#biggnife

The general theory I subscribe to is that with the soundtracks to Sonic 1, 2, and presumably even Sonic 3, those games were composed by people who were just writing "real" music. They would pick out real world instruments and write for that sound.

If you've never heard it before, for the 20th Anniversary, Sega put out a compilation soundtrack for Sonic 1 and 2, which included the original demo tracks Masato Nakamura wrote for those games.

Now these are basically just MIDI files, because they didn't need to be anything more than that. But you can tell he was thinking in terms of horn sections, bass guitar, and so on.

Nakamura would submit these MIDI songs on cassette to Sega, and Sega's sound engineers would transcribe those instruments into something that sounded appropriate for the Genesis hardware.

Now, Jun Senoue did the same thing, to a degree. Jun's first major Sonic soundtrack was Sonic 3D Blast on the Sega Genesis, and Jon Burton (of Traveler's Tales) revealed Jun's own demo cassette. If you listen to Jun's tracks, they're all done on the Honky Tonk/Rhodes piano. There's no attempt to utilize real world instruments or have any kind of sound diversity. [1] [2] [3] [4]

Instead of writing music for a band, he wrote music for an individual playing a keyboard.

Worse still, it has eventually been revealed as of Sonic Origins that Jun Senoue had very little awareness of how to make Genesis sounding music. Again, he only submitted his songs on cassette. He was not responsible for the FM Synthesis conversion, just the raw notes, which were all written on, and for, a keyboard.

(throwing the rest of this ask under a "read more" tag because it embeds a lot more videos and even some images)

So when it came time for Sonic 4, and they had Jun Senoue do the retro style soundtracks for those games, he was probably pretty out of his depth. He was writing for style of music he did not really have a nuanced understanding of.

Yes, sorry for the poor timing, but it’s been in my queue for months. I made it at the same time as the other Ripping Friends GIFs that I’ve been posting on a regular basis since last year.

I kind of have always appreciated Treasure more from a distance. They were made up of former Konami people, and one thing I feel like classic 16-bit Konami is known for is REALLY, REALLY difficult games. Gradius 3 and Contra 3 and Castlevania 3. Three for three. And also giving you difficulty options but then punishing you if you played on anything less than the hardest setting.

And Treasure carries some of that sensibility forward. So generally I play a lot of Treasure games, admiring the scenery and the ideas, until I get frustrated and then I go play something else.

So, like, I've only ever seen a couple levels of Dynamite Headdy. A couple levels of Gunstar Heroes. One level of Alien Soldier. And when it comes to something, like, say, Silhouette Mirage, I've never even tried touching it because Working Designs localized it and apparently made it even harder. (Thanks, Vic)

I appreciate how they pushed the hardware and they have cool sense of aesthetics, but I cannot actually say I've loved any of their games. Not in the way they deserved. They're just right on that edge of being a little too aggressive for me to click with. I liked what they did, I'm glad they got to do it, it enriched a lot of gaming culture, but... it's just not for me. They carry a little too much of that bullet hell shooter soul.

And once you get past a certain point, like post-Dreamcast Treasure, it starts feeling like a completely different beast. Their games start feeling really toothless and boring (the opposite problem).

Like, the only Treasure games I've finished are Gunstar Super Heroes and Advanced Guardian Heroes on the Gameboy Advance, and it does not make me proud to say that. Those aren't bad games, don't get me wrong, but I don't think they're great games. I guess Astro Boy: The Omega Factor was them, too. All of them have this problem where it feels like they're just, like, missing something, you know?

A special little spark, or a certain game mechanic to anchor the gameplay around, or just... something. Otherwise, they have half of a good idea and a lot of nostalgia.

For a long time, I did not care about Pac-man. I was a dumb kid who looked at those old arcade games and kind of turned his nose up at them. I remember when the Williams Arcade Collection came out on SNES and Genesis, I openly scoffed, because who would want to play old games like that? They were too simple for me.

My mom even got Ms. Pac-man for the Genesis, and I just couldn't get in to it. It was too repetitive.

As I got older, my perspective on games like that changed. Maybe it was the introduction of Xbox Live Arcade, and the renewed focus on the high score leaderboard. I never really considered myself a competitive person, but it was very interesting to see where in the field I landed. That was right around the time I was getting way in to doing Sonic Rush time trials on my DS, too. I dunno, I guess something about the repetition of working towards a high score was just what I was thirsty for in my 20's.

Pac-man Championship Edition was great, though admittedly, I never played tons and tons of it. I played a lot of it, but it never hooked me quite like it did with some people. But I respect it from a distance.

Which became how I felt about a lot of Pac-man, I guess. I played a fair amount of Pac-man 256, but beyond that, I haven't really gone too deep in to most Pac-man games.

"Pac-man the Mascot" used to feel pretty weird to me. He was this old arcade character, and it used to seem weird to me that Namco struggled to make him relevant by putting him in to generic platformers. Pac-man never really struck me as "a guy" like that. Giving him dialog and lore was strange.

But I acknowledge there are a lot of fans out there of the Pac-man World games. I myself eventually ended up putting like 3-5 hours in to Pac-man World 3 on the PSP of all places. It was fine. Had some ugly character designs, but it was charmingly weird.

Waluigi for sure. There was some video going around a few weeks ago where it was somebody just saying “Waluigi~” as if that was the lyrics to The Avengers theme and I feel like that was the tipping point for me where I’m fully done with ironic Waluigi appreciation.

I also don’t know if Big the Cat appreciation is ironic. I guess some of it probably is, but I have friends who genuinely like Big the Cat and root for him to be included in all the spinoffs.

Which is the thing, I guess. Waluigi feels like a weapon used to troll people. Even Nintendo kind of uses him in a “ISN’T HE TERRIBLE??” context. It’s less that people like Waluigi for who he is, and more that they like how much everyone else hates Waluigi. It’s the “Here, smell this. Isn’t it awful?” response for a video game character.

I don’t think Thundercats has ever been “dark and gritty.” But there’s this weird notion that kids are only allowed to have cartoons with short, cute character designs because anything more would be TOO SERIOUS for them! Kids are only supposed to have FUN!

Except, like, I grew up in the era of the X-men cartoon, the Spider-man cartoon, the Batman cartoon, the Gargoyles cartoon…

And even now, I think Steven Universe and Adventure Time have gotten way darker than anything Thundercats has ever approached. Steven Universe gestures towards topics of consensual sex and I think there was an Adventure Time arc about substance addiction if I’m remembering right (again: I don’t watch tons of TV).

So it’s like, even with Roar’s art style, it could still be a pretty serious show. There’s nothing stopping them from delivering on what people are actually asking for!

But it is that art style. That art style is the fad right now.

I know there are people out there trying to debunk an image like this by showing how the cartoons in question are slightly different than this template suggests, but that strikes me as nitpicking, because the similarities are still super obvious.

And this is coming from someone who, despite not watching a lot of TV, has willing sought out and watched quite a bit of Gumball because I genuinely love a lot of that show’s later seasons.

It’s just that cramming Thundercats down in to that style doesn’t feel right, given what’s come before it. If Cowboy Bebop came back for a new season and it looked like this

Would people be wrong for having a reaction against it?

Thundercats clearly has fans, and they clearly don’t like this style. Who are we to tell them they’re wrong, that they don’t matter, or whatever other dismissive reasoning we can come up with to invalidate their dissatisfaction? And in favor of what? More of the same?

This stuff doesn’t happen in a vacuum. If you’re going to dig up an old franchise, you’re going to have to deal with its fans, otherwise you shouldn’t even bother. This isn’t an old end table at a flea market you can sand down and repaint.

I think once the “Sonic R v0.03″ video went up and it became clear he was using GameHut to dump all kinds of interesting curiosities from the archives of Traveler’s Tales, I couldn’t subscribe any faster. It’s fantastic he’s willing to be so open about this kind of stuff. Imagine how much weird, cool stuff never gets seen from other developers. Projects that get started but never finished, pitches that get rejected, etc. There are thousands of games we never knew existed.

Sonic 3D Blast: Director’s Cut is a wild proposition. I think what maybe blows me away the most is that, like, it’s easy forget these guys are probably incredibly smart. Because Jon Burton is the founder of Traveler’s Tales. The success they’ve had with the Lego games earned him an executive producer credit on all of the Lego movies thus far. And you picture a guy like that, and you think of a guy in a suit who is in meetings all day long, and to be fair he probably is.

But he got his start making games. Getting his hands dirty. Writing code. And you watch him trying to get a Sonic R prototype running in an emulator, and it’s like, he’s injecting memory addresses and doing all this stuff that for me, a “modern indie developer,” is completely and entirely over my head. Even from the perspective of being around the borders of the ROM hacking community via Sonic Retro and stuff, some of the things he’s doing are still over my head. He may as well be a sorcerer.

And that after all this time, after the company he’s built, the fame he’s earned (at least in some circles), he’s still passionate about game creation to do something like a “Sonic 3D Blast: Director’s Cut.” To dip in to 23 year old source code for a dead platform and dump new features in to that game, just for fun. That’s just… wow, you know? That’s fantastic. Tremendous respect to that guy.

I had a spiel here about needing to see it in action before I pass judgement, but in the few days it took this to get posted, a video went up detailing some of his changes.

They’re definitely interesting and on some level I’m glad he’s not just ditching Flickies entirely as a mechanic. That’s not to say hunting out enemies is some tremendously fun thing, but we already have a hack that gets rid of the Flickies. I definitely approve of pretty much everything in this video, from the enhanced controls to the improvements to the camera, power-ups, and more.