#crypt killer

Crypt Killer/Lethal Enforcers I and II

‘Henry Explorers’ [aka: ‘Crypt Killer’]

[PS1 / SAT] [JAPAN] [MAGAZINE] [1996]

“Arcades were filled with the sounds of light gun games during the mid-1990s. Everywhere you looked was another Area 51, Point Blank, Time Crisis, House of the Dead or Virtua Cop.

Konami was no stranger to this, putting out its own new arcade game in 1995 called Crypt Killer, or Henry Explorers for the Japanese audience, which was ported to the PlayStation in 1997. Unlike all the above-mentioned games, this one was largely forgotten, and the home version tanked in review scores: 4/10 from IGN, 33% from Absolute PlayStation, and 3.8 from GameSpot.

Big name developers don’t often get hit with low review scores, and there’s no doubt as to what caused the low scores: it simply wasn’t as good as its competition. Time Crisis came out for the PlayStation in the same year, and when comparing the two, Crypt Killer has inferior level design, visuals, and gameplay mechanics.

“Crypt Killer is disappointing, especially considering it came from the creators of Lethal Enforcers” was a common refrain amoung reviewers.

That should be all that’s needed. No need for any more specific information, right? 

The comparison to Lethal Enforcers is what interests me, as it leads to an odd conflict: Crypt Killer plays just like Lethal Enforcers, if not better.”   ~@tangobunny, TangoPunk (#01)

Source: Sega Saturn Magazine (JP), 12/27/1996 || RetroCDN; Hivebrain

DAY 1567) Crypt Killer - Four Guitars

Composer: Mutsuhiko Izumi, Yuji Takenouchi

Very very overt clear 80s King Crimson homage going on here!! (this isn’t the only example of this game very clearly paying tribute to older music: https://vgm-in-irregular-time-of-the-day.tumblr.com/post/179494752935/day-1208-crypt-killer-spiral-stair-composer )

There’s multiple layers of guitar going on here!! Very polymetric and strange in true 80s King Crimson fashion haha. Going to attempt to address what they’re all doing separately.

1) High guitar 1 (always audible): 5/8 all the way through

2) High guitar 2 (fades in and out of audibility): 6/8 all the way through

3) Reversed guitar: 6/8 whenever it shows up (not always playing), not necessarily lined up with the timesig of anything else, but it’s always a sequence of 6 8th notes at the same tempo as everything else anyways. This is pretty clearly a clip of layer 2 reversed.

4) Bass (fades into audibility at around :06): 7/8 all the way through

Hopefully that’s reasonable to follow and is explained well enough! Layers 1, 2 & 4 are always countable as the same sequence over and over, if you count 5/8 (or 6/8 in the case of layer 2, 7/8 in the case of layer 4) all the way through, beat 1 will always land with the start of the ostinato in the same place, even after seemingly fading away or whatever.

DAY 1208) Crypt Killer - Spiral Stair

Composer: Mutsuhiko Izumi, Yuji Takenouchi

(0:00 - 0:45) [4 bars of 5/4, 2 bars of 7/4]x2

(0:45 - 1:00) [5/4, 6/4]x2

[loop from :08]

Above is the way the time signatures work if going by the actual melodic phrases, but the drums are polymetric and the driving pulse is ignoring the feel of everything else. For most of it has a “snare on 2 and 4″ SOUND, but keeps going in 4/4 like that even when the meter of everything else doesn’t match up.

I have a feeling this song is a reference stylistically to Kashmir by Led Zeppelin (which has the same “drums are in 4/4 but everything else is not” going for it, around the same tempo, and Middle Eastern scales used, similar rhythmic hits driving it).

If I’m right on this being a reference to that, and right on the guess that this specific track is Izumi (who notably, has the drummer for Led Zepelin in his facebook likes lol), this is far from the first time he’s made a reference this blunt to an existing piece of music (Metamorphic Force - Dragon of Fear, Metamorphic Force - Death Shadow)