In the past, I've express my love for video game songs arranged in synth for a different console. Each of the 8 and 16-bit consoles/arcades/computers had a very unique sound, and the interpretations made by fans are astounding.
Somehow I came across the works of GeckoYamori on Youtube today, and found a number of excellent SNES songs redone using the YM2612 + SN76489 sound ships found in the Genesis. I know that Nintendo has retrospectively won the 16-bit wars or whatever and the Genesis looked and sounded awful. But, yeah, OK, the SNES sound chip could sound amazing in very particular circumstances, but there's something very hard edged about wailing FM synth guitars and crunchy PCM drums. Personally I think this arrangements are better than their SNES originals, but that's because GeckoYamori did a damn fine job with them.
Here's a bunch of different songs from Super Metroid. Sounds really damn moody.
Here's the first stage of Axelay. Again, totally excellent. Someone in the Youtube comments suggested that the only thing that could make it better would be the orchestral hits found in the soundtrack to practically every Konami arcade game of the early 90s. (And TMNT: Hyperstone Heist for the Genesis, of course.)
Were you disappointed that Sonic 4's music sounded like a Genesis game, except really, really hollow for some reason? This version corrects that. Way better than the official version.
The above (and next two) are from Mega Man X3. I never really liked this soundtrack all that much, but I think it had more to do with the sample programming than the actual composition. It worked great for the style in the first Mega Man X, but both the second and third SNES games sounded really weird. Some of these were improved by the arrangements for the CD versions of X3, but I wasn't a particular big fan of that style. (Here's the SNES and CD versions to compare.) These Genesis mixes really make the songs shine, though. Outstanding work.
MMX3 - Blast Hornet
MMX3 - Toxic Seahorse
Showing posts with label Sonic 3. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sonic 3. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Thursday, October 22, 2009
I like burning hedgehogs
Contrary to the opening title, I’m not advocating wanton cruelty on animals – rather, I intend to talk you through the hassles of trying to experience Sonic Gems on the PS2 as it should be. The quick answer is: you can’t, making it possibly the most redundant compilation ever released.
With high street stores no longer stocking new PS2 games in the UK, and the second-hand selection dwindling to almost nothing, I’ve been discussing what needs to be smash-and-grabbed before the last PS2 leaves Saigon. eBay (hate it as much as I do) is rife with excellent games costing from $1 up to $20, all with free postage. This being the valley of the graph, many will inevitably rise in price. Meaning now is the time to BUY!
One game on my list was Sonic Gems, a Sonic compilation containing mainly obscure and weird crap most people haven’t played (Sonic Fighters the arcade game and a slew of Game Gear games), plus Sonic CD which has never appeared on compilation before (EDIT: I'm informed it's actually a port of the PC Sonic CD, not the Sega CD version - but I'm going to leave the cover art pics as is). A games journalist friend criticised it for containing only obscure titles - but I disagreed. This to me, made it potentially the greatest compilation ever released. Forget compilations with games which sold well - the original cartridges for those cost $1 a piece. No, reprinting a collection of retro games should - I feel - focus on those which are good yet didn't get as widespread a release. This would lower the prices that collectors demand for the originals, and it would mean the unwashed masses get to experience great games easily and at a fraction of the price. So in this respect, I regarded Sonic Gems as some form of holy gaming light - a shining beacon by which other developers could follow... And oh lordy, how wrong I was.
First up eBay UK, which has it for around $6 delivered. But then I realised this won’t have Bare Knuckle 1, 2 or 3. Only the Japanese version has them.
So I buy the Japanese version. Except it turns out that Sega, much like they did with Panzer Dragoon Orta on the Xbox, coded the Japanese version to be multi-language and select things based on the language settings of your system. PAL PS2 systems don’t have Japanese, so everything – and I mean EVERYTHING – defaulted to English, including the soundtrack to Sonic CD. This pisses me off, because the UK actually received the Japanese soundtrack for Sonic CD, and yet the UK versions of Gems boots the US soundtrack, as does the Japanese version in a UK system. So right off the bat, one of my main reasons for playing is curtailed.If I'm going to play Sonic CD I want it to have its original soundtrack as intended by the creators. Dave Halverson gave the Japanese version a perfect score of 100, and the US versions something like 70, purely they changed the music. I can agree with this. Compare the two soundtracks and it should be obvious the original is better. It's insulting that Sega felt the need to do this.
Some people say the change in soundtracks is licensing issues. Well, I call shenanigans on that excuse. That’s like paying $40 for a game at the store and getting home to find there’s no disc in it and the developer says: “Sorry, when we finished making the game we had issues with the fact that we couldn’t magically invent CDs out of thin air.” That’s the wrong answer. What you do is, you DEAL with it. Sorting out the licensing issues for the soundtrack, over a decade after its release, should be treated in exactly the same way as staff wages or hiring the factory to produce the discs is treated. IE: it’s part of the development process. Not bung both soundtracks on one disc and then deprive all non-Japanese of the chance to listen to it. If it can still be sold in Japan, by god it can be sold in the west – it was in fact sold in the UK! Bloody numpties.
Anyway, back to google.
Googling reveals that it’s possible to rip the game and hex edit it to only boot the Japanese soundtrack. So, off we go.
I couldn’t be bothered to work out how to rip it, so instead downloaded the ISO. Several hours and over 1 gigabyte later, I was faced with how to actually hex edit it. Back to Google to search for free Hex editors. As per usual, there’s a million different utilities. The one near the top, XVI32 looks reasonable, so I download it.
It loads fine, but trying to open the ISO results in a memory failure. Maybe it’s too big I think. Or maybe I need a binary files instead. Or maybe XVI32 is actually a bit pants.
So, it’s back to Google to search for how to convert an ISO to a BIN. Isobuster can apparently do it, but after fumbling through the menus for close to 20 minutes I’m no wiser as to how to do this. Perhaps another hex editor will fix it?
Back to Google, and I get Free Hex Editor Neo. And hoho, it works! Except that instead of roman text on the far right, opposite the numbers, I’ve got Japanese moonspeak. Perhaps it’s because I set my system’s character coding to Japanese for doujin games? I’m not going to change it just to hack an ISO, so I try to change the character setting in FHEN. Well, can’t do that because it’s a trial version. Bastards.
Anyway, I search for BGM_US.ASF and luckily it turns up just fine in the ISO. Except it’s not at the numerical location hinted at on the forum which gave instructions. Is this due to my downloaded ISO not being the correct length, or perhaps it’s due to character encoding? No matter, I hex edit it and move on. All need to read BGM_JP.ASF. The ISO saves quickly.
Finally burned, the game actually loads via Swap Magic 3 and I think I’m in the clear. Except no! The game still insists on loading the godawful US soundtrack. I double check the ISO, and it quite clearly shows only BGM_JP.ASF for each entry. Damn... What went wrong?Anyway, deciding I’ll fiddle with that later, I consider loading Bare Knuckle, except it’s not there. There’s only 2 blank slots for unlockable games, presumably Vectorman 1 and 2. But isn’t this Japanese version meant to have 5 unlockables? I check the ISO again, and it defiantly contains an MDROM folder, with BK1.cpt and upwards. So Bare Knuckle is on the disc.
Back to Google and GameFaqs. Turns out I need to play the compilation for over 7 hours before these games are unlocked. At which point sanity prevailed and I said: bollocks to this.
In total I must have spent around 4-5 hours surfing, buying, ripping, downloading, unzipping, hacking, saving, reburning, and generally buggering around on the internet. And for what? To play Sonic CD with its original soundtrack as the creators intended, and a scrolling fighter series which hasn’t been butchered? I own the original PAL Sonic CD with Japanese soundtrack, which boots perfectly on a modded Xbox with Genesis emulator, and I can force it to run in 60Hz mode so no borders. With the same modded Xbox I can load Streets of Rage 1 and 2, and the fan-translated version of Bare Knuckle 3, which would be in English, but not censored or with unbalanced difficulty. To top it off, the Game Gear emulation is appalling on the compilation, with washed out and anti-aliased visuals which don’t even fill the screen. Amateur coders are able to do better on big consoles without official SDKs, so why Sega did such a terrible job I don’t know. Drunk on shoe polish, perhaps?
Sonic Gems is a butchered mess. If you buy the PAL version you’re cheating yourself. If you buy the imported Japanese version, it will only work correctly on a Japanese PS2. The amount of effort needed to get it anywhere near acceptable is so high as to make it pointless owning. Like I said, possibly the most redundant compilation in existence. Unless you’re desperate to play Sonic Fighters.
EDIT:
I had considered hex editing the game to unlock the extra titles, but as pointed out on RHDN, an easier method is to download the finished save file off GameFAQs, and according to Kitsune Sniper on their forums:
You download the save files to a USB stick, you put the codebreaker/ AR / whatever disc on the PS2 (it's self-booting), you stick the USB into the PS2, you load the file, voila. That said, some PS2s are incredibly picky with their USB sticks.
Many thanks for the tip.
In case anyone cares: images stolen from all over the internet, be it Mobygames, or somewhere else. Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Michael Jackson did work on Sonic 3
Definitive proof that Michael Jackson worked on Sonic 3, after the jump. Oh, and some mad rambling from me on the state of the US and UK magazine scene.
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I was visiting the grand estate of friend, and fellow infamous hyper-games journalist, Ashley Fragonard Day, the Retro Baron for GamesTM, and as we sipped Southern Comfort and carried rifles to take potshots at his menagerie of decorative peacocks, we also spoke about games mags.
We discussed GameSetWatch’s Mag Weasel column, and the interesting fact that the UK, despite being a small island, seems to produce nearly double the number of games mags as the USA. And sadly, our output is seldom picked up by the videogame world’s flow of consciousness, despite uncovering and publishing some startling information not recorded anywhere else. Games websites either ignore or are unaware of what’s printed in the UK, and sites such as Wikipedia regularly refuse to acknowledge UK mags – the arguments I’ve had with the Wikistapo Mafia about them deleting entries sourced from UK publications!
The end result is that an unimaginable amount of historical information is being lost and forgotten in a few obscure games mags which don’t sell well outside of the UK (or even in the UK, it could be argued).
Of the wealth of interesting-but-ignored things we discussed (including his extensive examination of Captain Rainbow’s themes and the fact that Yojiro Ogawa of Sega specifically dragged a translator over so as to praise Comix Zone as his favourite Western game), the biggest annoyance was that Mr Day had documented proof of Michael Jackson’s involvement with Sonic 3, in GamesTM August 2007, and despite this, even months afterwards, the internet still spoke about it as being only rumours. One exception being the excellent Sega-16, which re-used the GamesTM quotes in a feature they did (also revealing that a copy of the original soundtrack still exists out there).
QUOTABLE PROOF, Roger Hector, then project-manager of the now-defunct studio Sega Technical Institute, said:
Michael Jackson was a very big fan of Sonic and he wanted to record a soundtrack for the game. He came to STI and met with the team to discuss the design theme, story and feel of the game. He then went away and recorded an entire soundtrack that covered all of the worlds. It was fantastic. The music fitted perfectly for the game, and they had a distinctive Michael Jackson sound. We had it all ready and integrated into the game when the first news stories came out accusing him of child molestation, and Sega had to back away from this collaboration. It was very late in the development process, and we had to quickly put together a complete replacement music track. Howard Drossin, STI’s music guy, stepped in and did a great job, working around the clock to get it done. It was too bad nobody outside ever heard the Michael Jackson music.
Mr Day later requested this content be reposted in an online news story, so it would be publicly available to all. Curiously, while Wikipedia does briefly confirm what he’d discovered, GamesTM does not get a mention. GameSetWatch is referenced, but no link is provided to any online page.
Well, now we should all know, Michael Jackson really did work on Sonic 3.
Beyond this though, and getting back to our original discussions, the situation raises a whole bunch of interesting points.
Firstly, why is it the tiny British Isles are able to support so many different publications despite their being ignored abroad?
The demise of (old) EGM was a sad end to an era, with some corners speculating it was Dan Hsu’s honesty with regards to corruption in journalism that resulted in its loss of ad revenue and eventual folding.
(Caption: Yojiro Ogawa, designer on Sonic Team, upon seeing Mr Day playing Comix Zone on a Wii at a press event, dragged his translator over specifically to praise the game, stating that it was internally very popular at Sega of Japan)Having worked in the magazine front-lines of the UK I’m only too aware of the systemic corruption prevalent in everything, and the fact that said corruption seems to be the only way mags make profit - like some kind of perverse life-sustaining cancer. RAM Raider’s excellent blog covers barely a fraction of the true picture. Is the UK perhaps more corrupt than the US, and so able to exploit more worker drones and consumers for profit, thereby sustaining more magazines? I once took the average monthly hours myself and my colleagues worked, and divided our annual salaries over them – we were legally earning less than minimum wage.
Another interesting point raised is, UK magazines tend to be better than American mags when it comes to juicy, in-depth features. The closest I’ve found to good features has been The Escapist and the now defunct Gamer’s Quarter, both of which have Reader’s Digest-like articles which go beyond basic interviews and reviews.
The only print magazine I subscribe to is Dave Halverson’s PLAY, which I love dearly, but even it can’t compare to some of Britain’s best features writers (though I’m sure US staff don’t suffer nearly as much psychological abuse).Admittedly there have been a few British features grasping at air, like GamesTM’s hopelessly pathetic piece on “Games for blind people” which turned out to be little more than babble about text adventures with speech synthesis. But across the board there’s been some spectacular writing from all major publishers, on subjects such as FAQ Writers (with some lovely ASCII design), games in foreign countries, Death of things on the internet (like HOTU), A visit to the Nintendo Museum in Osaka, Gaming Culture (NGamer have some truly wonderful features on this), Everyone’s Favourite Peripheral Buttons (a sublimely lighthearted piece with quotes from the guy behind Harvest Moon), Japanese Arcades, Sex in games (a mature discussion), What went wrong with the Gizmondo, The Rise and Fall and Return of SHMUPS, Captain Rainbow examination (GamesTM #76), Videogames that were turned into board games (this was an excellent feature in a one-shot Retro magazine)...
Only in the UK have I seen articles on boardgames in print. This photo courtesy of LevelOneBoss. It would seem that print mags in the UK are more willing to take risks on quirky articles which are normally only otherwise run on websites.... Pinball tables based on games, and hundreds of other features (including countless “The Making Of” articles) which I can’t quite remember at the moment. Not to mention my own features covering the History of Fan Translations (partly in response to the Wikistapo deleting Wikipedia’s entry on fan translations), Underground Collectors, the Hudson Mario games, History of Brazil’s Tec Toy (with exclusive photos), and a whole bunch of other stuff no one seemed to read.
UK writers, in the course of researching such topics (and paying heavily for material out of their own pockets, whether in-house or freelance), will often dig up some startling pieces of information, despite being worked harder and paid considerably less than their American counterparts... And then no one reads or pays any attention to their findings.
A lot needs to change in the games magazine industry, especially in the UK where it seems to be run by lunatic sadists, but a good start would be people reading and talking about decent features and interesting information, and perhaps giving a little nod to the burnt out human being who brought you those words. As I get time, and if I can get access to them, I will try to scan features which I feel are of merit – assuming people want to read them.
(Game images nabbed from MobyGames)
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