CD Review: The Warriors Limited Edition Soundtrack
When soundtrack to The Warriors was originally released, fans of the movie were kind of getting a bum deal. That’s because while it did include all the original songs that were composed for the film, it only featured a brief eight minutes of the movie’s iconic score, spread out across three short tracks. For a film with such a memorable and unique original score, it always seemed like a missed opportunity.
Thankfully, after 30+ years, La La Land Records have stepped up to fix this historic oversight with their new limited edition re-issue of The Warriors soundtrack. This new expanded and remastered edition features the original soundtrack album in its entirety, as well as the complete original score, with some unreleased material thrown in for good measure.
It kicks ass.
Game Review: Cloudberry Kingdom
Let me tell you the difference between a challenging game and a frustrating game.
A challenging game may be difficult, it may even make you angry, but if you keep at it long enough, you’ll figure out what it is you have to do in order to beat it, and you’ll do it. When you beat a challenging game, you feel like you’ve out-smarted it, that you learned its weaknesses and powered through them to victory.
A frustrating game is a game that is difficult, but for reasons that aren’t always fair or clearly-defined. A frustrating game will employ trial-and-error mechanics, ensuring that victory can only come from rote memorization. A frustrating game will often control poorly, and sometimes even incorporate its own poor controls into the gameplay. Finally, when you beat a frustrating game, you don’t feel like you accomplished anything, you just feel relieved that you don’t have to play it again.
Rogue Legacy is a challenging game. Spelunky straddles the line between the two. Super Meat Boy goes over the line sometimes, but never enough to make you hate it.
But then there’s Cloudberry Kingdom.
Cloudberry Kingdom isn’t just frustrating, it’s one of the most frustrating games I’ve played in years. It might just be the most frustrating game I’ve ever played that wasn’t just straight-up broken.
It’s an ugly, brutal mess of a game that lacks anything that someone might construe as fun. Not a single thing about the game, from the graphics and music to the gameplay and level design, is with merit or worth praise.
I hate this game.
Instant Finds – Rolling Thunder
Revenge movies are a tricky thing.
On one end of the spectrum you have violent power fantasies like The Crow, Desperado or Machete; unrealistic hyper-violent orgies of death and destruction that paint vigilante justice as a swift and powerful sword of righteousness.
On the other end are movies like I Saw The Devil, Hard Candy and Memento, which suggest that when someone takes the law into their own hands they risk turning into the very monsters that they are after.
And then there’s Rolling Thunder, a 1977 revenge thriller co-written by Paul Schrader, which seems to straddle the line between both sides, suggesting that while vigilante justice may be “right” in some cases, you’re not going to come out a better person having committed it.
My Weirdest Record: A Musical Seance by Rosemary Brown
I’ve been reading and writing about music for most of my life, but when I found out about Rosemary Brown, I was convinced that I found the strangest story in the history of popular music.
A rather common British widow living in a quiet London borough, Rosemary Brown appeared from out of nowhere in the late 60s with a rather bold statement: she was a psychic medium, and history’s greatest classical composers, including Beethoven, Chopin and Brahams, were contacting her from beyond the grave to share “new” musical compositions with her.
Vinyl Review: Daft Punk – Get Lucky 12″ Single
Remixes have always been a part of dance music, but it seems like they matter now more than they ever did before.
It’s always the remix that gets played at the club. It’s the remix that takes a summer festival crowd by storm. It’s the remix that charts at Beatport. If the modern ‘EDM’ scene has proven one thing, it’s that if you want your track to really take off and get that crossover appeal, you better be ready to hand it off to every DJ and producer in the world to let them dismantle and reconstruct it in their own image (especially if that image is “sick dubstep“).
So when Daft Punk announced that they would be handling all the remixes for the singles from Random Access Memories, a lot of people were taken aback. Still, it kind of made sense. For whatever reason, most remixes of Daft Punk tracks tend to fall flat. They always seem to strip away what makes the original tracks unique, and instead just transform them into standard, boring club tunes (Glitch Mob excluded).
But even if Daft Punk had given “Get Lucky” to a thousand producers, DJs and other artists to remix “Get Lucky” to their heart’s content, it’s safe to say that none of them would have taken the track and done what Daft Punk did with it, which is hardly anything at all.
Although that’s not really a bad thing.
Vinyl Review: Maniac Soundtrack (Death Waltz Edition)
It’s weird buying a soundtrack to a movie that you have no plan on actually seeing, isn’t it?
Well, that’s what I did with the soundtrack to Maniac, the latest high-end vinyl only release from Death Waltz Recording Company. And I’m glad I did, because while I have no desire to see the Maniac remake produced and co-written by High Tension director Alexandre Aja and starring Elijah Wood, it sure does have one hell of a fantastic score.
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.
Ryan Davis: 1979-2013
Rest in peace duder. I hope there are plenty of stupid movies on laserdiscs wherever you are.
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.
Unboxing Gallery – Envy: Invariable Will, Recurring Ebbs And Flows
Envy is a Japanese post-hardcore/post-rock/post-metal/post-whatever band that has built up quite the following in both their native country and in the states. To celebrate their 20th anniversary, Temporary Residence has released this, Invariable Will, Recurring Ebbs And Flows, a massive box set that includes every single song the band has ever commercially released.
Did I say massive? I said massive right? Because holy hell this thing is massive.