This is just a reminder for anyone interested in the Vintage Game Club — we start tomorrow! If you want to join us, install Grim Fandango and sign up for the message board and you’ll be all set.
Much of my bloviating intelligent criticism about the game will probably be offsite, but I’ll cross-post some of my thoughts here on Cruise Elroy too. I hope to see you in the forums!
During my last semester of college my composition professor went on sabbatical, and the music department brought in a temporary replacement from another school. While my old prof had a frivolous experimental streak — he once had us write pieces to cover up the nameplates outside people’s offices — the new guy was much more traditional.
One day I went to his office to show him a piece I was working on for class. It was just melodic fragments with some chord symbols sketched out underneath, but I wanted his opinion on the direction I was taking. He looked it over and asked, “What’s the instrumentation?”
I hadn’t decided yet, and told him so.
He stared back quizzically. “I don’t see how you can compose without knowing what you’re composing for,” he said. “I always keep the instruments in mind.”
I don’t really work that way, I said, and we got to talking about The Real Book.
The Real Book is a bible for jazz musicians. It contains hundreds of pages of music like this one, called lead sheets. Lead sheets are stripped down transcriptions that contain just a melody and chord symbols; no instrumentation, no dynamic markings, no detailed arrangements. And it is this tradition, not the classical one, that has informed my compositional thinking — much to my new professor’s chagrin.
The Real Book’s lead sheets are based on separating content from form, somewhat like the functional division between HTML and CSS. The written part — melody and chords — contains the core identity of the piece. This must be present in some respect for the performance to be recognizable. However, virtually all of the formal considerations — what the instruments will be, how the chords will be voiced, how long the solos will last, and so on — are at the discretion of the performers.
As someone from a jazz and popular music background, I typically consider a piece independently of a particular recording’s qualities. When I listen to Thelonious Monk play “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” for example, I hear the angular melodic lines and playful reharmonizations in the context of a baseline “regular” version (say, George Harrison’s), but I still keep the two separate. Whether or not Monk is too dissonant for your ear is a completely separate issue from whether you think “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” is a good song.
That separation, incidentally, is why I argue for the quality of old game music — as far as I’m concerned, focusing on the “fake,” low-fidelity sound misses the point. The music is there; the rest is aesthetics.
(UPDATE: Be sure to see Tommy’s response to the following criticism in the comments; as it turns out, we’re on the same page.)
Here’s a snip from game composer Tommy Tallarico’s interview with Guinness World Records:
Isn’t video game music just a constantly repeating loop of blips and bleeps? How can this be a full-time job?
This is actually a huge misconception among people who haven’t played a game in awhile. The reality is that when I first got involved in the game industry over 18 years ago a lot of the music was short repetitive bleeps & bloops. This was because the technology at the time didn’t allow for real music and live musicians. [...] In the mid 90’s DVD’s became a viable storage medium for games. Once this happened, composers and musicians could now use real instruments to create game music. It was an exciting time because no one had ever hear [sic] their video games make these kinds of sounds before.
And this is from the biography on his website:
Tommy Tallarico is a veritable video game industry icon. As one of the most successful video game composers in history, he has helped revolutionize the gaming world, creating unique audio landscapes that enhance the video gaming experience. He is considered the person most instrumental in changing the game industry from bleeps & bloops to real music now appreciated worldwide by millions of fans.
Tallarico rightly dispels the misconception that game music hasn’t evolved past “bleeps and bloops”, but he perpetuates another misconception in the process: namely, that game music before the DVD era was not “real” music.
I have a lot of respect for Tommy — he is, after all, the most prolific game composer of all time. But the idea that old game music was not “real” is a load of bull.
Yes, some of the lasting appeal of old game music can undoubtedly be attributed to nostalgia — but not all of it. There is artistic merit to the pieces of the 8- and 16-bit era that is irrespective of the technical limitations imposed by the hardware. The fact that they are performed by now-antiquated synths does not preclude them from categorization as “real music.”
As the co-creator of Video Games Live, Tallarico must have noticed the continued popularity of Mario and Zelda music. I think that, in his excitement over the new possibilities afforded by modern consoles, he has underestimated the compositional quality of older game music. He has conflated content with form.
(By the way, that lead sheet up above is actually the Koopa Beach theme from Super Mario Kart. Out of context, its harmonic language is indistinguishable from a bona fide jazz standard. But hey, it’s all just bleeps and bloops, right?)
Today I subscribed to the excellent new blog Versus CluClu Land (thanks, Michael), a heady project from one Iroquois Pliskin which analyzes games from a philosophical perspective. Its unique focus got me thinking that many of my favorite writers often approach games from the perspective of another branch of knowledge.
Leigh Alexander writes about games and sex. Roger Travis writes about games and classics. Michael Abbott writes about games and film. Corvus Elrod writes about games and storytelling. Iroquois Pliskin writes about games and philosophy. (And here at Cruise Elroy, of course, I write about games and music.)
It’s certainly important to study games on their own terms — in fact, I often recommend Mitch Krpata’s series A New Taxonomy of Gamers, in which he argues that our current vocabulary is insufficient for critical discussion and posits new terms to better describe the different types of gamers. At the same time, though, there’s a lot to be said for the multidisciplinary approach of the blogs I listed above. We risk insularity and irrelevance when we only discuss games qua games; Situating our analyses among other well-established fields of criticism lends the discussions legitimacy and perspective, and makes our dialogue richer.
So here’s to you, Iroquois, and all the other writers who tackle video games with a unique frame of reference. I hope to see more from all of you in the future.
One of my biggest gripes with Twilight Princess (and, indeed, many adventure games) is that I never felt any attachment to the world. It’s nice that I can defeat Ganon and save Hyrule, but what is it, exactly, that needs saving? Most of the game world is a vast expanse of empty space that’s just an excuse for Epona to get a workout. It’s pretty, and there are certainly well-developed parts, but on the whole it’s not particularly memorable.
Okami’s Nippon, though, is teeming with personality. The art has a lot to do with that, but it’s Ameratsu’s interaction with the land — repairing cursed zones, revitalizing blackened trees, feeding hungry animals — that establishes the player’s unusually strong connection to the game world. I find that I look forward to reviving Guardian Saplings not just so that I can progress through the story, but so that I have a new area to explore and nurture.
Speaking of exploration, the sense of scale in Okami is phenomenal. I’m over nine hours in, but the game still feels like it’s in its introductory stages. I constantly run into areas I can’t get to and objects I can’t interact with, and the various lists on the inventory screen indicate that I still have quite a long way to go.
My biggest complaint so far is with the writing. To be blunt, the characters are not nearly as charming as the game seems to think they are. When I excitedly showed Okami to a friend, he read some of the dialogue asked me if it was a game meant for little kids. I don’t think that’s an unfair question, really; Issun in particular is a badly forced attempt at comic relief, with lines that sound like Midna or Navi in Zelda fan fiction.
There is a similar whimsical spirit to many of game’s characters, which would be fine if they weren’t all so one-dimensional — the personality that Okami cultivates in the world itself is lost in its inhabitants. I’d probably skip the cutscenes if I didn’t want to follow the plot, but the story is enjoyable (dialog notwithstanding) and often contains important information. I’m willing to forgive the flaw, though; plenty of games feature less-than-stellar characterization, and there are a lot of other things to like here.
It may be a while before I get back to Okami, as I’ll be traveling next week and then focusing on Grim Fandango for the Vintage Game Club after that. It has me hooked, though, and I’ll definitely see it through to the end.
Are you a fan of the Cruise Elroy music posts, or of game composer Nobuo Uematsu? Well, I’ve just added a bunch of new pieces to my irregular meter collection! Part two now includes songs from Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX, as well as a bonus tune from Chrono Trigger.
(If you missed the updates to part one, there are lots of new pieces to see there too — everything from Road Rash 3 to On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness.)
The Vintage Game Club is a new project from David Carlton, Michael Abbott and me that aims to get people playing and talking about classic video games. On July 21 we’re going to fire up Grim Fandango and play through it collectively, sharing our thoughts along the way.
Interested in joining? Michael has graciously agreed to host this round, so head over to this post for the full scoop. We already have around two dozen a ton of participants! If all goes well, we’ll probably do more games in the future. It should be fun!
As a left-handed guitarist who plays righty, I’ve always found it odd that most people fret the strings with their non-dominant hand. It seems to me that you’d need more dexterity to make complex chord shapes than to strum; why waste your good hand on a simple repetitive motion?
I’ve often had similar thoughts about video game controllers. We take it for granted that the directional control is always on the left and the buttons are on the right. But isn’t it strange that most people control a D-pad or analog stick with their bad hand? Doesn’t directional control require more precision than simply tapping your thumb?
I’ve had the opportunity to explore these questions with the Wii. Since the Remote and Nunchuk act as disconnected halves of a controller, it was finally possible for me to manipulate the analog stick with my non-dominant hand, like a righty.
Super Mario Galaxy was the first game I played this way, and the results were mixed. The Super Mario 64 controls are burned into my muscle memory, so it took a while for me to mentally flip all of the buttons. More crucially, I had trouble with delicacy; I ran at top speed everywhere, and occasionally did so in the wrong direction and into a pool of lava. Righties may be used to controlling an avatar (or fretting a guitar) using their non-dominant hand, but it’s difficult to flip everything around after years of experience.
With practice, though, I got pretty decent at playing with the controllers backwards. While it never felt completely natural controlling the analog stick with my right thumb, it was definitely more comfortable holding the heavier Wii Remote in my dominant hand. In fact, I ended up playing most of the game that way — including that killer Luigi’s Purple Coins star!
Thinking I was pretty badass I went on to play Twilight Princess and No More Heroes with the controllers reversed too, but in those games the results were less than stellar. I never quite wrapped my head around the controls for Twilight Princess; even in the final dungeon I’d constantly hit the wrong button during battles. That, combined with my lingering awkwardness in using the analog stick, made Link a bit less graceful than I would have liked.
In No More Heroes I had to struggle with the fact that the wrestling move instructions were all backwards. After trying to do mental gymnastics every time Travis flipped someone over his back, I started just crossing my arms when those parts came up so that the positions of the controllers in space matched their positions on the screen. I’m sure I looked ten times sillier playing that game than I ever did playing WarioWare.
I decided that my success with Galaxy was an aberration and resolved to go back standard controls for Okami — directional control with the left hand, buttons with the right. Now I’m thinking that might have been a mistake.
Here’s the thing: holding the Remote + Nunchuk combo normally puts the Remote in my bad hand. Since Okami makes extensive use of the Remote’s infrared pointer functionality, I constantly find myself drawing like a righty and cursing the wobbly circles and squiggly lines.
In Galaxy the pointer wasn’t terribly important since shooting Star Bits was largely unnecessary. In Twilight Princess I just used it to fire the occasional arrow or Clawshot, which I think I could have pulled off with my bad hand. Drawing shapes in Okami, though? The recognition is finicky enough as it is; my crappy right-handed penmanship is only exacerbating the problem.
And yet I can’t help noticing that I’m starting to improve. After several hours with the game my circles have become more circular, my lines more linear. Maybe, given enough time, the Wii will make me ambidextrous.
My post on fidelity and quality uses music as its example, but the real battleground in this debate is with graphics. Indeed, the desire for more realistic graphics has been a driving force in hardware improvements for decades; it’s only recently with the Wii that graphical fidelity has been intentionally sidelined in favor of other new features.
As with audio, though, more realistic doesn’t necessarily mean better. Crysis may look more like real life than Yoshi’s Island, just as the orchestral music in Super Mario Galaxy sounds more like real instruments than Mega Man 2, but photorealism is not in and of itself an objective improvement.
Actually, to be honest, I’m a bit worn out with photorealism. Sure, it’s technologically impressive to try to create a lifelike environment, but there are diminishing returns — I was floored when I first saw Super Mario 64 after playing Genesis games, but was only moderately excited by the improvements from Morrowind to Oblivion. And I’m sure I’m not the only one who would prefer to have the original sprites in Chrono Trigger DS instead of the 3D graphics of the Final Fantasy III and IV remakes. Low-fidelity can be beautiful too.
Anyway, all this is to say that Okami, which I recently started, is the best-looking game I’ve seen in years. True, it’s not any great technological feat, and more could certainly be done with the powerful hardware of the PS3. But frankly, if all games had such original art direction, I’d happily never play another photorealistic game again.
I’m unfortunately too busy to play Okami the way I’d like, but that hasn’t been much of an issue. Even playing for 30 minutes at a stretch I’m happy to just walk around the game world and marvel at the graphics. I can’t remember the last time I felt that way — maybe Ocarina of Time.
After I get a bit further in I’ll have more to say about the gameplay itself.
Today, a bit of wanton silliness.
Take a look at Robo’s theme from Chrono Trigger:
I want to draw your attention to two things: the IV-V-V-vi harmonic progression, and the rising melodic contour using scale degrees 1-2-2-3.
Now listen to number-one hit and internet sensation “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley:
As you can see (and hear), both feature the same progression and melodic contour. The only significant difference is that Robo’s theme resolves to a tonic or tonic substitute in bars 4 and 8, while “Never Gonna Give You Up” continues to cycle through the IV-V-V-vi progression. (As such, it never resolves to I; my Roman numeral analysis is in the relative major for the sake of comparison.)
So in effect, you’ve all been getting rickrolled for years longer than you thought — for certain values of rickroll, anyway.
(And yes, I know I’m not the first person to make the connection. But I suspect I am the first to do a comparative harmonic analysis!)
Back in April, Michael Abbott had this to say on one of my Ocarina of Time music posts:
I’m wondering how you feel about the whole MIDI versus recorded orchestrated music question. It’s a no-brainer to me, but I was surprised to receive a couple of responses on my blog recently in defense of the MIDI approach to music in the Zelda series and the hope that it wouldn’t change. Is this just preciousness about the old games, or is there really something preferable about triggered music samples?
I suspect Michael is right that his readers’ preferences are fueled by nostalgia, but his comment touches on an issue that I’ve been meaning to talk about: the conflation of fidelity with quality.
When Ocarina was released in 1998, recording live orchestra was not an option — there’s simply not enough room on an N64 cartridge for audio data. With the advent of massive digital storage media like DVDs and Blu-Ray discs, though, such things are possible. The common wisdom is that the latter is an improvement. It is, but not in the way you might think.
Specifically, digital audio is an improvement in fidelity over sequenced music. The percussion will sound like a drumset instead of radio static; the strings will have proper vibrato instead of the silly wobbling that synthesizers often spit out; the choir will have real people singing real words. In short, the sound quality will be purer, and the instruments will sound more real.
But there are two things to keep in mind here. First, these improvements have no bearing on the quality of the music itself. As an old professor of mine once observed, “You can play a shitty song on a Steinway, but it’ll still be shitty.”
Second, high-fidelity sound is an aesthetic choice, not an objective improvement. If you’re a fan of popular music, you’ve probably heard someone criticize a pop song’s production values as “slick” or “overproduced” while lauding a lo-fi artist’s amateur recordings as “honest” or “authentic” — making no reference to the actual songs the two artists performed. If you listen to hip-hop, you know that the TR-808 is still sampled extensively even though “better” drum samples are readily available. Even the sound of a distorted electric guitar is really just a sacrifice in fidelity for aesthetic reasons. In short, sound quality comes with its own set of connotations and preconceptions that are independent of the quality of the music itself.
Getting back to games: the Super Mario Galaxy score has a number of newly composed, fully orchestrated pieces, such as the Good Egg Galaxy and Gusty Garden Galaxy themes. These are great pieces, emblematic of the new Mario sound. At the same time, Galaxy also features a number of sequenced songs, such as the Toy Time Galaxy and Sweet Sweet Galaxy themes, which are nostalgic remixes of old Mario tunes. Are the new songs better? Maybe — but if so, it’s not because they feature an orchestra.