan in November. I was lucky enough to snag one while I was there, and I’ve been meaning to review it ever since. However, I wanted to review both the vinyl and the downloadable MP3s that came with it, but I was unable to redeem the codes due to them being on a Japanese website, and me speaking/reading/understanding zero Japanese.
Twitter to the rescue! With the help of one Matthew Keehan, I was able to get my downloads in order, and now I am finally able to present to you my thoughts on this box set.
And after all that wait, what do I think of it?
Eh, it’s okay I guess.
Yars’ Revenge – The Record
I love Yars’ Revenge.
It’s my favorite 2600 game, no question about it. Sure, Demon Attack was great, and Pitfall is a classic, but if I had to choose one Atari game to hold above all others, it would have to be Yars’ Revenge.
I played the hell out of this game as a kid, emulated it like crazy in the 90s, and even bought it legit again (on Microsoft Game Room no less) a few years back so I could rock it on my Xbox 360.
I love this game.
So I am totally stoked that I own it on vinyl.
Missile Command – The Record
Even before I dropped the needle on the Asteroids record, I knew that the album’s creators probably had to stretch a bit to come up with an original story that could fill 20+ minutes. Asteroids has no plot. You shoot rocks. That’s it. Not much to go on there. Not surprisingly, the story they created for the Asteroids record ended up being pretty threadbare, but when you consider their source material, it’s amazing they were able to piece anything together at all.
So I was a little more excited when I found out that the same label, Kid Stuff, also put out a “soundtrack” album to Missile Command. Because, while you may not know it, that game is actually about something. Mainly, that game is about World War III.
You aren’t shooting down random missiles in Missile Command, you’re shooting down ICBMs. And the cities aren’t no-name metropolises from another word; they’re California cities Eureka, San Francisco, San Luis Obsipo, Santa Barbarage, Los Angeles and San Diego.
You can’t beat most games from that era, but in Missile Command that actually means something. No matter what you do, no matter how good you are, no matter how many extra lives you earm, eventually you’re going to lose in Missile Command. The missiles will fall. The world will end. Everyone will die. That is what Missile Command is about.
And then someone at Kid Stuff saw the game and said, “let’s turn that into a children’s record!”
Needless to say, changes had to be made.
Atari’s Asteroids, Now on Vinyl
Asteroids was released in arcades in 1979, and has gone on to be one of the most enduring examples of the golden age of arcade games. Although most would probably find it boring today due to its simplistic gameplay and lack of variety, at the time the game’s innovative control scheme (no joystick, just buttons) and momentum-based movement were revolutionary and helped arcade operators rack in quarters by the bucketload. Just two years later, the game made it on the Atari 2600 home console, and kids around the country were playing the game in the comfort of their own home, blasting rocks and competing against each other for the highest score (myself included).
In the years since, the game has been ported and converted to nearly every gaming platform in existence. You can play it on your phone, on the Xbox, the PS3, the PC, you name it.
But did you know that you can play it on your turntable?
Presenting Asteroids, the album. A 1983 release by Kid Stuff Records.