Cruise Elroy

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.

I hate to do this right on the heels of Michael Abbott’s refreshing optimism, but I’m a bit disappointed in the gaming community right now.

Two of my favorite gaming journalists, Stephen Totilo and Leigh Alexander, were quoted in a recent New York Times piece on the significance of Metal Gear Solid 4. Here’s an excerpt:

It’s been just over a week since the release of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, the latest chapter in the popular video game series about a covert military agent named Solid Snake. And already, fans are exchanging rhetorical fusillades on the Internet, teasing out what the underlying political and philosophical messages of Metal Gear Solid 4 might be.

Encrypted within this discussion is a more sophisticated argument about the nascent medium of video games. Can it tell a story as satisfyingly as a work of cinema or literature?

Is the Sisyphean mission of Solid Snake — to rid the world of a robotic nuclear tank called Metal Gear — a parable about the futility of war or about its necessity? A critique of America’s domination of the global stage? A metaphor for the struggle between determinism and free will?

This is exciting stuff. It’s exactly the sort of discussion I’m trying to encourage with this blog (and that journalists like Alexander and Totilo foster with their work). I was thrilled to see such a high-level analysis in an article from a major publication, and I threw up a link on Twitter the second I came across it.

It appears that my enthusiasm was not shared, though, as Alexander was inundated with hate mail for her dismissal of Halo’s story at the end of the piece. Today she reflected on the response on her blog, Sexy Videogameland:

I guess I just felt disappointed in the audience, when even those who stood on my side of the issue were busy on message boards flaming something else they didn’t like about the column.

I have felt this disappointment for some time, mind you, at the fact that whenever we as gamers on the internet have the opportunity to discuss anything at all of significance, we lapse into contentious flamewars.

I always feel like we end up injuring the very thing we’re defending: our right to be considered a legitimate audience for a legitimate medium, our right to be considered as mature, responsible consumers, our right to self-regulate appropriate content, an entire kitchen sink of issues that ends up all chipped and powdered porcelain on the bathroom floor.

While I’d like to believe we’re all interested in defending those things, I’m not sure that’s true.

Alexander’s feature on Kotaku today discusses why the dismissal “it’s just a game” is not a satisfactory defense of the medium. Here is a response from commenter “Mikazukinoyaiba”:

“It’s just a game” is what I use because that is how I honestly feel, all of these discussions about games as an “artform” and how it should evolve, what it needs to do, and how it can mature do not interest me and actually starts to become pretentious.

Lets stop trying to take everything so seriously and examine it under the microscope.

And here’s “SgtElias” on a different post about Stephen Totilo and N’Gai Croal’s Vs. Mode:

I like Kotaku for the news and information, but I usually turn off when discussions on morality and such in games is brought up. I play video games to have fun. I enjoy a good story and I understand that there is more there to be analyzed. It speaks to some of the opportunities in this country though that people can earn a freaking paycheck discussing it though.

Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, of course, but I can’t help feeling disappointed that there are gamers ambivalent about the evolution of the medium. I always thought it was our job to proselytize about games and the media’s job to dismiss us; I guess I had things backwards.

In studying my gaming habits, I’ve noticed that I play games in one of two ways: in small doses over a long period of time, or in large doses over a short period of time.

The former category is made up of games with high replay value but no story to complete — sports games, racers, fighting games, and so on. I may typically play Super Mario Kart or Tetris for just a half hour at a time, but I’ll keep returning to them over the course of weeks, if not months or years.

The latter category is made up of linear or narrative games that can be finished, like RPGs or shoot-em-ups. I prefer to “binge” on these games, plowing through them in a few long play sessions. For example, I was replaying Chrono Trigger last week for my Blogs of the Round Table post, and got to the final battle after just four nights — but each night I had played for several hours. Why? Well, it’s fun, of course, but I also like holding an entire work in my head at once so that everything is fresh in my memory.

As it turns out, I consume a lot of media in the same way for just that reason. I’ll listen to one album almost exclusively for a week at a time, I’ll comb through years of archives of newly-discovered blogs, and I’ll read entire novels in one or two sittings (even long ones like David Copperfield). If this sounds strange to you, consider the ways in which we can now watch TV shows or read comic strips. We all drink from the firehose.

The issue I’ve had recently is with episodic games like On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. The artificial splintering of the narrative keeps me from playing the way I want — there’s not enough material for me to binge on, but I don’t want to wait for months to get a resolution. If I had started Chrono Trigger last week and paced myself to finish it in December, I’d go nuts.

Games have spoiled me. Unlike TV shows or comic strips, I’m used to having their stories available as quickly as I like. With episodic gaming, though, that option is no longer available. Maybe I need to wait for the box set.

Spoilers follow; proceed with caution.

Chrono Trigger is one of my favorite video games. It does almost everything well — story, characters, battle mechanics, music, you name it. Of all its memorable moments, though, the one that really stands out is when it kills off your main character.

Until that scene, I thought my attachment to Crono was tenuous at best. We never get a sense of his personality or desires; not only does he never speak, but the game’s plot is driven by coincidences and the actions of others, so we rarely see him act meaningfully either. As with many silent protagonists, my empathy was limited by his genericness. In short, there was nothing for me to latch onto.

My real sympathies, it seemed, were with the other characters. I found myself playing with Marle and Lucca as much as possible, even when they weren’t the most practical choices. How could I leave the two hilarious, brash tomboys at the End of Time in favor of a fat old robot and a histrionic frog?

At Crono’s death, though, the strength of my attachment to him was made clear. I found myself unexpectedly devastated. When the cutscenes ended and the “Who’ll you replace?” screen came up sans main character, I probably came as close to crying as a video game will ever take me.

Of course, this is not Aeris kicking the bucket in Final Fantasy VII. You can get Crono back — and I did — so there was no lasting harm done. The amazing thing, though, is that the game got me to care about its nondescript spiky-haired protagonist at all. Why did that happen?

Recently I came up with what I think is the answer: I was role-playing.

True, I loved Marle and Lucca as characters, but the real reason that I kept them in my party was because I felt like they belonged there — they were my friends, after all. When Crono died, I was upset because I took it personally: not only did “I” die, but I had let down everyone else. When I was asked to select a new party, I was uncomfortable because — well, it just felt wrong controlling someone else. It wasn’t me.

It sounds incredible to say, but I don’t think that any RPG before or since has actually gotten me to role-play like that. I never felt like I “was” Ryudo in Grandia II or Max in Shining Force any more than I felt like I “was” Mario. In those games, I never acted in a certain way because I thought it matched my character’s disposition; I was just the guy moving the plot along, making things happen behind the scenes to reveal more of the game.

Chrono Trigger was a sea change in how I understood player-character relationships. As someone who came to video games without any pen-and-paper RPG experience, its stellar characterization gave me an idea of what role-playing could be.

This post is a contribution to Corvus Elrod’s Blogs of the Round Table. The other entries for this month are available below:

First things first: a mission statement.

So far my music posts have been straight-up theoretical analysis. While I think there’s a lot to be learned from studying music on its own terms, context is important also. And since this is purportedly a blog about video games, I’d like to move beyond the self-indulgent theory posts and provide something more topical. In other words, I’ll keep doing the hardcore analysis, but I’d also like to talk about why game music matters.

All right. With that said, let’s look at that most important category of video game music: the 1-up jingle.

Here’s a brief audio sample of a Super Mario Bros. play session. The player earns a 1-up at the seven-second mark.

Iconic as it is, the Mario 1-up jingle is pretty unremarkable. Its total length is only a second, and it’s not exactly attention-grabbing. Here, for example, it’s sandwiched between the “emerging power-up” noise (5.5 s) and the “Super Mario got hurt” noise (9.5 s), and none of the three sounds stands out as the most important one. Sonically speaking, earning a 1-up in Super Mario Bros. is a fairly pedestrian event.

Now listen to this sample of a Sonic the Hedgehog play session.

The attentive listener may have noticed the player earning a 1-up at the five-second mark.

Not only does this jingle silence the rest of the game’s audio, but features a dramatic horn and timpani fanfare that lasts for three and a half seconds. Sonic doesn’t want to just draw your attention to the 1-up; it wants to herald a momentous occasion.

The cool thing is that the prominence of the 1-up sound is tied to the games’ design.

In Super Mario Bros., extra lives are relatively easy to come by. Your coins automatically carry over from one level to the next, so collecting 100 of them is almost an inevitability; green 1-up mushrooms are hidden, but frequent. This is balanced, of course, by the fact that it’s also relatively easy to get Mario killed. Each individual life is not so important, and the subdued 1-up jingle reflects this.

In Sonic the Hedgehog, the dynamic is reversed. Since Sonic won’t die if he’s holding rings, a smart player will effectively have infinite hit points. On the other hand, 1-up item boxes are rare, and collecting 100 rings is difficult because it’s so easy to lose them. Extra lives are therefore more precious than in Super Mario Bros., so the jubilant fanfare that accompanies a 1-up is somewhat deserved.

[Part one | Part two]

7/9 — Three Final Fantasy IX pieces and one Chrono Trigger piece added.

6/22 — Three Final Fantasy VIII pieces added.

The first irregular meter post has gotten so many updates that I’m starting a new one. Thanks for all your suggestions!

On a tip from Peter I checked out the soundtrack to Final Fantasy VII, composed by Nobuo Uematsu. Here’s a snip from “Hurry Up!”:

There’s a nice mix of four- and three-beat patterns here, somewhat reminiscent of the Road Rash 3 Australia theme in the last post.

Here’s “Cinco de Chocobo:”

The obvious influence here is the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Take Five,” composed by Paul Desmond.

See what I mean? Same rhythm, similar harmony, crappier melody!

The neat thing about “Cinco de Chocobo” is that when it switches into 6/4, it actually feels less natural because the 5/4 rhythm is so strong.

Finally, here’s a very brief snip from “One-Winged Angel”:

Just a little bit of 7/8 in a primarily 4/4 piece. A tiny section of irregular meter is actually one of the less interesting features of “One-Winged Angel,” but what the heck, right?

6/22 update: Moving right along, here’s a quick update on the pieces I’ve culled from Uematsu’s Final Fantasy VIII soundtrack.

Here’s the beginning of “Don’t be Afraid,” the battle theme:

The piece continues in 5/4 throughout, mostly with the 3+3+2+2 eighth note subdivision.

This is the beginning of “Dead End”:

Though it starts in 7/8, after four bars “Dead End” drops into 4/4 and never looks back. In this case the irregular intro is just an attention grabber — though certainly an effective one.

Last up is “Premonition,” which I want to discuss in a bit more detail. The piece features a recurring rhythmic figure that goes like this:

Notice how each bar begins with two notes in the space of three beats, and ends with a straight eighth note rhythm that allows for some variation.

After that pattern is established, the figure changes:

Pretty neat, right? The “rules” are the same as before, but now every other bar now has an extra beat; if you were expecting the earlier figure, this sounds unbalanced.

Finally, a bit further into the piece, we get this:

The rhythmic figure’s malleable ending has already been introduced; now Uematsu has room to play with it even more. Here the variation makes it difficult to predict how many beats any given measure will have.

7/9 update: All right, let’s close the door on Uematsu (for now) with some pieces from Final Fantasy IX.

Here’s a snip from “Ambush Attack”:

This is an easy one. The metric subdivision is a very slow 2+2+2+3, and I’ve beamed the eighth notes accordingly.

Here’s the beginning of “Feel My Blade”:

I wrote the introductory rhythm in 5/4 with a caesura to emphasize its similarity to another famous 5/4 piece, Gustav Holst’s “Mars, The Bringer of War” from The Planets. Have a listen:

As you can hear, it’s very nearly identical; the only significant difference is that the last two beats are swapped. Even though it’s a bit slower, it retains the same martial (ahem) feel as Holst’s piece.

Later on in “Feel My Blade,” we hear this lively little section:

This one touches on a discussion I had with Peter down in the comments on the nature of irregular meter. If you add up the beats in the first four bars, it’ll come out to an even sixteen quarter notes — meaning that I could have simply transcribed the thing in 4/4. (After that, though, it gets a bit more complicated.)

So why am I calling this irregular if it can be written in common time? I’m just using my judgement, to be honest. Whereas a relatively simple subdivision like the 3+3+2 in Coldplay’s “Clocks” is easily understood in 4/4, I think the complexity and unpredictability of this rhythm makes it well-suited to a mixed meter transcription. (My conflation of mixed meter with irregular meter is a topic for another day.)

Here’s a snip from “Run!”:

If “Feel My Blade” was inspired by “Mars,” “Run!” owes a debt to Lalo Schifrin’s Mission: Impossible theme:

Of course, the 5/4 theme isn’t all that’s going on here. See that random measure of 7/8 (bar 12)? That has the effect of sounding like half a beat is missing — as though we were moving along in 4/4 and then had a measure of 3.5/4. Try tapping your foot to that part and you’ll see what I mean.

Skipping fractions of a beat is one of my favorite rhythmic tricks, and Uematsu seems to like it too. Take a look at this later section of “Run!”:

The alternation between 15/16 and 4/4 is effectively removing a quarter of a beat, which is even more difficult to wrap your head around. Then, after a brief bit of insanity in 15, we’re home free. Piece of cake, right?

To close out this little Uematsu extravaganza, here’s the one and only irregularly-metered piece from Chrono Trigger. Most of Chrono Trigger’s music was scored by Yasunori Mitsuda, but Uematsu contributed a couple of pieces, including “Closed Door”:

Nothing too mind-bending here, but it’s neat how the arpeggios seem to move in double time.

Well, it seems that Nobuo Uematsu is the reigning kind of irregular meter in video game music, at least so far. As always, if you have other soundtracks you think I ought to look at, drop me a line. Thanks again to Peter for tipping me off to the PSX-era Final Fantasy games. See you all in part three!

I’ve been thinking about piracy and emulation some more, and I may have figured out why my position on it is so muddled.

If you want to become well-versed in most forms of art — painting, literature, film — you can get everything you need for free at libraries and museums (or, if you prefer, for cheap on Amazon and eBay). You can even find the old classics for free online. The barrier to entry is low, and availability is high — anyone with enough commitment can become a connoisseur.

If you want to become well-versed in video games, though, you’ll need to shell out. New games are notoriously expensive; old ones can be just as bad, and rare to boot. If you can’t get a hard copy, your (legal) options are to pay for a subscription service like GameTap or GameFly, or pay by the download on Steam or the Wii Virtual Console. Both options offer limited selections, and while they can be cheaper than eBay the charges still add up quickly.

In the past, most gamers had lived through much of the industry’s history, so gaming literacy came with the territory; now, that’s starting to change. Today on Kotaku some gamers admitted they had never heard of or played the original Golden Axe. I was amazed. For a moment I even felt old, which is an odd sensation for me in the context of video games. But can we really expect a young gamer to have played Golden Axe, the way that we might expect a literature student to have read The Old Man and the Sea?

If the answer is yes, then we owe that expectation to emulation.

I have a hard time morally supporting piracy, but there’s no question that it’s filling a niche. It’s increasingly difficult to achieve gaming literacy through legal means — accessibility is poor, and the cost is prohibitive. If we hope to perpetuate video games as an art form, we’re going to need a way to expose people to them, and until Gabe Newell gets “every game that’s ever been available” on Steam there aren’t many good options.