Tag: audio

Sundry Sunday: Ken Woodman’s Mexican Flyer and Space Channel 5

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

I find myself looking back upon the Dreamcast’s library, which was outrageously experimental. Sega tried so many things to see what would stick, but sadly few of them did, even though they’re really cool games.

There’s probably no better example of this than Space Channel 5, which I sometimes like to call “How Many Ways Can We Remix Mexican Flyer?”

Mexican Flyer is a real song, that existed long before Space Channel 5 and the Dreamcast. It was first published by Ken Woodman and His Piccadilly Brass in 1966 on their album That’s Nice. Here’s audio from Youtube (2 1/2 minutes):

Space Channel 5 remixes it several ways. Here’s the beginning, which is a fairly straight rendition. (That link was made with Youtube’s Clips feature, which doesn’t embed too well in WordPress.) Here’s the start of the second level (5 minutes):

Space Channel 5 isn’t a very long game, with only four levels, and although there’s alternate sections of a couple of levels that unlock after finishing the game and a subgoal of rescuing all the hostages, it doesn’t have a lot of replayability. It’s an enjoyable trip while it lasts, though.

It ends with a (mostly) a capella version, about ten minutes long:

And here’s the music isolated without the gameplay sounds overtop it (3 minutes):

Ken Woodman passed away in 2000, only a few years before Mexican Flyer began its video game afterlife. He also did music for a couple of British radio productions, and arranged music for Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones and Sandie Shaw.

Sundry Sunday: Animation of a Splatoon 3 Song

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

The Splatoon series has a lot of great music, usually composed along the lines of squishy voices shouting gibberish, which makes sense due to the singers being squid, or other forms of aquatic life.

One of the songs in Splatoon 3’s single-player campaign is Seep and Destroy, which has gotten the fan name of Bang Bing due to a specific frequently-heard vocalization within it.

nathors made an animation (2:46) that has no sea life at all, but fits really well. It imagines the song as backing a civilization of Easter Island heads, who get abducted by a planet of robots, and then they fight their way onto a spaceship and back home. It’s fun! It’s here:

Sundry Sunday: The Soundtrack to Black Knight 2000 and Sword of Rage

There are three Black Knight pinball tables: Black Knight, Black Knight 2000 and the recent Black Knight: Sword of Rage. The first came from before music was regularly featured in pinball, but the latter two have amazing music. My favorite is the music in the second, by Dan Forden & Brian Schmidt, possibly the most epic metal sound track in electronic gaming history. That is not thoughtless hyperbole! Listen to it below! “You can do it you can do it!” There’s something about FM synthesis that lends itself to simulating electric guitar really really well!

This is a playlist of the 17 tracks from the game. If the voice of the Black Knight sounds familiar, I think he’s also the voice of the Mutoid Man from Smash T.V (“NO WAY! HUH-HA-HA!”) and designer of all three Black Knight tables, Steve Ritchie.

There is something about pinball that lends itself so very well to metal, and to characters like the Black Knight. Video games can be defeated and mastered in ways that pinball, real pinball, cannot, and that recognition mixes with, enhances, the Knight’s character.

Here’s a game on an actual table that demonstrates how the music comes together in play (12 minutes):

Black Knight: Sword of Rage also has an epic soundtrack, performed by Scott Ian of Anthrax and Brendan Small of Metalocalypse/Deathklok (oh, and Home Movies):

I think 2000 has the edge over it though? What do you think? This is not intended as a comment prompt (I hate those), but it’d be nice to get people’s thoughts!

Sundry Sunday: Medieval Cover of Super Mario Bros.

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

It’s a cover of the theme to Super Mario Bros. played in a medieval style (1 1/2 minutes). That’s all for today. This video has lurked in my files for months, I figured I’d go ahead and get it posted. Remixes of the SMB music are one of the oldest genres of internet meme music there is, so here it is in a really old mode. The channel it’s from does medieval covers of a variety of music, so if that sounds entertaining, please ambulate towards that vestibule.

Sundry Sunday: Gyruss Themes

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

While there are examples of excellent music from the classic era of arcades (Frogger comes immediately to mind), I don’t think there is much that can equal that of Gyruss’ arrangement of Bach’s Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor. Here it is, isolated from the rest of the game’s soundtrack, from Youtube uploader StyleK226 (1 1/2 minues):

Wikipedia tells us that the arcade arrangement is reminiscent of a version of the song from the British band Sky, titled just “Toccata” (4 1/2 minutes):

If you only know Gyruss from the NES port, you might be surprised that it’s an almost entirely different arrangement from the arcade version! Maybe it was changed because of the similarity to Sky’s version. Some people prefer that one, it’s got a bit more variety, although I think the arcade’s is a bit better. Judge for yourself (3 minutes):

The Toccata is only used for the intro and the first warp on each planet, which is a bit of a shame, the rest of the music isn’t bad, but it’s not Bach. In Japan, Gyruss was a Famicom Disk System game. The FDS had extra sound hardware, and the result is an upgraded version of the NES soundtrack (14 minutes in all):

There’s been a number of fan versions of the Gyruss soundtrack, although most of them seem to be inspired by the NES port rather than the arcade original. Here’s a metal medley of that particular musical mutation (3 minutes):

As commenter @Fordi says, “What I love is that Intro / Stage 1 is a genre cover (metal) of a game’s adaptation (Gyruss) of a genre cover (Sky – Toccata) of classical music (Toccata and Fugue in Dm).”

Sundry Sunday: Megalixir

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

A really recent one this time! BitFinity, a.k.a. Matthew Taranto, who made Brawl in the Family and a fair amount of Waluigi music, animated and wrote this terrific little song about item hording in Final Fantasy VI, sung by Taylor Robinson.

Space Harrier Theme on Japanese Master System Hardware

Fact 1: the Japanese version of the Master System had an add on that provided FM synthesis sound synthesis, and greatly improved its music. Many US-released games have support for the add-on, but it was never released over here so that feature remained unused.

Fact 2: A later revision of the hardware in Japan (there called the Master System) had the FM chip built in. This version could even mix together the system’s default sound with the FM chip. And, if you turned the system on without a game inserted, it played a special version of the Space Harrier theme, programmed to take advantage of both chips.

This is that:

Sundry Sunday: Onett, Titanic Ant and Captain Strong from Duane and BrandO

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

The Adventures of Duane and BrandO were a nerdcore rap group that focused on doing video game parody songs. It’s an oft-told tale, old as time. They had some drama and broke up a few years ago, but not before making some nice tracks.

Honestly, that isn’t my scene musically, but they did some tracks based on Earthbound, and that entirely is my scene. The whole thing’s on Bandcamp, but here’s a sequence of three bits early in the game: a fairly straight rendition of part of the music for the first town, a diss track (is that what they call them?) from the first “Your Sanctuary” boss, and then the highlight, I think, in which the Onett police force get their heads handed to them by a 12-year-old kid. “I’m out of here that looks like it smarts/Check out my Super-Ultra-Mambo-Tango-Foxtrot Martial Arts!” (SUMTF?)

Onett – Titanic Ant – Captain Strong: Youtube – Bandcamp (2 1/2 minutes)

A Video on Wario Land 4’s Sound Design

Did you ever play Wario Land 4 on the Gameboy Advance? It was the last “classic” Wario Land game before its team switched over to making WarioWare games. If you’re a gaming, or at least a Nintendo, enthusiast you probably know what WarioWare games sound like, that endearingly weird crushed and echoey sound, but you might be surprised to discover that Wario Land 4 sounds of a piece with the Wario Land titles! Here’s the intro, hear for yourself:

Here’s the original WarioWare’s intro to compare its sound to. It’s all the good stuff!

geno7 over on Youtube (who has a terrific home page, by the way!) did a 51-minute deep dive into WL4’s sound design that’s just the kind of obsessive attention to detail that our cadre of pixel art loonies appreciate! Have a gawk and a listen and see if you agree.

The Bizarre Music and Sound Design of Wario Land 4 (Youtube, 51 minutes)

Zelda Podcasts

Ryan Veeder has made (and continues to make) podcasts about playing various Zelda games.

The Hero’s Path is about replaying Breath of the Wild. 54 episodes, about 42 hours in total. Here’s the RSS link.

The Complete Guide to Koholint was his first Zelda podcast, and it discusses each of the 256 overworld screens of Link’s Awakening. 256(!) episodes. They vary in length between one minute and 47, with most being just a few minutes long. RSS.

The Complete Guide to Termina covers various elements of Majora’s Mask. It’s at 21 episodes, and is ongoing. RSS.

The NES Sample Encoding Error

There was an error in the data prep in many NES games that caused them to reverse the bit order of samples. Or more accurately, the games encoded the samples correctly, but the flaw is in the NES sound hardware.

The result is, many games with samples sound notably worse than they should. The most infamous example of this is the sound in Double Dribble, which sounds particularly bad on its title screen. The difference can be heard on the game’s page on The Cutting Room Floor. There’s a hack for Double Dribble on romhacking.net that corrects the samples in-game.

Another game this affects is the unlicensed Tengen NES game KLAX. In the arcade KLAX had very little music, but the NES version has excellent music that relies heavily on sampled instruments. There’s a fixed patch for that game on romhacking.net, too!

Sleep Baseball

We here at Set Side B are about computers, and we’re about games, and we’re about the intersection between the two, which happens by accident to include Northwoods Radio Sleep Baseball, available as individual files, and also through Google and Apple‘s podcast systems.

People have remarked about the powerful soporific effects of having a baseball game playing on the radio when you’re trying to fall asleep at night. But there are several difficulties with using baseball for sleep-producing: there’s not always a game on, when the game’s over there could be any loud thing on afterward, and there’s always the chance something exciting might happen that would rouse you from your repose and briefly cause you to care.

Sleep Baseball solves all of these issues. The games played are not on a radio but on your phone or computer, as audio files. The Sleep Baseball league is entirely fictional, so there is no actual drama. And the announcer is pretty relaxed and low-key, as are all the ads (for fake products and businesses), so you don’t have to worry about sudden bursts of interest.

If you’ve followed Sleep Baseball before, you should know now that they have recorded their third game, and have recorded some new ads. If you had gotten tired of the same game and events between the Big Rapids Timbers and the Cadillac Cars, it might be of interest to you to give the new recordings a try. Sweet dreams!