Friday, July 11, 2025

Game EXP: Last Guest (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Last Guest through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

Last Guest
Systems: Windows, Steam OS
Release Date: May 28, 2025
Publisher: Room13Games
Developer: Room13Games
Time Spent: 47 Minutes
Playthrough Videos on YouTube

Last Guest plays like a combination of visual novel and walking simulator, which isn't supposed to be a dig at either genre.  While there isn't a whole lot to do in Last Guest besides talk to a couple of people, it does deliver on being a moderately unsettling game.  In Last Guest, you follow the story of a man who stops at a motel while driving somewhere between Portland and Seattle (it's about a three-hour drive), although they mention that "have to get back to Takomu," which maybe is supposed to be Tacoma (which is only an hour or so south of Seattle, depending on traffic), or it's just a fictional town in the Pacific North West.  The narration also mentions that they've been driving all day, hence them being tired and needing to stop, so geographically, I have no idea where the story is supposed to take place*.  That doesn't really matter, though, because the setting of the game is a small two-floor motel off a highway, so it really could just be anywhere, which is just as well.

Part of what makes this game slightly unsettling is that I'm not always sure if the characters and dialogue were purposefully written that way or if there was something that happened during the localization process.  The dialogue from all of the characters always feels a bit off, both in terms of what is said and how the response relates to the expected reaction to the previous comment.  

You: Good evening. Do you have a room available for the night? I'm exhaused after driving all day.

Concierge: Number 7. Available.

You:  Great, I'll take it. How much is it? Is there anything closer on the second floor?

Concierge: Pay in the morning.  Room 7, on the first floor. There are no others. Keep the key.

Because there is no voice over when the characters speak, it's left up to the player to interpret how the dialogue would sound coming out of each character's mouth, be it spoken hastily with an unsettled urgency, or a slow and friendly manner, like someone doing a poor job of trying to conceal nervousness.  I read the Concierge's dialogue in a slightly slow and monotonous tone, like they're doing a bad job of reading a script.  I can't quite place it.  Like, it seems intentional, but at the same time, not.  The dialogue of the Concierge feels just off enough that it nearly gives me chills.  Similar to how disjointed the voice on the phone in Stephen King's short story "1408" comes across.

The telephone continued to grind and spit, the voice coming from it now the voice of an electric hair-clipper that has learned how to talk: "Five! This is five! Ignore the siren! Even if you leave this room, you can never leave this room! Eight! This is eight!"**

A big "Ooph" for me, and apparently a lot of people, was the appearance of the mechanic, who has a nasty habit of clipping into the wall.  If you watch either of my videos (linked above), you'll notice that it's particularly bad in the partial video where the mechanic is half in the wall and his face keeps clipping into the towel rack.  In the full video, it's not so bad, mainly his shoulder, but it's still distracting.  My uneducated guess is that it has something to do with where the player is located when they click the shower, to where specifically the mechanic spawns, in that it's not a set spawn point but is reliant on the location of the player.  I'm also not certain if the mechanic's eyes were supposed to be double-pupilled a la the Axe Maniac from In the Mouth of Madness, or if it was just a bad character model/asset.

I also experienced a game-breaking glitch, viewable in the partial video at the 15:10 mark.  Something about where my character was positioned when I clicked on the car in your character's first attempt to escape the motel, and where you respawn.  I can only guess that I was somehow too close to the car, and when the character model respawned after the screen cut to black, I might have respawned slightly inside the model of the car, rendering my character immovable.

One small thing that bothered me was that there were several houses clearly across the street from the motel if you walked as far out of the driveway as possible.  Maybe the houses came with the location and were not purposefully placed there, because then why else wouldn't the character just go across the street to use the phone after witnessing a murder?  I get that the location of the motel is supposed to feel remote based on the opening text, but seeing several houses, literally across the street, made it feel more suburban than rural.  Yes, it didn't look like there were indoor lights on during the night scene, but I guess that's just the backseat driver during a horror movie part of my brain working.

There were a couple of typos, too, throughout the game.  In one instance, the dialogue had the "Concierege" as the person talking when it was clearly the player.  In another instance, a character was described as a "man" when the character model was clearly a woman, which means that either it's a simple typo or that the character model was changed at some point during development.  These alone or altogether were not enough for me to write off the game, but it did make the game feel significantly less polished.

Overall, I actually enjoyed the story behind Last Guest as it reminded me of a short story Stephen King might come up with.  Out of the way motel, weary and tired driver, creepy and cryptic concierge, murderous neighbor, strange local mechanic.  All of the components are there for a fun and creepy short story, and I could tell that that was what Room13Games was trying to convey, but Last Guest just didn't feel as complete or refined as it could have been.  Maybe with another couple of passes from an editor and a couple of tweaks after some playtests, there really could be something here.



~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian


* Although, I guess if you wanted to take an indirect coastal route from Seattle to Portland, then it could take you just over seven hours, although that doesn't answer if Takomu is supposed to be Tacoma or not.

** King, Stephen. “1408.” Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales, Pocket Books, New York, NY, 2003. 

Wednesday, July 9, 2025

MIDI Week Singles: "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" - Fallout 4 (VSD)

 


"I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" from Fallout 4* on Windows, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One/S/X (2015)
Performed By: The Ink Spots
Album: Not on any official Fallout 4 soundtracks*. Released as a B-side with "Hey Doc"
Label: Decca


To me, this song and "Maybe," not coincidentally, both songs by the Ink Spots, are quintessentially Fallout songs.  Something about the leisurely-paced trotting rhythm of the guitars lends itself to casually walking around whatever wasteland you find yourself in.  The title of the song also feels appropriate to how I often played Fallout 4, just minding my own business walking from one end of the Commonwealth to the other, likely while overencumbered, and find myself fired upon by a half dozen raiders, which then forces me to kill nearly two dozen people as half way through the firefight I am also beset upon by more raiders in hiding, a group of Super Mutants in the building next door, and a roaming group of robots hellbent on saving the people of the Commonwealth the only way they've calculated how.  I just wanted to deconstruct a literal half-shit-ton of scrap, and I end up committing my third mass-murder-shooting of the day.

Interestingly, I actually rarely heard this song while playing Fallout 4 since I only found myself listening to Diamond City Radio and Radio Freedom a couple of times, instead opting for the score composed by Inon Zur instead.  Even then, I can't help but think of Fallout whenever this song crops up.


~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
And The World Has Turned Around Again


*This song was included on "Featured Selections from the Fallout 3 Soundtrack," released by Bethesda in 2008.  It was also used in Fallout 76 and the Fallout Amazon series.

Friday, July 4, 2025

Monthly Update: July 2025

 


I'm sure that I'll probably write more about the Switch 2 as a system in the coming weeks, although maybe I'll relegate it to Monthly Updates as I don't see myself having much of any kind of technical information regarding screen ghosting, 4K visuals, or how the Switch 2 version of Cyberpunk 2077 compares to a liquid cooled RTX 5090 with 256 GB DDR5 RAM.  Right now, I'm only playing Mario Kart World as a Switch 2 exclusive and playing a couple of other digital releases (Car Quest) that I'm not playing on the Switch OLED (see Monday).

I did finish a couple of games and one DLC last month, specifically Fallout 4, Super Mario Wonder, and the Morrowind DLC for The Elder Scrolls Online.  I already wrote about Fallout 4 last week, and I'm not sure if I'll write about the other two in a typical Game EXP article.  And it's not from not enjoying either, but Super Mario Wonder was strange in that I played it a lot with The Squire, both in single player and couch co-op.  Sometimes he'll want me to play as Blue Yoshi in single player if he's having a hard time, because that's his favorite color and because Yoshi is nearly invulnerable.  At other times, when we play co-op, he'll want to play in a silly way that isn't really conducive to making progress, and he always wants to choose which level to play, which again doesn't always lead to progress.  For the Morrowind DLC, I spent probably around 150 hours in Vvardenfell, and while I loved returning to that inner island during the 2nd Era, I don't really know what I would write about.

Back on the Switch OLED, I'm jumping back into Triangle Strategy since I'm somewhat self-relegated to playing only physical game cartridges and Virtual Console titles (see Monday).  I was surprised and relieved that I hadn't left off where I thought I had, in a difficult story battle, but instead in the middle of a level-grinding battle.  I think when I finish this game, I'll look up a flow chart to see how the different paths and choices affect the game, because right now, our group is doing about as poorly story-wise as you could expect.  Our duchy has been framed and blackmailed, we've lost multiple attempts to sway a court in our favor, and our region has essentially been taken over by a hypocritical and morally corrupt official from an overly religious kingdom.  I'm really hoping there'll be some positive resolution, and I didn't just accidentally make ALL BAD CHOICES.

With the recent trailer release of Resident Evil: Requiem, I decided to jump back into my chronological Resident Evil journey and started the 3rd-person action shooter with some horror elements, Resident Evil 6, on the Steam Deck.  It doesn't quite replace Fallout 4 as an easy game to jump into and out of, as I found out that reaching checkpoints is not the same as saving, and saving is only done by the game at specific times.  As a winddown game, I'm also playing Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster, as in the first Final Fantasy and the only two negative things I have to say about this game (and collection) at the moment are that I don't like that your character can move diagonally, that just feels weird.  And two, that the "soundtrack" that comes with the pixel remastered collection seems to only be three songs from the arranged soundtrack; mostly disappointed by this but I guess I shouldn't be surprised otherwise the collection would've been closer to $150.

So that's June going into July.

Oh, and I've got lots of words and thoughts about Trump's billionaire tax break and 12,000,000 less people on Medicaid bill, but I forgot my charger at home (I'm not currently at home) and I don't have to time to research, write, edit and publish a coherent rant about how dumb this bullshit is before my battery dies, so I'll just leave it at that, and you're welcome to further extrapolate at your leisure.


~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Да-ли смерть встречать уж пора

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

MIDI Week Singles: "One-Man Festival Theme" - Cho Aniki: Seinaru Protein Densetsu (PS2)

 


"One-Man Festival Theme" from Cho Aniki: Seinaru Protein Densetsu on the PlayStation 2 (2003)
Composer(s): Koji Hayama, Takeo Yahiro, Aki Hata
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Global A Entertainment
Developer: Psikyo


If I had thought that Hybrid Heaven was an innovative take on the wrestling and fighting genre, then I don't know what to tell you about Cho Aniki: Seinaru Protein Denstsu, aka Cho Aniki: The Legend of the Sacred Protein.  This is a game about two bodybuilders who have tasked themselves with protecting a legendary protein from various antagonists who want to consume it so they can achieve the ultimate physique.  And it's a side-scrolling shmup like Life Force or R-Type.  Each stage, Adon and Samson protect the legendary protein while it fires barrages of projectiles at the enemies who come to consume the protein, culminating in a boss fight.

Stage 5 takes place during a New Year's festival in Japan, where the two bodybuilders and legendary protein finally go up against The One-Man Festival...which is the name of the boss, or at the very least his title.  There is separate music during the stage, but once The One-Man Festival appears, this song kicks in, and I'd like to think that it is the boss who is singing.  I imagine The One-Man Festival singing this song somewhat drunkenly as he approaches Adon, Samson, and the legendary protein, already confident that he will be consuming the protein to get them gains, and his singing is just now catching up with him.

It's an absurd song to be boss battle music, but this game is nothing but absurd, so it works well, and I will not accept any other statement to the contrary.


~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
And The Gin They Never Had

Monday, June 30, 2025

Nintendo Switch 2: Three Things


Well, I bought Nintendo Switch 2 on Friday.  Correction, I purchased it earlier in the week, and it was ready to be picked up on Friday.  I experienced my first bit of anxiety regarding this new system after opening and taking everything out of the box, but I was unable to locate what was understood to be a business card-sized redemption code for Mario Kart World.  I recalled that the box hadn't been taped and was hoping that someone at Best Buy hadn't snagged it out of the box earlier in the day.  The wording on the box even stated, "Full Game Download," and "To be downloaded on included system.  See inside panel for instructions," and I wasn't able to find any panel, inside or otherwise, that could direct me to anything to do with the download.  After a frantic Google search, I found out that all I had to do was to connect to the Nintendo eShop, and the game would be available to download, so the download code is directly tied to the console and not a specific code which would be then tied to the Nintendo account that used it.  I'm not sure how I feel about that, but there it is.

The second hiccupy thing I ran into was with the original Switch Pro Controller.  I'd read that the original Pro Controller was compatible with the Switch 2, and I've found that to be true.  The complication came when I realized that switching the Pro Controller between the Original Switch and the Switch 2 is cumbersome when having to pair it back and forth.  With the Original Switch, I can just plug the USB cable into the controller and the console dock and it almost immediately connects/pairs (as in fewer than 5 seconds), but when I tried this method with the Switch 2, nothing happened; yes, I went to the alternate pairing methods page/tab/section.  I don't know if this was an initial setup hiccup or if you just can't pair the Switch Pro Controller with the Switch 2 using only a cable, but the process of pairing between the Switch 2 and the Original Switch has made me now want a Switch 2 Pro Controller, but only after they're back in stock at Costco.

The biggest "Well, huh" moment came when The Squire wanted to play a game on our original Switch, but was unable to because of Nintendo's recently implemented game card sharing system.  All of this future confusion and complications are likely due to having my linked Nintendo profile connected to multiple Switch systems, including the Switch 2.  I feel like this is going to need a flow chart, otherwise I'm likely to talk myself in circles and still not come across as making any sense.


Okay, I guess it's less of a flow chart and more of some pictures with a bunch of confusing arrows and some descriptive non-descript text.

So we have the original switch that is, according to Nintendo, my primary switch, which is where digital games go when I purchase them.  So, any purchased digital games can be played by any account on the original Switch.  Then we have the OLED Switch, which I have also linked my Nintendo account, but other accounts on the OLED Switch cannot play digital games because they're not authorized accounts according to Nintendo; other accounts on the OLED Switch can't play the "Virtual Console" apps (NES, SNES, Game Boy, etc) because they're not part of our online family plan.  Then on Friday, when we got the Switch 2, I used the OLED Switch to perform the system/account transfer link, which I'm thinking might be part of my problem, and downloaded Mario Kart World.

My frustration came to a head when I opened up the Original Switch and The Squire tried to play Hatch Tales.  This is when I found out that you're only able to link your Nintendo account between two systems max, even with exclusive Switch 2 games like Mario Kart World.  What I've found out in the last couple of days is that if I want to play Mario Kart World, I need to have the Switch 2 linked to the Switch OLED.  If I want to play any digital games that I've purchased with my Nintendo account on the Switch OLED.  I need to have it linked to the Original Switch, which then means that I have to unlink the connection between the OLED and the Switch 2 and link it between the OLED and the Original Switch.  Did I just say that twice?  Maybe, but that's what the non-flow chart flow chart is supposed to be for.

I'm thinking that some of my problems might be alleviated if I reset the Switch 2 to factory settings and connect it as a primary link to the Original Switch.  Maybe having the Switch 2's primary link to the Switch OLED, which doesn't have my primary linked account.  My one hangup is I'm slightly afraid that if I do perform a factory reset on the Switch 2 that I won't be able to redownload Mario Kart World, because I've already downloaded it.  I'm 87.47% sure that that's not how this actually works since the game seems to be tied to the console, but there's that lizard-part of my brain that's telling me that doing a factory reset on the Switch 2 will somehow erase something to do with the eShop recognizing the "paid connection" between the console and Mario Kart World.  

Or maybe not, and I'm just conflagrating the situation?  I just returned from looking into doing everything in the last couple of paragraphs, and I was able to play both Mario Kart World on the Switch 2 and Hatch Tales on the Original Switch, which means that my Switch OLED is not currently linked to either system.  So maybe the Switch OLED will now just be a physical game card-only system for the sake of convenience?  I did run into an issue last night when The Squire was quickly clicking through the 'link to a different Switch' prompt and unlinked between the Switch 2 and the OLED and linked the Switch 2 to the Original Switch, which immediately kicked me out of the digital game I was currently playing (Car Quest).  Which is a terrifying prospect of playing a digital game if I'm away from the house (ie, work) and The Squire is home and wanting to play Hatch Tales or Flashback (he likes the title music).

If you've gotten this far in the article, or even if you've just skipped to the last paragraph, I want to emphasize that this article is not in response to buyer's remorse of any kind.  I think part of the inception for this article is that I've never had to deal with this level of backward compatibility across multiple console systems before.  It's also something that I hadn't anticipated with Nintendo's game sharing system, and something that I hadn't heard of in the 25 days since the console was first released.  I am having a lot of fun with Mario Kart World, and I'm sure I'll be able to work out a system regarding the Switch OLED, the Original Switch, and the Switch 2 that I'll eventually be happy with once all of this newness has worn off.



~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I Know How To Keep A Woman Satisfied


P.S.  I also found this Reddit thread pretty useful in terms of the transfer process from the Switch to the Switch 2.  It answered some questions I didn't know I had, as well as a few "features" that I don't recall reading about before I started the account linkage.

P.P.S.  I have not played any online matches in Mario Kart World, so I have nothing to add regarding the apparent hate after a recent update modified the way random tracks are chosen.

Friday, June 27, 2025

Game EXP: Fallout 4 (VSD)

 


Systems: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, Linux, Steam OS
Release Date: November 5, 2015 - April 25, 2024
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Time Spent: 261 Hours, 48 Minutes

I genuinely don't know where to start with Fallout 4 and its accompanying DLCs.  I spent nearly 262 hours, or  210 in-game days, which honestly surprised me because I did a somewhat decent job of roleplaying my character of Jacqueline.  Kind of.  I had Jacqueline have a 100-hour detour from trying to find her kidnapped son to the island of Far Harbor to help a colony of synth refugees, all the while infiltrating a fanatic religious organization, The Children of Atom, while succumbing to frequent near-fatal amounts of radiation.  Before we continue with this meandering article, I'd recommend reading/rereading my First Impressions article from last August, where I do a bit of character introduction and cover my first 47 hours.  

Now, 214 hours later, let's jump back into the end of the middle of Jacqueline's story in the wasteland of the Commonwealth of the former United States, 2088.

Yes, the game starts on October 23rd, 2077, the day the first bombs were dropped in the United States, and your character, known colloquially as the "Sole Survivor", wakes up exactly two hundred years later on October 23, 2277.  I finished Jacqueline's story on May 20, 2088.  During those 210 days, I had her join the reformed Minutemen and helped set up 30+ settlements that pledged loyalty to the Minutemen after completing numerous fetch quests.  Jacqueline also helped a synth detective absurdly named Nick Valentine with a case (that I've since forgotten about) to find out information about her kidnapped son, only to discover that he was being held by The Institute, and quite safely and happily at that. 

As a result of being told that her son was alive and well taken care of, Jacqueline had a brief crisis where she ended up helping another family try to locate their missing daughter, where she ended up saving the synth colony of Acadia on the island of Cold Harbor from the Children of Atom and a handful of fearful citizens in the town of Cold Harbor.  I also replaced the leader of the Children of Atom with a synth with the help of the synth leader DiMA (after doing some batshit-crazy brain hacking mini-games).  The daughter was convinced that she was a synth, but later returned to her family on the mainland with loving and open arms, regardless of whether she was a human or a synth.  

Jacqueline also stopped an uprising of robots from an eccentric figure self-titled The Machinist, whose mechanical creations had deduced that the best way to save the people of the Commonwealth was to kill them all.  She also helped a super mutant scientist recover a serum from The Institute to help him revert back to his human form, and accidentally wiped out a small village of the Children of Atom when she accidentally caused one of the members damage while jumping down from a room while wearing power armor.

Jacqueline later joined the Underground Railroad to help with the relocation of synths who had escaped from The Institute, while also at the same time infiltrating The Institute, only to find out that her son, who was taken recently, had in fact been taken over 60 years earlier and was the leader of said Institute.  While running missions for both factions, Jacqueline made life-long enemies of the Brotherhood of Steel by stealing a fusion-based energy source from the BoS to power The Institute's reactors indefinitely, only to blow it up during an incursion by the Underground Railroad, where her dying son Shaun was caught up in the blast.  But she did rescue, in the dumbest narrative way possible, a synth copy of her son as a 10-year-old boy, so now Jacqueline can be a Mom to a child.

Although I did save the game before I ran the assault on The Institute to see if, in fact, I could save hundreds of lives by killing one person, the leader of the Underground Railroad and then become the new leader of The Institute via the biggest case of nepotism since 2016.  It turned out that I would have had to have killed a lot more people.  However, I wasn't entirely happy with that timeline, or the idea of running fetch quests for different department heads, which is rather an odd feeling since I'd been running fetch quests for nearly the whole game.  But by this point, I had forgone my MO of not fast traveling and was regularly fast traveling, especially if I was encumbered (here's lookin' at you fully leveled up Strong Back perk).  I had felt that I had seen all there was to be seen between the Underground Railroad's HQ and wherever Tinker Tom needed me to place a MILA or wherever a dead drop was, and its subsequent clearing out of a safe house; this was probably around the 190-200 hour mark for those keeping score.  Although I still never fast-traveled to a settlement went they were under attack.  I was pretty hands-off with the settlements, only really having 3-8 people at each one and keeping the recruiter signal off after having it on if it was required by a quest.  I fortified most with a couple of turrets and made sure that each had enough beds, food, and water, but that was about it.  I also did about 99.45% of solo without any companions or Dogmeat.  There were a couple of missions that required you to have a companion and once those were over, I sent them to live at one of the settlements, or they went back to their starting location in case I wanted to pick them up later.  I didn't.

I started the Vault-Tec Workshop DLC, but decided that running a Vault-Tec-style vault wasn't for me, so I turned off the recruiter signal there too and left Overseer Barstow to wallow underground until she leaves or goes feral herself.  I also didn't do the Nuka World DLC, which seemed to focus on creating a raider colony and sending out raiders to raid settlements, and that wasn't at all who Jacqueline was.  She had a 10-year-old synth to take care of; I'd also read that unless you were going in to develop your character as a raider/leader of raiders, that some of the fights were needlessly difficult so I decided to skip that altogether.  I also got over my annoyance with power armor occurring so early in the game simply by not really using it until after getting back from Far Harbor, and only then very rarely.  I probably had close to 100 unused power cores and 15+ at varying levels of power left.  

Obviously, I really enjoyed Fallout 4 and especially the Far Harbor DLC.  Like a lot of western-styled RPGs, I really enjoyed the early game the most when I was constantly cobbling together ever slightly better bits of mismatched armor and there always being a chance I could die from taking on one too many raiders.  After coming back from Far Harbor, I had found all the pieces of the Marine Armor set which I ended up modding to include Deep Pockets to help increase my carry weight, but every other piece of armor I found did not give me a better overall armor rating, so for the remaining 150+ hours, I was in the same armor, which did feel a little stale by the time I liberated the Commonwealth from The Institute.  But roleplaying definitely helped here a lot because it meant that I would periodically change up my armor or weapon to better suit the specific mission I was playing if it called for it.


Yeah, I think having played for 261 hours in the end really summarizes how I felt about this game in how I decided to play it.  Good world, satisfying level progression, too many settlements that I never really felt invested in (so don't worry about them)*.



~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Would You Like To Be What You Can't Be?


*More On this.  Maybe if each of the settlers had been given a randomized name instead of just "Settler," there might have been more of a connection and reason to feel invested in the creation and maintenance of a settlement.  True, there were some settlements with named characters like Covenant, The Slog, and Greygardens, but all of the random settlers that show up are only "Settler."  It's harder to care about someone if they're only a title.  There might be something there.

P.S.  I also just realized how underutilized the cannon artillery placements you learn from doing the Minutemen questline involving the Castle.  I get the idea of creating cannon placements at other settlements to have a wider range, but it felt like most of my important and hard battles were fought indoors, where the cannons are not going to reach.  Neat idea, but it never felt practical.  Or maybe I just didn't fully understand the in-game mechanics.

P.P.S.  I'm also now just wondering if there was an endgame where the Brotherhood ot Steel attacked The Institute as a final test of your loyalty, or if it would always be against the Underground Railroad.

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

MIDI Week Singles: "World 3: Into the Warzone" - Booby Boys (DMG)

 


"World 3: Into the Warzone" from Booby Boys on the Nintendo Game Boy (1993)
Composer: Kenji Yoshida
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Nichibutsu
Developer: Nichibutsu


When you're randomlly pulling up music from video games you've never heard of with hopes that you'll come across some semblance of an earworm, I was really really hoping that I would find something from Booby Boys, if only just so that I could feature a song from a game with this name; I can still be immature sometimes.  Believe it or not, I really liked the music from World 1 and World 3.  The music from World 1 felt too predictable, so we went with "World 3: Into the Warzone" for a couple of reasons.

First and foremost, I do actually enjoy this bouncing melody.  Secondly, while I was doing research and trying to find out a more appropriate name than "BGM 03," being the name of the file, I discovered that this music plays in the third world of the game, specifically a military base or warzone-themed world.  Absolutely nothing in this jovial little diddy has anything reminiscent of a military base (although I've mostly only been to air force bases in the late 80s and early 90s, so maybe the atmosphere has changed since then?) or a warzone (never attended).  Although if I think of this song as being performed by a military band during a proper military parade, then I can mentally insert a drum line, piccolos, trumpets, and maybe a colony of clarinets, then you know what?  Sure, this song could be appropriate for this setting.

Maybe not while one or two little rapscallians is running around setting up booby traps in the form of pits to capture/kill whatever the justification for monsters running around, but there you have it.


~JWfW/JDub/The  Faceplantman/Jaconian
Seems Like Such A Blur