Infinite Lives

I really liked Bit.trip: Beat. The combination of retro gaming style, excellent music, underlying narrative, and addictive gameplay put it up among my favorite Wii titles. So imagine my surprise last Monday (editor’s note: Jenn sucks) when I noticed that a sequel, Bit.trip: Core had been released on WiiWare for 600 points!

As its predecessor had done for Breakout-style games, Bit.trip: Core takes the notion of classic, single-screen shooters and spins it off into a new, equally rhythmic direction. Whereas in the first game you were a paddle bouncing pellets to create musical notes, here you are an icon in the center of the screen capable of aiming and firing a beam in four directions, albeit only one at a time. Pellets will appear from all corners of the screen, and you must shoot them before they escape. It sounds deceptively simple, but the game is difficult. Ample reflexes, pattern recognition, and spatial skills –- which block will enter your range of fire first?—are important, but as with Bit.trip: Beat, to truly excel at the game you must lose yourself in it and the music. It’s a zen gaming experience.

Jackson’s popularity was such that his influence has permeated the gaming medium, whether through his direct involvement, composers riffing on his yelps and yowls, or just a bit of cheeky satire. Yet what I’ll remember most about him is how his music became an essential component of the sonic texture of arcades, along with the distant warble of a dying Pac-Man, the chime of a stage beginning in Galaga, a bold narrator extolling the virtues of Dirk the Daring.—Jeremy Parish

While it’s true that 1UP’s Michael Jackson retrospective skipped over my favorite homage—the ‘Thriller’ dance sequence near the beginning of Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti (video link)—it’s certainly a nice gesture. More meaningful, though, I think, is Jeremy’s short and heartfelt little ode to MJ over at 1UP’s Retronauts blog.

edit: Oh, my.

• Retronauts blog – R.I.P.: Jackson’s Unspoken Gaming Legacy
• Offworld – One Shot: MJ, in Memoriam
• GoNintendo – Michael Jackson tributes in Mario Paint

Kevin Bunch’s Otocky retrospective reminded me that Bit.trip: Beat just arrived on WiiWare!

After rearranging my Wii’s disk space to accommodate the comparatively large download—catch you on the flipside, Paper Mario—I settled in for some truly excellent, old-school synesthesia.

Bit.trip: Beat is a paddle game: think Arkanoid, Breakout, Pong or, ahem, Circus Atari. Here, though, the paddle control is gracefully approximated by very gently rocking the Wii remote forward and back. As with classic paddle games, the controls are ‘twitchy’ and require only very fine movements.

Your onscreen ‘paddle’ (which is to say, your avatar, or, you know, the line) moves vertically along the far left of the screen, and little pellets fly onto the screen from the right, hurtling toward the paddle. And the point is to hit them. Simple. Each pellet represents a kind of a musical note, too, so as you bat the pellets away, the game’s melody emerges. So far, easy enough.

But as you progress through the game, the choreography of the pellets becomes increasingly intricate. Soon those specks are weaving in and out of one another, changing shape and size, or cruelly altering their course midflight. In that way, Bit.trip: Beat is a classic gamer’s classic game: it’s all reflexes and pattern memorization.

To say the NES’s musical capabilities are famous is an understatement. With tunes like the Super Mario theme and the soundtracks to Mega Man 2, Castlevania, Contra, and dozens of other games, the system’s little sound chip can pump out some incredible music. The NES is practically a founding member of the chiptune musical genre, alongside such luminaries as the Commodore 64 and the Atari 800. Thus when I heard about an oddball, Famicom Disk System-only ‘musical shooter’ entitled Otocky my interest was piqued.

Otocky is the brainchild of Toshio Iwai, known more recently as the developer for Nintendo’s Electroplankton, and was released in 1987 by the ASCII Corporation. You play a weird little orange thing with cartoony eyes, arms, and legs that flies through inconsequential backgrounds populated with even stranger enemies. Your objective is to collect musical notes to fill a meter at the bottom of the screen, at which point the stage will end and you will face off with a giant, foe-spewing musical note. You must then fire off your collected musical notes at the holes in the boss until you’ve used them all. You can collect a bomb power-up, and your normal, boomeranging shot can be tweaked by collecting certain items.

The Ocarina of Rhyme, a hip-hop mashup of Zelda music, is pretty intense.

Supposedly this is the second time this has been done, but Team Teamwork’s version is pretty jaw-dropping anyway.

• 8tracks – The Ocarina of Rhyme via Reddit

“MC Lars knows a lot of people! These are some of them in alphabetical order!”

Here is a music video about how MC Lars has a ton of Facebook friends (warning: video contains geysers of fake sperm). Which doesn’t have a ton to do with videogames, I guess, except that it’s nerdy and the glitchy beat is likably 8-bit. Also, check out DocPop—he’s the one flexing.

• Drown Radio – MC Lars Knows a lot of people (& I’m one of ‘em!) via DocPop

“And dere’s one special lady who’s found her way through my vinyl-treated denim shirt and into my heart—and that’s this lady behind me. Meez Pac-Man.”

In an Angle Dance -caliber performance, The State’s Michael Ian Black—surrounded by dancers clad in Blade Runner raincoats—sings a love song to a Ms. Pac-Man upright arcade cabinet.

Dig that pompadour!

• YouTube – “Ms. Pac-Man” by Johnny Blue Jeans (via)

They told him, “Don’t you ever come around here,
“Unless you’re really good at Soul Calibeer”
There’s Frogger in their eyes
And Crystal Castles in their leers
So beat it, just beat it

This April, Michael Jackson will auction his arcade collection, including Frogger, Soul Calibeeer, and an old Zoltar machine. Zoltar, you guys.

Check out the Julien’s catalogue—either MJ doesn’t own a Moonwalker, or he ain’t sellin’ it.

• Siliconera – What Arcade Games Did Michael Jackson Own?

This video, set to Dan Bull’s new track “Generation Gaming,” is actually pretty amazing:

Taking control of / Somebody else’s console / With no remorse / That was so debauched! / My only thoughts were total scores on Tony Hawk / Or running amok in smug-g-ler’s runs / Smug-g-lin’ guns and drugs for fun / And pullin’ a gun on any NPC I see or stumble upon / GTA3 / made me inclined to kill repeatedly / The spinal chills / Of Silent Hill / Are still on my mind and creepin’ me / The fuck out!

Want more? Last month, Dan Bull released his first album, Safe—generously, it’s available as a free download, too, if you can suffer the lower audio quality.

• Freshnut.co.uk – Dan Bull – Safe – EPK

I love vintage children’s instruments, and I try to collect them. (It goes along with the edutainment thing, I guess.) I really like miniature accordions, toy pianos, and different types of glockenspiels.

Usually I troll YouTube for ukulele covers, but tonight I figured, hey. Ukulele is stale. I ought to listen to melodica covers instead.

Now, the melodica is an interesting instrument. It looks like a child’s instrument, like some common recorder or penny whistle, but it has a really warm, organic sound that hints at its relation to the accordion and harmonica. But it doesn’t sound quite like any other instrument—the melodica is inscrutable. With both the melodica and the accordion, you get the sound of breathing, of little air valves pumping, which lends these instruments a “voice” that you don’t usually get either with wind instruments or with keyboards.

And that is why I like the melodica.

With no more ado, here are a handful of classic Nintendo songs as played on the melodica.

This is the Super Mario Bros theme.