MIDI Week Singles: "Dream Chaser" - F-Zero X (N64)

"Dream Chaser" from F-Zero X on the Nintendo 64 (1998)

Composer: Taro Bando

Album: F-Zero X ORIGINAL SOUND TRACK

Label: Pony Canyon

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Nintendo EAD

I love this song.  Not because it has the catchiest of melodies, but because for me it generates a lot of fond memories from two specific race tracks in F-Zero X.

The first is Silence: High Speed, being the second track you race in the Jack Cup, which is essentially just a loop above a planet.  I feel like the whole point is to show off how fast you can get your car up to as the entire track is covered in boosters.  I played this track I don't know how many dozens of times, especially in the Time Trials mode where I would occasionally fly off of the track because of how fast (usually around 1,300-1,400 kph) you could be traveling.  The number of times my car blew up as I crossed the finish line from spamming the boost power ability was also probably pretty hilarious.

The second track was Silence 2: Wavy Road, being the second track in the King Cup.  Again, playing the Grand Prix a lot, I found that on a decent run, I would make it to the wavy section at about 0:28, which for whatever reason played great at that point in the race track.  The track itself was fairly unremarkable considering it is part of the more advanced race tracks of King Cup including tracks like Sector β, and White Land 2, but for me, the use of Dream Chaser makes this track memorable, hence why I seem to have remembered it after 20+ years.

And hell, if a lackluster race track can be made memorable by a piece of music, then you can be sure that I will want to share that with the rest of the world.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
Fear Nor Regret What You Will See

#IndieSelect: UBERMOSH:OMEGA (NS)

Disclaimer:  I received a copy of UBERMOSH:OMEGA by developer Walter Machado and publisher QUByte Interactive through Xinthus' #IndieSelect event last Saturday.  The game was given and received without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and the experience be shared through social media channels.  All of the words and pictures in this article, unless otherwise noted, are from my own experience playing the game.

UBERMOSH:OMEGA is an odd game in that there is so much more history to this franchise than what I was expecting going into the game.  When I saw Xinthus' announcement go up last Friday and then watching the trailer, all I saw was a contained bullet-hell twin-stick shooter that was visually harsh on the eyes.  I initially was not sure if I wanted to participate in this particular #IndieSelect event as I have not had the best of luck with other twin-stick shooters in the past (Inksplosion, Hellmut, State of Anarchy), not that the games themselves were bad, but that I was not able to either beat the game, score high enough in the game to feel satisfied, or be competent enough with the game to feel that I understood all that the respective games had to offer.  No, I was just bad at these games, partly because it has never been a genre of game that I have flocked to, and I also blame the controller layout of the Switch for causing my hands to cramp up after fewer than 5 consecutive minutes of gameplay.

While writing this article, I did find out that UBERMOSH:OMEGA is not just a one-off title, but actually the eighth game in an already established series of arcade-style twin-stick shooters.  Then reading a statement (presumably by the developer) on the Steam page for the first UBERMOSH game about why he created this type of game really put everything into a perspective and elevated the game from some quirky indie game to a style of playing that I had not taken into consideration.

"Like a pinball table or a coin-op arcade machine, UBERMOSH was made to give you a shot of adrenaline in a couple of minutes. Each time you play a new level is generated for you to beat your score in 90 seconds."

This simple two-sentence statement about the game completely changed the way I thought about it, and all for the better, all without any changes to the game, but to my way of thinking about it.  Similar to how my perception of the Steam controller changed when I started thinking of it as a keyboard emulator and less like another Xbox controller for PC.  Thinking of UBERMOSH:OMEGA as a game to be played in short spurts just to try and beat your score, not unlike a game of pinball made all the difference in the world.

So I did submit my request of sorts for UBERMOSH:OMEGA and that is why we are here today.  And below you will see my first experience with the game because it is both confusing and hilarious.

Yup.  Your Guess Is As Good As Mine.

What you witnessed above was me selecting the first character and then running around button mashing and trying to figure out what the hell was going on all in the span of a few seconds before I died and was kicked back to the start screen.  My third and fourth attempts with the same character lead to similar results.  My score was a few hundred points, I lasted fewer than 10 seconds, and I had earned a score of F.  Confused as to what was going on, I decided to choose a different character, this time, selecting Woot (I think that's the name, but I could very well be wrong) and had similar results.  I was not until I selected T7 (the third character) that I had better luck surviving longer and managing to actually kill some of the enemies on purpose.  This was when I discovered that the L/R shoulder buttons are what you need to press so that your primary and secondary weapons fire.  It is cheesy to use cliche lines, but this was literally a game-changer because I no longer felt as confused, frustrated, and as lost as I had the last five minutes.

This was also the time that I figured out the general format of the game.  Essentially you are dropped into a closed-off space where you have to survive for 90 seconds against wave after wave after wave of bad guys trying to kill you.  I then played through the rest of the characters finding out that some characters focused on ranged attacks while others had melee weapons that while short-ranged, could also deflect enemy projectiles back at my foes.  

And then I found out that the hard-to-read text surrounding the image of the character you decided to play was not just there for visual aesthetics, but actually served the purpose for you to customize your character's loadout.  Would you rather have an extra HP (to survive an additional hit) and a late-game shield, or would you have no extra HP and instead equip a shield (of sorts) and a melee weapon for your primarily ranged character?  This newly discovered feature made the game a whole lot more enjoyable since I felt I had a better chance of surviving those 90 seconds because I had the ability to customize how I played the game within a pre-existing character's hard-wired skill set.  

Top: Blood Settings Normal.
Bottom: Blood Settings in Colorblind Mode.

By this point in playing, things were beginning to click and I was feeling better about the game, with the discovery of the loadout customization and how to actually play the game, the last piece was a visual setting in the options.  Here, you can change the colors of the game to be better suited for people who are colorblind or at least have one particular type of color blindness.  What this did for me, someone who is not, in fact, colorblind, removed the harshness that the bright red/black background (being the blood/gore dropped weapons of your enemies) becomes as you kill more-and-more enemies with a darker, almost black/purple shade of red, being much easier on my eyes.  I played a handful of rounds with this setting turned on, turned it off and determined that it was difficult for me to focus on my character, the enemy characters, and all of the projectiles, as well as the reticule that is used to direct your character's fire.  So I went back into settings again and turned the colorblind blood setting back on.

And that was when I was able to last the full 90 seconds using T7, scoring an S rank in the end.  Since that fateful afternoon, yesterday, in fact, I have again survived the 90 seconds of mania, this time with Kore, and scoring 5044 which is well enough to earn an SSS+ rank.  And I had fun.

UBERMOSH:OMEGA was an interesting ride of a game.  What started out as a confusing screen of death and chaos has morphed into something that I could see myself playing for maybe 10 minutes when I am either between games or maybe something of a palette cleanser.  I am also interested to tool around further with the various skill/buff settings to find different combinations that are fun to play, as well as figure out what they all do because I am still not sure what either Shredder or Celerity do, or even how late-game Late Shield comes into play.  But in the meantime, I may just see if I can last any longer than 20 seconds with Aya and become better at redirecting bullets because that seems like a key skill when you are bringing a sword to a gunfight.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
There's a Wound That's Always Bleeding

MIDI Week Singles: "Death Circus" - Air Buster / Aero Blaster (GEN)

"Death Circus" from Air Buster / Aero Blaster on the SEGA Genesis (1991)

Composer: Tatsuya Watanabe

Album: Air Buster

Label: Scitron / Pony Canyon

Publisher: Sharp Image Electronics / Namco

Developer: Kaneko

Well, it had to happen eventually, and today is the day that we debut music from the SEGA Genesis system, the console that both Dr. Potts and I viewed as The Enemy during the Console Wars.  Over the last couple of years I've been feeling that I should listen to this whole catalogue of music that I had no knowledge of, so today we are showcasing music from the 1991 Kaneko game, Air Buster.

Having no context for this song (aside from watching YouTube Longplays), all I can go off of is how happy and victorious this songs comes across, not at all like what you might think of a Death Circus to sound like.  To me, this sounds like something straight out of an 80s teen flick.  Maybe a group of scrappy kids trying to escape from some out of control cops while riding their bikes a mall, maybe through a lumber yard or crossing the line of a BMX race?  And this upbeat tune is not just for the Genesis port, but is also on the original arcade cabinet as well, although the arrangement is different and a lot more bass/drum heavy, obscuring a lot of the melody; but then again arcades were never the best places to listen to video game music.

So I hope that you have at least somewhat enjoyed our first foray into music on a SEGA console and I can tell you that it will not be out last.  Now that the door is open, there will be more inclusions from SEGA.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

I Think It's Today Yeah

#IndieSelect: Cosmonauta (NS)

Disclaimer: I received a copy of Cosmonauta for Nintendo Switch through publisher/developer QUByte Interactive through Xinthus' #IndieSelect event late last week.  The game was given and received without the promise of a positive review, only that the game be played and the experience be shared on social media channels.  All of the words and pictures in this article, unless otherwise stated are from my own playthough.

This might sound like a total cop-out, but I genuinely went into Cosmonauta blind because I did not want to know what I was getting into.  I know this probably sounds callous especially since the game was offered free (see above), but aside from seeing the screens that Xinthus posted, I wanted to be surprised. What it looked like to me was a little blue character in space mid-jump and there were some enemy-looking creatures nearby.  The narrative I constructed in my head was that it was some kind of a cross between Super Meat Boy because the camera was pulled back really far with a lot of spikes, and Mega Man because a blue main character jumping in a space-type setting is going to invoke that kind of a reaction from me.

Instead what Cosmonauta turned out to be was a slightly disappointingly non-existent-on-story puzzle-ish platformer in the vein of Super Meat Boy but with floaty controls, spotty platforming, inconsistent level design, and levels that seemed to be crafted around making people on the verge of rage quitting.  Maybe that was a little harsh, but I stand by that.

"Why Am I Here!? What's Going On?"
"Shut Up And Get To The Exit Blue Hero!"

Cosmonauta starts when you select "Start" from the game menu and you are immediately off to the races.  No cutscene explaining what your blue little hero is up to or what any of these traps and spikes are about.  Maybe they were captured and thrust into a series of trials put on by an antagonistic alien society to test the betterment of humankind?  Maybe are blue dude is on the run from bounty hunters? No, from what I can tell after playing 32 of 65 stages is that you are traveling from one area in a room to another and things are trying to kill you along the way.  The only story-bit I could find was on Nintendo's eShop page, which states that "[d]uring a space expedition, our hero experiences issues with the navigation systems on his ship and now needs to face the dangers of the unknown to find his way back."  Now, I am not a game developer, but putting that text on a black screen before the game started could have been a nice touch to start things off.  Maybe this is harsh since in Super Mario Bros. you are thrown into a level without any in-game explanation as to why an angry-looking mushroom is marching toward you with ill intent, and all of the story as we know it was communicated through the instruction booklet.

Something else that bothered me a bit, and not because I did not get past Stage 33, was that to me the controls felt floaty.  What I mean is that the developers did go the Super Mario Bros. route in that the longer you press down B to jump, the higher your jump goes.  Maybe that had something to do with it, but there were times when the jump seemed to be off or I couldn't accurately estimate where I was going to land.  And Cosmonauta being the game it is trying to be, needing to land in just the right spot and if you are off by a pixel or two, then you will die from the shots of green fire.  Coupled with that all of the times I fell through actual platforms to my death was a bit infuriating.  

Most of the jumps that killed me, as illustrated twice above, were times that when paused, clearly shows Blue Hero on the platform that is only moving vertically.  Then in the subsequent animation frames, they fall through to the spikes below.  Maybe it has something to do with both Blue Hero and the platforms being in motion since I was able to jump from just a tip-toe on platforms, but landing those jumps with the same about of toe-strength seemed nearly impossible.

Yoi!!

The last thing I want to dig into is the construction of the levels and their respective difficulty.  I have read some people who also received free review copies of the game mention the difficulty of the various stages.  Above, Stage 24 proved itself to be fairly difficult and over more than a couple dozen attempts, I learned how/when to time my jumps and what the game would accept as a legitimate landing, then Stage 25 I was able to complete in just two attempts and so the Stages continued until I hit Stage 28 and was once again, saddled with a significant spike in difficulty.  Like any difficult game, it does feel great once you manage to pass a challenging section, but the stages never felt like the troublesome areas were increasing, but randomly spaced out.

Am I A Checkpoint?

There were several aspects of the game that I did very much appreciate that I feel could be overshadowed by all of the criticisms I have.  Because of the type of game Cosmonauta is, I would have been very sad and probably stopped playing after a few minutes had the game had a set number of lives, but thankfully, you do have infinite lives to make it through each stage.  And thankfully there are checkpoints in each stage, and for a brief time, I thought that they were signified by the icon/ground sprite to the right.  In the first dozen or so stages it did seem that I respawned at or near these tiles, or at least often enough for me to question if they were indeed checkpoints.  But as the game progressed into new areas with different tilesets, I stopped seeing these so maybe they are not?  Either way, checkpoints in this game are a necessity so that the player can maintain their sanity.  The music too was not bad, but it was not great either.  There were a couple of songs that would play from beginning to end and then a new song would play.

So would I recommend Cosmonauta?  I don't know.  If you are one to play a platformer that is difficult for the sake of being difficult, then sure.  You could be happy with this game which starts at $0.99 and might likely drop in price during sales.  It may not be everyone's cup of tea and if you are one to fall into fits of rage, then you might just want to pass on this for something a little more calming.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
The Lights of Space Flared

Game EXP: Type:Rider (NS)

Coming off of the heals of Typoman: Revised, I had decided that Type:Rider by French developer Cosmografik, a platforming game based around fonts and typography seemed like the perfect follow up.  I almost hate to use the comparison again to LIMBO, but that is kind of what it did remind me of, but if LIMBO took place in the pages of a book, seeing as you play as a rolling colon in stages rife with pits, hazards that chase you, and in the case of one area of a stage, someone shooting at you from off-screen.

At my age of Born During the Last Millennium, I have not played a lot of educational video games.  Well, I take that back.  I played a lot of Number Munchers, various iterations of The Oregon Trail, Where in the World (as well as Where in Time) is Carmen San Diego, but that was all before Y2K.  And I did play Brain Age II on the DS quite a bit, maxing out at having played 365 days (not in-a-row though), and a typing game called Zty.pe, but you know what?  I'm talking myself into a hole here.  I apparently have been a fan of educational video games, to a certain extent, for a number of decades, tapering off as more-and-more were geared more towards younger kids.  Type:Rider, on the other hand, is directed towards non-child-aged people, unless that six-year-old wants to know the history of the Helvetica font.

But there is so much more to Type:Rider than reading about how a particular font was created.  It is also the history of communication and the use of communication as an art form, which is uncovered as you progress through the game, from cave paintings through the present (or at least the present as of 2013) day and trolls.  For me, the information was presented in a way that felt engaging and not like I was being forced to read anything.  When you acquire bits of history, described later, you are not immediately taken to the book-screen, but you are prompted to with out-of-the-way text.  I would typically go to this screen, but only when I knew that I was in a safe place that would seem like a shock when I returned to the game.

Type:Rider is similar to Typoman: Revised in that it feels heavily influenced by LIMBO, but only in the feel of the game to a certain extent.  Type:Rider is broken up into 10 stages including a prologue/tutorial level, each focusing on an influential font during a particular period of time while giving the history and context of that font in relation to historical events, typographers, and societal changes around that time; the Sociologist in me loves all of this.  Each stage is essentially the same.  You work your way through solving environmental puzzles in order to progress, all the while collecting alphabetical letters of that particular font, which act similar to bananas in Donkey Kong Country in that they point the way to go through the levels.  Also scattered throughout the levels are asterisks that are usually easy to find, never requiring much if any backtracking.

It is these *'s that give you history and context to the font, and I feel like it is this mechanic in the game that elevates the game from a simple platforming game to something that could be used as an educational tool, and it could probably lose its audience if they are not attracted to reading or find reading during video games as cumbersome.  After collecting an asterisk, you can go to a submenu where you read about some element of the font, the typographer who developed the font, or even someone a few generations before who influenced that typographer in the eventual development of that font.  I personally had never put a whole lot of deep thought into the development of fonts and typefaces, although I am 100% serious that when I saw that the Garamond font was featured, I got audibly excited as it is one of my favorite fonts to use.  I kid you not.  I had no idea that the design of this font was nearly 500 years old.  Sure I knew that printed type had been around for nearly 600 years, but the purposeful design of lettering I just took for granted.

Along with the 6 asterisks to collect in each stage, there is also a well-hidden ampersand (&) also in the font style for the stage.  The &'s are usually take a bit of time to locate within the stage and you may never know which of the four areas of the stage it is hidden in.  In [stage name] I did double back to locate the & after missing it, but for the most part, I felt that locating them was a little intuitive having spent the better part of the last 30 years playing video games.

The only negative thing I have to say is about the bonus stage which is not required to play, but it does bring fonts and typography into the modern age while going into the history of Comic Sans.  The history of the font I was perfectly fine with, but the stage design played more like an aggravating level in Bit. Trip Runner where if you died, you had to start back at the beginning.  What made this level sad for me, was that I was at first excited to play it since it played on a lot of early 2010s Internet culture including a glowing-eyed cat that chased your throughout most of the level, Internet Trolls, WTF culture, and what must have been an homage to Cheezburger.

Look Upon Me And Dispair!

On top of all that was a stupidly difficult stage that felt like you had to play it multiple times in order to figure out how everything worked against you, is a 180-degree shift from the rest of the game.  I feel like I summed up the last level perfectly with a Tweet about it back on January 11th, that by the time I finished the level playing the game "became a difficult chore devoid of enjoyment."

I would say that with the exception of the aforementioned Comic Sans stage, I enjoyed everything that Type:Rider threw at me.  At times, the platforming felt pretty inconsistent which I chalk up to the physics engine was used, combined with playing as an object that could be split (like having one period above a track and one below at the same time, sometimes to your advantage, but other times I would get caught up on pieces of the environment, unable to get enough momentum to move forward.  But since Type:Rider was never set out to be a tight platformer, I feel like I can forgive them this transgression.  Where Type:Rider did excel was presenting historical information about fonts, typefaces, and typographers into a video game that did not require Michael Bay levels of action to be interesting in a way that still maintained the integrity of history.  There were times when I felt like I might have been reading a Wikipedia article since I am the kind of person that will deep dive into topics on Wikipedia, this was not an issue for me.

Type:Rider ended up taking me only about 3 hours, no part in thanks to the nearly XX minutes I spent in Comic Sans.  I do not know if I would go back and replay the game for my own sake, but I am definitely going to try and get like-minded friends to play it because damn it, fonts are interesting!

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
I Almost Start To Weep

MIDI Week Singles: "Clarendon" - Type:Rider (NS)

"Clarendon" from Type:Rider on the Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, and PC (2013)

Album: Type:Rider OST

Composer: AudioGaming

Label: Soundcloud

Publisher: Arte

Developer: Agat Films & Cie - Ex Nihilo

What is it about ambient wind sounds, a deep harmonica and the scree of a hawk in the background that works so well together?

The level Clarendon in the Type:Rider, a puzzle-lite platformer full of history about fonts and typography is wonderfully created and this music plays throughout the entire level.  There is everything you would expect in a level filled with this music, from tumbling tumbleweeds, dynamite plungers, mine carts, to being shot at while rolling through a saloon.  The music is not overtly full of action because that is not the type of game Type:Rider is, but the music is perfect for putting you in the correct headspace to learn about a typeface that was created in the mid 19th century.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
Wherever I Wander, Wherever I Rove

Game EXP: Typoman: Revised (NS)

What drew me to Typoman: Revised at first was the font for the title, the name itself, and the icon used in Nintendo's eShop.  Then I watched the Switch announcement trailer and was pulled further in.  The game visually reminded me a lot of LIMBO, in that the atmosphere is bleak and there are traps to avoid and work your way around as well as monsters to avoid as there did not appear to be weapons of any kind.  What substantially differentiates Typoman from LIMBO is the use of words and language to progress through the game, similar to Scribblenauts, but with less freedom for creativity, which in this case is not a bad thing.  While you could claim that Typoman is just a LIMBO clone, but that would be doing a huge disservice to both the game and Brainseed Factory who developed the game.  LIMBO might have been the inspiration for the game, but there is more here than a bleak puzzle platformer.

The story in Typoman is pretty light in that there is no introduction to what it is that is happening in the game world.  The game opens by a bunch of letters being dumped into a landfill-type-situation, with a letter O rolling out towards the right side of the screen, prompting the player that this is the way to proceed, also not so subtly hinted at by the PROLOGUE sign breaking with the letter G landing next to you spelling GO.  You then roll towards a gap and with most people familiar with video games, I had already tried pressing all the buttons to see if I could roll faster or jump since an O is essentially a ball, but in the gap/pit are the letters DR_P, indicating to the player that with them as the letter O, this spells DROP and that this is the correct path.  You then come across the letter E and when you connect with it, the O becomes part of EVOLVE, which now allows you to jump/spring forward.  Eventually, your playable character spells out HERO and when you grab a glowing quotation mark, your purpose (to a certain extent) is made clear when the quotation marks reveal a line of text:

Unfortunate is the land in need of a HERO.

It's only one line of text, but it tells you so much.  The land you are in is in some type of peril.  The industrial animations in the background, the post-apocalyptic design of the land itself, and the brown/purple/yellow tint to everything hint at pollution and a decaying world.

Typoman is all about language, although I have not seen localization ports allowing people who do not speak English as their primary language limiting the game to the English speaking world, which is rather unfortunate.  There are a number of puzzles in the game that are specifically built around spelling words with a limited number of letters, and I fully admit that games like Book Worm,  Boggle, Scrabble, and even Bananagrams are not my forte.  There were several times that I became stuck due to not being able to figure out what words I needed to spell so that I could continue, often involving a blocked passage, a platform that needed to either move or rotate, and in one instance, I had to zoom in using the double-tap-home feature on the Switch to find out that a series of platforms were numbered and needed to be reordered, but the font was too small to see in handheld mode.

The only thing that I would add to the game is a dictionary of words that you have spelled.  Throughout the game when you come across letters you can move, I frequently tried to spell words to discover easter eggs, but more often than not, I would just be told down in the lower-left corner of the screen that a word had been discovered.  Being told this was nice that the game acknowledged that I spelled a word correctly, but there was never anything keeping track of what words I spelled or how many words that either did or did not have an effect I spelled too.  Maybe something for Typoman: Revised 2nd Edition?

Sure I started out with BRAVE, but RAVE seemed more fun. Until you
end up getting stuck by a sentient syringe filled  some kind of black
market poison hallucinogen.

Typoman is not a great platformer as the controls sometimes feel floaty and the way the HERO runs comes across a kind of bumbly, and as mentioned above, some of the word puzzles can be tricky to figure out, but I never felt that the game was trying to be the next Super Metroid or Super Meat Boy.  It was taking the idea of using language and words to solve puzzles in a simple platformer setting.  It is pretty gimmicky, but that is one of the things that I love about it.  I love that in integrates language into the gameplay mechanics, and that there is no real penalty for dying aside from invisible checkpoints.  I love that ladders are made from a bunch of H's stacked on top of each other and that a streetlight is make out of the letters L I T.  I love that when I spelled RAVE, the music changed and there was a multicolored flashing light that had zero effect on gameplay but was something humorous that the developers put in just because.

I do love this game.  It is not perfect, but it never needed to be.  To me, it is a love letter to language and video games, something that there should be a lot more of.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
Instrumental

The Birth and History of Cooking Crack

Over the last month or so, you may have noticed the addition of "Cooking Crack" to my list of names/aliases/handles down there at the bottom of the articles I've written as well as on Twitter.  This is all thanks to Brian David Gilbert's video on coming up with your own personalized Hideo Kojima name.  I should preface the remainder of the article by saying that I have only played a handful of Kojima games. . .wait, no.  I have not played any of the games that he has produced, directed, wrote, or designed.  But I have played Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, which was co-developed by Kojima Productions and Mercury Steam.  I know who he is though, so maybe that counts?  The point is, is that apparently, Hideo Kojima uses some odd names for his characters.  I knew this only because I tangentially got Solid Snake, Liquid Snake, and Big Boss (aka Naked Snake, aka John "Jack") confused around the time that Phantom Pain was being announced.

Before I go any further, I highly recommend that you watch the video below because if you don't, then everything I am going to get into here will just sound bat-shit-crazy.

At this point, I am going to assume that you have watched the above video.

I have also included the link to download and complete your own copy of the Hideo Kojima Name Generator as well as a copy of my filled out the form so you can see my own filled out form (with one or two bits of information omitted for security reasons (thanks NSA).  And before we get down to any further explanations, I apologize for the quality of my handwriting as it looks like crap, I know that, and I blame it all on my ability to take notes quickly starting in Mr. Willoughby's World History class in 9th grade.

As far as the individual sections go, I realize I probably could eat more than eight full sized carrots in a single sitting, and I probably could have come up with something a little more embarrassing than face planting on a neighbor's driveway when I was five.  Maybe I'm a bad person for not having a particular favorite Kurt Russell role, but I do really like the film Backdraft and that soundtrack is up there with one of my all time favorites, as well as being the first CD that I ever owned.  I also have no idea who Joy Division are.  The "Scientific Term from NPR" bit in Section 3, and because I wasn't driving to work on a Friday, there was not a whole lot going on in Science the day I filled this out, hence someone saying that something was Bat Guano Crazy.  It's a bioscience term.  And never having played a game in the Metal Gear series, where the Section 13 Part 1 comes from, I feel like the explanation of my name that could be used during an introductory cutscene fell a little flat.

So, thanks to my description of Mads Mikkelson cooking in a kitchen a la Hannibal and that the first thing I could think of that sounded similar to my name being Crack, I have the self-imposed Kojima Name of Cooking Crack.  It's not the Cool Name that I kind of was hoping that I would end up with, something more along the lines of Revolver Ocelot or Laughing Octopus, but that just might be the kind of cool name that Hideo Kojima thinks is cool.

And who am I to argue with Hideo Kojima?



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
Look At Us, But Do Not Touch


P.S. What is your Hideo Kojima name?  You know you want to!!

P.P.S.  And for the sake of having a Horny Name because why-the-hell-not, it would have been Wright Lickable Liquid.  I'll leave you with that.

MIDI Week Singles: "Title Theme" - The Immortal (NES)

"Title Theme" from The Immortal on the Nintendo Entertainment System (1990)
Composer: Rob Hubbard
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: Sandcastle

It has been a long long while since I last played The Immortal on the NES.  I recall seeing the game in the pages of Nintendo Power and it wasn't until I purchased the game used from G&G in the Mall that I actually got to play the game.  Sort of.  Long story short, I still have the cartridge somewhere and I still do not think that I ever made much further than shortly after the first goblin.

So I decided to use the music that plays during the opening titles, which kind of comes across as your stereotypical medieval peasantry song that would play in an open-air market where you could buy a flagon of ale and roasted quail.  This song would not be out of place were it to have been used in either Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves or Willow video games.  What is great about this song being the title theme, is that it does not really represent the overall tone for the game which is a lot darker and more sinister than this jovial tune.  But that in part is what makes this song so great!  At least in my head anyway.

So nice job Rob Hubbard!  See, you are not just a one-trick pony, writing songs for skateboarding video games.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

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