MIDI Week Singles: "Song C" - Gauntlet (NES)

 

"Song C" from Gauntlet on the Nintendo Entertainment System (1988)
Composer: Hal Canon
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Tengen
Developer: Tengen

Memory and the passage of time are a fickle thing.  I could have sworn that I wrote the MIDI Week Single article for "Treasure Room" a year or two back, thinking that I didn't need to feature another song from Gauntlet so close to the previous article.  But that article was from five years ago.  Surely the previous article for "Song A" was more recent than no, that was 11 god damn years ago!  So maybe we're doing Gauntlet music every five-ish years at this point?  

Maybe it's also some kind of commentary on the music itself, and at this point, I don't need to go into my personal history with Gauntlet.  Something that did surprise me while researching this article was that it appears that the music in the game is random, as a couple of the longplays I watched had different songs play for different levels.  In my mind, this is the music that I would hear in Room 2.  Maybe it's something about the layout of the room or the color palette, but something about this music harkens back to that, and I can't fully figure out why if the music is indeed random.  Maybe my memory is faulty as it has been over 30 years since I last played Gauntlet on the NES, but I'll be damned that this game had some great music.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

When I Get Too Drunk To Sing

Monthly Update: May, 2025

 

What have I been doing these last 30 days?  Huh.  Stuff, I guess.

I've been plodding through Fallout 4 and at times wonder how and why I don' just b-line through the main quest and finish the damn thing so I can move onto another 170+ hour game that isn't The Elder Scrolls Online.  Then I finish a quest adjacent to the main storyline, having to do with the Minutemen, and I get an achievement.  Sure, there's the little serotonin boost when that bleep-bloop sound effect pops up and that's nice and all, but it really sinks in after I've turned the game off and look at the Steam Global Achievements page and see that only 29.8% of players of Fallout 4 have gotten the "Old Guns" achievement by creating artillery placements at Fort Independence.  Or that only 14.8% of Steam players have completed the "Far From Home" questline that is the Far Harbor DLC.  Don't get me wrong, it's not the rarity of the achievement that is driving me to play more, but more having to do with that, based on this one number for this one quest, 70.2% of the 15,200,000 who have purchased and started Fallout 4 have ever completed this far into the Minutemen quests; maybe they are that universally hated?  To me, that's wild.  Sure, some of it could be chalked up to people playing offline and the achievement not being recorded/counted, or some other function of the game not working, and that information not being recorded/collected by Steam.  But yeah, wild.

I feel like I'm nearing the end of the main quest in the Morrowind DLC in The Elder Scrolls Online, and I wouldn't be surprised if I take a little break after that happens.  Being able to explore Vvardenfell in a higher resolution than the original 22-year-old classic was one of the primary drivers behind starting that DLC in the first place.  Maybe I'll also start the Elseweyr DLC, too, since that's a region that's never been explored in the mainline series outside of Arena.  The same could be said for the Black Marsh DLC and the Aldmeri Dominion quest line, and it delves into both the Summerset Isles (not counting the Summerset DLC) and Valenwood.  Shit y'all, I think I'm stuck doing another 300+ hours in this game.

As of this writing, no, I didn't snag a Switch 2 pre-order.  I did briefly try when Best Buy went live on the 24th, but I seemed to have been sitting in a queue long enough that my phone timed out, and I got kicked back to the store page.  I wasn't bummed since I really couldn't afford it at the time.  I think if I do order one within the year, it'll likely be once Nintendo sends out their order form for people who signed up to register for pre-orders (although now it looks like they'll just be regular orders at this point), but I guess we'll find out by May 8th when order forms may or may not go out.  I mean, I didn't buy the Switch until it had already been out for four months, so it's not like I've ever felt like I needed to buy a console at launch.  I think it's more likely that I buy a new laptop since this one I'm using I bought back in 2020, although the only major thing wrong with it is that the sound driver is crap; always has been too.

I know I said last month that I wasn't really excited about the release schedule for this second season of Andor, but I would like to say that I've changed my mind on the three episodes dropped every Tuesday for four weeks.  Granted, Conklederp and I aren't binge watching all three episodes at once, instead, we're spacing them out over three nights.  So by the time this article goes to the proverbial printers, we'll have finished episode five (early night on Wednesday so we only watched the fifth episode on Thursday night).  I do really like that each three-episode arc encapsulates a series of events that happen during a year, or at least that's how it's currently established.

Oh, and I just picked up the Watch Along edition of Godzilla Minus One because it contains both the -0 (or minus color) edition and a new commentary specific to the minus color edition.  I figure that if I'm ever going to buy a Godzilla movie, it's going to be the one that nearly brought me to tears while I was donating platelets last year; not because it's not masculine to cry during a Godzilla movie, but because it would've been inconvenient to have one of the phelbologists constantly wiping away my tears while hooked up to the platelet machine.

Let's call it there for now.  I'm sure I could think of more things that have and will happen, but there's plenty of time to mill that over for the next 31 days.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Riding the Grid, Riding the Word

MIDI Week Singles: "Mitsurin" - Dragon Spirit (TG16)

 

"Mitsurin" from Dragon Spirit on the TurboGrafx-16 (1988)
Composer: Shinji Hosoe
Album: No Official Release for Turbo Grafx-16 Music
Publisher: Namco Ltd, NEC Home Electronics
Developer: Namco Ltd.

I promise you I didn't intentionally choose the same song from Dragon Spirit that I chose from Dragon Spirit: The New Legend almost six years ago.  I was listening to this song and thought pretty much the same thing as I thought then, that this song screams 1980s from beginning to end.  The biggest difference between this song and the one from the NES version is that "Mitsurin" is a little more subdued and just a little less flamboyant and exciting.  It makes sense that the sound chip in the TurboGrafx-16 has smoother sound quality compared to the NES, as it was running a more powerful system and was afforded more audio channels.  It also doesn't completely loop at 0:40 like the NES version and develops a bit more by throwing even more instrumentation in.  I am a bit sad that every version of this song from the TurboGrafx-16 game cuts off right at 1:09, and I couldn't find an extended version, but that's what the replay button is for.

This is still a hella fun song though, so we're using it again.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

And the Moonsparkling Sea

First Impressions: ROBMEMBOR (MQ2)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for ROBMEMBOR 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.] 

ROBMEMBOR
Systems: Meta Quest 2/3/Pro
Release Date: September 29, 2023
Publisher: Palindrome VR
Developer: Palindrome VR
Time Spent: 39 Minutes 41 Seconds
First Play Playlist on YouTube

I feel like I should have enjoyed ROBMEMBOR more than I did, and I'm disappointed to say that I didn't enjoy it for several reasons.  Although, let's start off with how the game advertises itself.

Navigate the labyrinthine corridors of an elderly woman's mind, whose memories have been broken by Alzheimer's. As the chosen mind-repairer, you will solve puzzles, guided by a witty robot, to piece together the tapestry of her life. Merge technology with empathy to revive beautiful memories from oblivion.

That there sounds like a great experience.  A moderately chill VR video game tackling the topic of Alzheimer's in video game form in a way that doesn't seem to make light of this condition.  The game's title is a portmanteau of the words Robot and Remembor, as you help a robot fit back together the memories of a woman with Alzheimer's disease.  The in-game narration even describes the process and mechanics as similar to an escape room.  On top of that, I have about six years of experience working with people with dementia, Alzheimer's, and in memory care units.  I should have liked this game.  What ended up turning me off from ROBMEMBOR wasn't anything to do with the content, but the execution of the game itself.

One of my biggest problems with the game was that the in-game menu and any dialogue text boxes were physically (virtually?) attached to the head of your robot guide.  This wouldn't necessarily be a problem if the robot didn't move around in the playable area and wobble its head so damn much.  Trying to read the menu screen or text while I was standing still with the screen bobbing about was starting to make me motion sick, something I was not expecting from this game at all.  Even the second time I played, for the short amount of time the menu was visible, I felt my stomach churning.  Thankfully, you're able to minimize the menu screen, and the dialogue disappears after a short while so it's not visible the entire time, but during the tutorial, as you become accustomed to the controls and what you're supposed to do, it seemed somewhat important.

My next issue was with the controls themselves.  In the game, you're basically playing as two floating hands that serve multiple functions.  First, you can pick up and manipulate objects.  By pressing the X/A buttons on their respective controller, you can turn on a transparent/duplicate mode where your hand can pass through objects and duplicate any object you pick up in the process, just by picking it up, leaving the original object in its place.  The third function is that your hand becomes just an outline, and you can swap colors, in the most rudimentary sense, with the object you're touching.  You can also raise both your hands to your head, which will reset the colors of the objects you've altered to their original color.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that in my first time playing, I missed part of the text from the robot about using its head, which I realized while thinking about the game between my first and second time playing.  I can't explain, though, is why the game didn't seem to want to accept my solution the first time (in Part 2), but after exiting and redoing the puzzle (again), it did seem to work.  I also don't know why the game wouldn't let me place the head back on the pedestal after thinking that one head wasn't where it was supposed to be.  That led me to think that there was some kind of glitch, and I needed to either reset the puzzle or just exit out completely.  

That was when I decided to give the freeplay/playground mode a try, but that ended up with its own issues.  To me, there was just too much free rein and not enough direction, but I guess that's kind of the point of a playground.  It really just felt like I could spawn any of the objects from the catalogue and then change their color if I wanted.  I did find out that I could change the environment, but that seemed to have an unintended consequence on the other objects in the room, like the table and the robot, not taking into account the rocky terrain of the moon/tree landscape.  So I went back to the tutorial level.

This time around, I again couldn't tell you what I did differently from the previous attempt, but whatever it was was an acceptable solution, and so I was (finally) taken to the first chapter in the story mode.  I admit that I probably didn't give this first chapter a fair shake in terms of really exploring the room and trying to actually figure out how to solve whatever the puzzle(s) were.  I genuinely thought that the layout of the room was odd and not initially clear on what it was that needed to be done.  Likely something to do with the figurines and the pedestals.  And I probably could have tried to connect the dots.  And done something with the weights and the scale.  By this point, though, my left hand seemed like it had glitched beyond repair, as I wasn't able to cycle through the different functions, and eventually the same happened to my right hand.  I was also starting to feel more and more nauseous from moving around the environment and the robot's bobbing text box.  So I gave up.

I know.  That's bad journalism to stop playing a game after fewer than 60 minutes and only just past the tutorial stage, but I felt like I was playing a game that was buggy and making me physically ill due to a design choice.  I also wasn't having fun due to the aforementioned issues, something that I felt that I should've been experiencing by this point, especially in a VR game that wasn't in the horror genre.  I love the concept of approaching memory loss and Alzheimer's in a video game, and VR does offer the unique experience of the medium, but I just wish that ROBMEMBOR had been a better game than the one I experienced.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
In Four Moons the Antlered One Will Go To Rest

MIDI Week Singles: "Sand Fabrics" - Racing Battle: C1 Grand Prix (PS2)

 

"Sand Fabrics" from Racing Battle: C1 Grand Prix on the PlayStation 2 (2005)
Composer: Akihiko Hirama
Album: Racing Battle C1 Grand Prix Original Soundtrack
Label: TEAM Entertainment
Publisher: Genki
Developer: Genki

I don't really have much to say about "Sand Fabrics" apart from that I really dig it.  I haven't played Racing Battle: C1 Grand Prix, so I don't know if the title is related to anything in-game or if it's just a title that Akihiko Hirama came up with on his own.  "Sand Frabrics" is just a fun, high-energy (trance?) song from a game that I'll likely never play, although a new English translation was released last year.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

Game EXP: Everybody's Gone to the Rapture (VSD)

Everybody's Gone to the  Rapture
Systems: PlayStation 4, Windows, Steam OS
Release Date: August 11, 2015 & April 16, 2015
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Developer: The Chinese Room
Time Spent: 10 Hours 42 Minutes

When I first started playing Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, I had intended on filming everything and doing another video walkthrough/playthrough series for the YouTubes, but after my first time playing and just basking in the beauty that The Chinese Room created, I decided that this game and experience was instead going to be just for me.  Granted, there were some caveats as I did film some sequences that I knew I would want to revisit, like The Mourning Tree sequence, as well as the end of the game and the final ascent up to the observatory.  With only a couple of exceptions, I didn't want to have to worry about whether I was getting a good angle on something that was happening or fear that I might have missed something story-wise in-game and would later be chastised by the greater internet community, who are also professional cinematographers.

My biggest critique for Everybody's Gone to the Rapture has nothing to do with the movement speed, which probably won't surprise people who know me, but was with how the story was communicated throughout the game, but that seems to be my general critique with exploration walking-sims where bits of information and story are scattered throughout the playable area.  Here, you have the light that travels around that you're supposed to follow, the lights that appear in locations that you discover yourself, phonebooths that ring, and radios that all transmit information and little story points connecting various characters to each other and the overarching story.  There's a lot that can be missed.  Before passing out of an area, I would constantly worry if I had missed something that was not required to move the game along, but still important to the story.  After playing the game, I did read the Wikipedia article just to make sure that I had gotten the main points of the plot, similar to how I finished Blood Meridian or even perusing YouTube lore videos for Dark Souls II.  There were some finer points of the story that I missed, glossed over, or had just completely forgotten, but I'm thankful that I got the basic gist of what happened.  Except I don't think I registered that the events in Naughton later became a worldwide phenomenon, although you think I would've with the event being right there in the title.

I had wondered if the title was just a metaphor since the player is moving about the world, watching past moments from people's lives as interpreted and broadcast by The Signal.  I also wasn't entirely sure what it was that the player was supposed to be as they wandered through this idyllic English countryside.  There were no legs when you looked down, but that's not entirely uncommon for first-person perspective games, as it's more rare to see legs/feet.  I did notice that when I was moving through water that there were ripples and a sloshing sound, which implied that there were legs attached to this consciousness, but that could've also just been something to do with how movement worked in Cryengine.  I don't know, I'm not a developer, and ultimately, I don't feel that what the player was was necessary to enjoy and take in the story.

I am glad that I played Everybody's Gone to the Rapture at this moment in time.  Had I played it in the before times, my laptop would not have been able to handle the game cranked up to the highest settings.  Plus, the story here revolving around people suddenly experiencing some mysterious illness before dying and in some cases, disappearing completely, does really hit different now in the years following the outbreak of the pandemic.  And, equally so, have been my reactions to the story now that I am a parent.  Seeing an abandoned suitcase along a country road with a lone teddy bear does hit so much harder than it would have just five years ago.  And I'm thankful for that because I love it when a game can have an emotional effect on me, especially little things like that little bear.  Just waiting there.  For the rest of eternity.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

MIDI Week Singles: "BGM 3" - Mario's Picross (DMG)

 

"BGM 3" from Mario's Picross on the Nintendo Game Boy (1995)
Composer: Unknown
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Jupiter, & Ape Inc.

I've been playing a lot of Mario's Picross from the Game Boy Nintendo Switch Online app-thing a lot since it was released last month (March, 2025) close to around 18 hours and I'm almost 2/3rds of the way through.  During the game there are five possible songs to either choose from manually or let the game cycle through them and for whatever reason, I seem to hear "BGM 3" more frequently than the rest.  Or, more likely, I enjoy this one the most out of the others so I just happen to notice it more regularly.

I don't have a good reason for liking this song as much as I do.  Maybe because sections are more easily hummable than others or that I almost don't even recognize this song during the first 35 seconds so when 0:35 does crop up, my brain is like, "Yeah, this song!"  I guess that's just music for ya.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Well Maybe You Doing Your Best