Keeping on par with my Mario themed entries. While searching for videos to add to my entry I found a cool fan made video. Someone was smart enough to put lyrics to Beware the Forest Mushrooms, and I must say, bravo. They did a great job with recapping the story plot, as well as capturing the overall feel of the game. I tell you one thing, it makes me want to play right now.
Greetings all on this weird first day of spring. I found a hilarious cover of the Judas Priest - Breaking the Law VIDEO. It isn't a cover of the song just the video. It is all done with little kids and I must say job well done. The kid Halford cracks me up trying to mimic his dancing in the video. I give this video a 4 out of 5 laws broken for its faithfulness to the video. Take a look.
Here is the original contrast and compare!
Bonus!!! Here is MOTORHEAD'S cover of Breaking the Law. Lemmy+Priest = EPIC WIN!!
Part 2 of my favorite Super Mario music is here! I hope you enjoyed yesterday's romp into NES land. Like in part 1 only original game music is counted here that means no remixes or remakes. 16 & 64 bit ho!
Super Mario World - The Evil King Koopa Hearing this reminds me of playing SMW when I was a kid and the adrenaline rush I would get upon reaching Koopa. It didn't matter if I slugged it out through the game map proper, or used the Star Road to get there the rush would always be the same. As I got further and further into the fight my heart would beat faster, I would get pins and needles, and my arms would feel like they were made out of Jell-O! Then when the pressure has reached its apex and my body can't take the rush anymore Mario let's the final mechakoopa fly, and our little mechanical friend connects with his target causing the clown ship to turn and dump out its prize. I would breathe a sigh of relief and my body would relax. Danger is over as Princess Toadstool floats down daintily to meet our hero. It may not seem like much to you but this game gave me one of my first adrenaline rush experiences at a kid and I will always be reminded of it from this song.
Super Mario Land 2: The 6 Golden Coins - Star Maze This song is one of the first songs that caused my child brain to pay attention to music and critically listen. I remember hearing it and being soothed, knowing that it was more than just a creative background track for a game. To me it was an accurate representation of the calming whimsy that outer space can offer one's imagination. Star Maze is one of the first tracks from a video game to get an emotional reaction out of me, every time. It would make me stop and think about the emotions that were flooding me at the time. I knew from the first time hearing it that it was a special track which would remain near heart for the rest of my life.
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island - Flower Garden This song always struck me as walking through a park on a gorgeous day in the height of spring. The structure of the song is what made this my favorite out of an amazing soundtrack. It does a great job of making you imagine a crayon drawn world revolving around critters and baby Mario.
Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars - Beware the Forests Mushrooms This is one of my favorite games of the SNES and of ALL time. I had such a blast playing this game that I was genuinely upset when it was over. Of an amazing soundtrack it was hard to choose just one song as my all time favorite, but I knew it would be this track. To me it does a great job of conveying the feeling of wandering a forest and the mystery inside. I always, always think of a cloudy or rainy day in mid spring in 96 when I hear this. How it was a time in my life where I was on the threshold of a life changing event. ( I was about to graduate elementary school and progress to middle school where I gained more responsibility and start to become my own person.) It also helped that this was my favorite part of the game when Mario is trying to help the citizens of Rose Town. It is a bit difficult to put into words exactly how this song makes me feel and where else in time it takes me, so you will just have to give it a listen for yourself. (side note: my least favorite part of the game is trying to climb those damn vines to get to Nimbus land!)
Super Mario 64 - Dire,Dire Docks An amazing game. Nintendo hit the nail on the head in Mario's first foray into true 3D. This song is along the lines of Star Maze in the sense of how it made me feel about my emotions. Being a young teenager at the time of it's release I was able to think a bit deeper into the emotions that Dire, Dire Docks conjures up. Some of those emotions were peacefulness, love (which I was starting to learn more about from my own experiences at the time), enjoying life and everything that being an early teenager had to offer, and good times with friends. The calming phrases and soothing melodies would make me think about sitting outside on a spring or summer night and look to the horizon and think about where my life was at that particular moment. Or floating in a pool during the summer of my middle school years looking up at the sky and watching the clouds and sun dance from under the water.
That's my list! I know what you are thinking, "Wow! What a giant dork!" All I am trying to do is convey the importance that video game music has on my life and why. Hopefully, I didn't just ramble on pointlessly and was able to reach someone. Possibly, even cause someone to stop and think about where these songs take them. Also I would like to thank YouTube user SilvaGunner for their amazing collection of video game music.
Recently I have been in a video game music kind of mood, and I decided I would make a list of my favorite tracks from the various Super Mario games. This list is original tracks only not remixes or remakes, solely original game music. Now, there is nothing wrong with the rest of the songs from the games these just happen to be my favorite songs from each. Some tracks have a particular meaning for me while others are just there. I decided to break this up into 2 parts to try and get rid of the giant list feel. In chronological order here is:
Super Mario Brothers - Overworld. This is one of those songs that can transport people back to a wonderful time of their life when everything was alright. It always reminds me of sitting at home or a family members house enjoying life, and trying to get to lvl 8-4. 9 times out of 10 if you hum this song for people they will know exactly where it is from. This song is the very definition of epic. It ALL starts here for Nintendo and Mario.
Super Mario Brothers 2 - Overworld I know that this game was originally Doki Doki Panic and that the Lost Levels are the real SMB 2, but to me this is Mario 2. The overworld music from this game is by far one of my favorite video game tracks of all time, and every remix or rehash of this song I have heard has always been amazing. Hearing this makes me think of the first time I played Mario 2. I was at my mothers friends house and her daughter was away so she let my sister and I play her NES. That is how I met the world of sub con. FYI Princess Toadstool is the best character to use, period end of story!
Super Mario Land- Chai Kingdom Mario Land will always have a special place in my heart, because when I was a kid my father and I would play this game constantly. I remember one day he picked me up from school and told me that he finally got to the Chinese Level! (at that time we had never gone that far before) I was so psyched I was flipping out in the schoolyard! The best part was he had my Game Boy in the car on pause so I can play the level! It was like Christmas in the middle of the year that day! That memory in particular is why the Chai Kingdom is my favorite track out of a superb line up of music from this game.
Super Mario Brothers 3 - Underworld This is my favorite Mario game for the NES and in the running for mine of all time. Everything about this game was amazing! This is another game where upon hearing the sounds and music will transport a person back to a magical time. I remember playing this game nonstop at my babysitters house with my sister and her grandson. Trying our hardest to all the magic whistles and the white ghost ship. Of all the tracks from this game (and they are all good!) I chose the underworld as my favorite because it takes the main theme and gives it a gritty rock groove to it. Although it is the same basic theme from SMB 1 it feels like a genuine progression. The tempo is sped up, kick ass drum track is laid down, and the theme itself has more bass to it.
That's all for part 1! Come back tomorrow for part 2 SNES and Beyond!
Oi! Happy St. Patty's Day to ya! To commemorate this day of drinking, eating green dyed food, and bad decisions here are a few Oirish songs I am enjoying today!
Can you say Floggy Molly???
Of all the countless covers of this song, this is my favorite so far. METALLICA!!
It's just not an Irish post without a song by Enya.
Here is a video I found of a commercial from the 80's. Mickey Mantle is telling us about the Intellivsion play cable. Being an Yankees fan and a proud former owner of an Intellivison I like this video. Also it its good filler for today while I preblog for the week.
A while ago I found this amazing video on YouTube . It combines two of my favorite things, Final Fantasy VI (my fav in the series) and Full Metal Alchemist (using my favorite of the openings!). Some guy took the time out to recreate one of the opening and endings from the anime Full Metal Alchemist and replace the characters with those from FFVI. After having watched this video over and over again all I could say was, "Damn! I wish that was a real anime!" Check it out for yourself. Side note: If anyone knows the last little song that they sing at the end please let me know it always gets stuck in my head when I watch this.
I am a big fan of Daft Punk. Needless to say when I stumbled upon this Internet gem I spent a good portion of the past hour playing with it. The url is http://www.najle.com/idaft/ and it is a keyboard map to sound bytes from their song Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger. It is a pointless little flash app but it did bring a smile to my face. It might to yours as well. Here is the video for the song so you can see where the sounds come from. Lets see how long it takes to annoy my coworkers with this.
Today is March 11th, so I am celebrating it by listening to 311 all day! Enjoy these videos and spread the chill. Edit: Since 311's record label being retarded and removed the embed capabilities from their YouTube videos, I had to find fan made videos set to the desired tracks. So sorry in advance for any AMVs or crap just enjoy the music!
Ecto-Cooler! Just hearing the name gives people of my generation smiles. That is how great this green drink of the gods is. Every kid remembers having the drink box if awesomeness in his lunch during school. It ruled not only for its Ghostbusters tie-in but for its crazy green color and kick ass taste! For this weeks Website to View Instead of Work I found an amazing in depth article abourt what happened to Ecto-cooler. http://www.x-entertainment.com/articles/0822/ It gives a short history of this amazing drink and then starts you down a path on what happened to it. Unfortuately this article is outdated (2003) and the answer it gives us to the million dollar question, what happened to Ecto Cooler, is also out of production. Oh by the way the answer is Crazy Citrus Cooler and in 2007 it was kanked out of production. Still it is a good read to bring you down memory lane and a good place to start for hunting down remaining stocks of this beverage of the ages. If anyone finds any information regarding Ecto-Cooler or its repackaged form, Crazy Citrus Cooler, please shed some light and inform me of your progress. From one fan to another, please let me know.
Aside from the horrible quality images this article is well written and researched. It does a good job of motovating the reader into searching for their own stash of green heaven drink boxes. Although it is a fast read, I count it as a spring board into flurry of different sites for research. That is why I give this site a 4 out of 8 work hours wasted.
So last month I went to NY Comic Con and met the creators of the Ninja Turtles. They were gracious enough to paint me a color head shot of Leonardo saying "let's kick shell". When they were done creating it I told them my childhood thanked them for the good times. A week or so afterwords I went to AC Moore to get their masterpiece matted and framed. Fast forward to this past friday and the framing is done! Take a look. Let me know what you think.
So I went to midnight madness for Watchmen Thursday night and it was great! I will have a review of it next week. For your Weekend YouTube video I found out what happenes when you combine the Watchmen with Saturday Morning Cartoons. You get this! Enjoy.
I recently finished watching the series Heat Guy J. I first found it around 2004/2005 when MTV tried to show anime again. Doing what MTV does best it moved the show around different time slots until they stopped showing it all together. Since then the entire series (26 episodes) has come out on DVD and I decided to start the series over again and add it to my Netflix.
J beating the piss out of someone's head
The main plot of the show focuses on a young detective named Daisuke Aurora and his android partner J. J is the only government sanctioned android in a futuristic island society where borders are closed and androids are banned. J's design is pretty cool kind of a cross between cyberpunk and a futuristic steampunk, as he relies on steam pressure to operate and vents the exhaust through pipes that serve as his clavicals. The cast of characters are a pretty good mix and play off each other well. After watching a few episodes the real underlying plot comes out which boils down to fight the mafia and the government. Towards the end of the series it does a good job of showing how much you really care about the characters as they have grown on you.
A Track from the shows diverse soundtrack
The animation style is very clean and the CGI images are as good as 2002 had to offer. The voice acting was well cast and believeable. For those familiar with Cowboy Bebop the voice of Jet is promently heard through out this series as supporting roles. The part of the show that really sticks out for me is the soundtrack. The music ranges from bluesy rock to bagpipes, classical voice, and techno. They even throw a few world music style songs in there to show a mixing of culture. An example of this are the tracks that have an Indian woman singing in the style of the Indian culture, high pictched and fast. As great as the plot was to follow each episode I enjoyed and looked forward to the music the most. This show does not dissapoint.I reccomend anyone who is intersted in anime or a good detective/sci-fi story to give this show a try, or at the very least try the soundtrack.
This weeks entry of websites to view instead of work is the Video Game Lies wiki, found at http://videogamelies.wikia.com/wiki/Video_Game_Lies . I found this website while perusing around kotaku. This little gem is dedicated to one of the cornerstones of playground bragging the video game lie. Like the wiki's opening sentence states, we all knew someone who claimed to have done something that was so secret, so awesome that only they and a few others in the world have done it. One of those almost always being the older brother / cousin of course, having been the person who passed down this knowledge onto them. Examples of this from my childhood were jumping over the flag in Super Mario Brothers took you to a warp zone someplace cool and impregnating Sindel in MK3 as a finishing move. Ah, memories of growing up in the early 90's I do miss those halcyon days.
This wiki is thin on content, I'm assuming because it is young. However, what it lacks in quantity it makes up for in quality. There are a few lies in here that I remember from way back when. The creators poses the question of whether the lies come out of a desire to trick people or merely look cool to others? All in all I find this site to be most informative about a common place but rarely spoken of phenomenon in video game culture. This site has great potential and it being a wiki makes adding your own stories of lies even easier.
I give it a 5 of 8 work hours wasted. http://videogamelies.wikia.com/wiki/Video_Game_Lies
I finished reading The Yankee Years by Joe Torre Monday and I must say it is a good book. It starts out in the end of 1995 with the decision to make Torre the manager of the Yanks. How the NY press was ripping into him before he even started! We following the historic run of Torre's tenure from World Series hero to his leaving in 2007. He goes into detail about the players like Derek Jeter, who he puts on a pedestal, and the management like Cashman. It was interesting to read about the different personalities that they players have. Like Jeter being the calm, no complaining ever, stay the course and do your best out there everyday attitude. As well as how big name players who are traded to the Yankees can't handling playing in New York and collapse.
He writes about the elation of winning his first World Series in 96 as the under dogs and how it set the tone for the years to follow. There is quite a bit about the 98 Yankee season and how everything just came together for them. As well as how they embodied the team mentality and went on that magnificent run of three back to back World Series wins, a feat not seen since. He broke down how the Steroid Era came to be and the early warnings that players tried to give while MLB ignored it. The subsequent fallout that was the aftermath of steroids in baseball.
Torre writes a good transition showing how the Yankees were getting farther and farther from the team mentality of the "good old days." How certain players required special attention/needs , Clemens, and that others were so stats centric it hurt their performance as a team player and a member of the family, Rodriguez. The book shows how Steinbrenner was a boss who was involved with his team, even if it was in eccentric ways, to his state of declining health and a back burner role. One quote of Steinbrenner's that I particularly enjoyed was when a player threw a bag of chips ( I think it was chips) or something and it wound up hitting the boss. He just stood there and said "Who threw that?" upon finding out who it was he stated, "I knew it was you because it didn't hurt." Classic Steinbrenner! One thing I didn't like was how the Boss grew so accustomed to winning the World Series that he expected it to happen every year. The years that it didn't he viewed as a total failure. Now granted they lost the 01 and 03 World Series but, damn those were two amazing seasons and postseason runs!
It was interesting to read how baseball as a whole was changing. From batting percentage and gut feelings being the end all be all to how on base percentage and information became king in baseball. How revenue sharing gave weaker clubs a chance to compete against big teams like the Yankees. Baseball today really is a different world than how it was even in the late 90s.
Torre then writes about the gradual falling out of favor with the management to the point where they were gunning for Torre. That is what made me sick to my stomach. This man who brought the Yankees out of an 18 year post season slump to 12 out of 12 playoff appearances. Going to the World Series 6 times wining 4, 3 of which were back to back! Having the team give amazing season after amazing season, making sure the Yankees were the best team in baseball every year, and the management grew pompous and wanted to get rid of him because they weren't advancing to the World Series. Now I am all for don't let your managers get complacent but damn give the guy some slack. Towards the end all he wanted was a 2 year contract so as not to feel like he had his head in a noose and retire after the first year in it. But no they chose to sideline him.
Before I get ahead of myself with another rant I will end it here with this is a great book to read regardless of whether you are a Yankees fan or not. Not only does it chronicle his tenure with the team well but it peers inside the world of baseball as a whole during those years and how things transformed in this fast paced world we live in today. Definitely give this book a read if you are a fan of Baseball.
For Christmas I bought my parents a combination record/cd/mp3/radio player seeing as my sister and I broke theirs when we were younger. Ever since then I have had an itch to start my own record collection. On Sunday I cashed in the thought and went to Vintage Vinyl to see what records I could purchase. I set off on this excursion with Pluck the Knife. I had a few records that I wanted to get already listed in my head as high priority, Judas Priest, particularly Screaming for Vengeance. We spent a good two hours or so in the store flipping through the used vinyl section, which had no order to it just records piled in bins and boxes, as well as the new vinyl. I was getting upset towards the end because I flipped through the used records and couldn't find any Priest! Right when the sadness of no JP set into my mind I notice that the record in front of me had a familiar logo on it. I turn it around and it was Defenders of the Faith and behind it Turbo!
I wound up purchasing the following:
Judas Priest - Defenders of the Faith Judas Priest - Turbo Judas Priest - Hero, Hero ( new copy) Foreigner - Head Games Foreigner - Double Vision Men at Work - Business as Usual Ted Nugent - Cat Scratch Fever Led Zeppelin - Song Remains the Same Soundtrack Steely Dan - Gaucho
and a few others that I can't remember now but probably will once I click post. I was sad that there would be no screaming for vengeance that day but eBay rectified that once I got home. Tom and I furiously went looking for a Jefferson Starship album that had Light the Sky on Fire. We found only one that had it included as a single, however it wasn't in the sleeve. Either some fan boy took it or it just wasn't in there. I am happy that I am getting a record collection going wether or not I listen to them is a different story. I would like to find records of Ace Frehley's solo KISS album, any Led Zeppelin, and any Pink Floyd. So if anyone knows where I can find those as well as the Starship song I am looking for please let me know. I bid on a Star Wars soundtrack which hopefully (fingers crossed) I should win, and did a buy it now for The Empire Strikes Back soundtrack. I believe my record collection is starting to take shape nicely.
Damn I was hoping there would be no more snow in store for us this year but I guess I was wrong. Why must the weather tease me. It was just on Thursday and Friday last week we had 65 degree weather. For sure I though this could be the start of spring, wrong. I find out yesterday that we were in for a Nor'Easter. Push come to shove I decided that I was done driving to work in the snow this year and called out of work. Now I can spend my day catching up on Netflix, reading, and Xbox Live. So you will have to wait for tomorrow for a more serious blog entry. Here are some pics of the snow around here.
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