Sep 22, 2012

New Remixes, Future Projects

I've been meaning to post something here for quite a while so here's some new music, all megaman related.

First a blizzard man remix:

And a Chill Penguin/Armored Armadillo Remix:


Both were made for different Mega Man competitions.

Now I've been reading up a lot on production lately and polishing my skills to start making new music again, and I'll probably be posting it here.  Diablo 3 and other games kind of separated me from this hobbie but I'm getting back into it again.

I'll be posting a few other entries on some topics I've been wanting to write about for a while too.  See ya then!

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Jun 13, 2011

The New Mortal Kombat

Well color me surprised. The new Mortal Kombat is actually good and fun.


What's different this time? well for instance, it isn't trying to be something it isn't. In previous games they tried to do stuff like going for 3-d movement, or adding changeable fighting styles, or weapons, and other gimmicks. My response? a profuse yawn.

What this new Mortal Kombat is, is just what makes Mortal Kombat good. Loads of blood, Gore with a touch of ridiculousness, a 2-d plane, and simple but fun mechanics. This MK isn't trying to be Soul Calibur, nor is it trying to have the depth of gameplay of street fighter 4. It's just good old fun MK.

They did add a couple of new toys. The Special Bar allows to power up special moves, to brek combos, or to perform a devastating X-ray move. The X-Ray moves are completely awesome, they pack a lot of hurt, and you can do them over and over again and never get tired of seeing those bones crunching or those internal organs exploding.

The Fatalities are the best the franchise has seen since MK2. Gory, splashy and satisfying. Also, this game boast one of the best Story modes I've ever played in a fighting game besides some of the soul calibur games.

Some of the characters I felt they could have done away with, like that stryker who looked like a dumbass back in MK3 and still does, or Sheeva who always was a pushover and still is. But for the most part, all the characters feel good and fun to play.

If this is the new road MK has decided to take then I see a bright future for it. This game isn't on par with SF4 or MvC3, but it is close when it comes to fun factor. Worth a try.

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Nov 23, 2010

Goldeneye Wii

It's been a long time since I posted anything here.

Mostly because what I usually talk about over here are new movies I've just seen (and I haven't been to the theater in ages) or new stuff in World of Warcraft (Which I haven't played with any kind of consistency in ages as well).

What have I been doing then? well, catching up to some Wii titles, sick at home because an incredibly resilient flu, and playing League of Legends quite a bit. The game is excellent, really. Check it out.

So I heard activision was remaking Goldeneye. Activision is a company that has been famous lately in the industry for being the "new EA". Churning out sequel after sequels, milking out franchises dry until they are a carcass of their former self. This made me think this game was going to be a quick cash-in, and yet another desecration of something that has a lot of nostalgic value for some people. But, turns out it wasn't that way at all.

A little backstory: I was a n64 kid. I didn't have a playstation, so most of the games I played on the n64-saturn-playstation generation were n64 games. Some of them, I played for hours on end. Beating them from start to finish countless times. Mario 64, Zelda Ocarina of time, Star Fox 64, and of course, Goldeneye.

I gotta say, I wasn't expecting a game that was EXACTLY like the old goldeneye. But if you're expecting something even closely resembling it, you will be disappointed. This game is just not goldeneye. The feel of the game, is certainly not goldeneye. The story is different, the layout of the maps is completely different, the characters are different, the weapons, etc. You can't shoot enemies in the hand and see them grab the wounded hand in pain, or the foot, or the groin. You can't see blood stains in the part of the enemy that you shoot. There are no trip mines, remote mines, laser watch, or ANY gadget from goldeneye. You can't dual wield.

This is not Goldeneye. Not the movie, not the old game.

This is Call of Duty with a James Bond license. The weapons feel like call of duty, the engine is call of duty's engine, the enemies act like call of duty enemies, The cinematics are clearly made by the call of duty team. Seriously, if you've ever played any call of duty game, you will see through the James bond cover right away.

However, this is a really good shooter.

And it's on the Wii, which REALLY lacks good shooters. The feel of a james bond movie (not goldeneye tho!) is there. The missions are fun, the weapons too, it's all very fun. The melee takedown system is really, really fun, and I was trying to sneak through the enemy lines using takedowns as much as possible because it was so darn fun.

This is a great game for the Wii. DO NOT EXPECT IT TO BE GOLDENEYE. It's just not. It was all a marketing ploy, which is to be expected from Activision. However, I didn't expect them to deliver a fun game, but they did, and that makes up for trying to fool us using nostalgia as an excuse.

A 4/5 game for me. Give it a chance.

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Sep 29, 2010

League of Legends

Initially I wanted to do a lot of updates on the beta, but things change so radically every week that a lot of the things I write here are obsolete in the next patch, or simply M.I.A. (For example, the power auras implementation is gone in the last patch. Bummer) But aside from the constant changes, I haven't played the beta a lot lately, this is mainly because a few reasons:


-Some quests are broken, impeding me to continue key questlines. For example, the goblin questline has been broken since I joined the beta, I still haven't been able to get a goblin out of the lost isles.
-I am not very interested in testing the level 80-85 content at the moment. I am an altaholic, and thus I am focusing on the different and new experiences provided for the players in the new and revamped Azeroth.
-Last but certainly not least, League of Legends and Minecraft.

League of legends is, simply put, the best free-to-play game on the internet. I'm sure tastes will vary, and not everyone is into PvP-oriented games, but the polish and quality found in this game is simply not found in any other F2P game out there.

This game has made me a hater of WoW PvP.

I wasn't too keen into WoW (or any other MMO) PvP from the start. I did play quite a lot of PvP back in Burning Crusade, but after the complete disaster that was Wotlk PvP balance, I decided to stick to the PvE part, which was, for the most part, as entertaining as ever, and in some cases it even was the best PvE ever found in WoW (Ulduar).

Now, League of Legends is not a MMO. It's based on the Defense of the ancients style of gameplay. You can pick a Hero out of more than 60 (!) found in the game, each with its own completely unique style of gameplay and unique abilities, get into a team of 3 or 5 people and play the game, which consists on, basically, destroying the enemy's Base.

Sounds simple enough, but the game requires a lot of strategy and coordination, and everyone in the team must contribute to the team fights. What I like the most about this game is that a good player can make the difference for the team, and not necessarily which character you're playing, which is something games like WoW haven't achieved yet, where flavor of the month or cookie-cutter comp wins the day everyday (lolroguemagepriest roflpwntrain)

You are able to customize your character with runes and a talent tree that you start to fill up as you gain levels, which are independent from the levels you gain in-game. You also gain IP, which are used to buy champions and runes. Each week gives you 10 free champions to try out, but as you play matches and gain IP, you are able to buy the champion you like and stick with it, or also buy other champions.

The game is free, and there's a store where you can buy skins (which are all very cool for the most part), IP and XP boosts(boost the XP and IP gain from games played), and also buy new champions which come out every month. You can do this with IP or riot points which are bought with real money. Whichever way you choose, it doesn't really give you and advantage. The store doesn't give a gameplay advantage if you use real money or not, and that's something I really really like.

The most important thing though: the game is FUN. The game is addictive, and many many times more balanced than WoW. It's lightyears away. There are certainly tiers of champions, but as I said most of the time it matters more if you're a good player or not, rather than what you play. There are no set comps that everyone uses to win. It's really cool to have more freedom on what you want to do rather of what works. All the champions have a weakness that you can exploit, and comps are based on the type of job you do (Tank, support, dps) than exactly what class you play.

So yeah, this game is great, and it's been very successful so far. It gets updated all the time, and new champions are added every month. Riot initially had some server issues, but those are being resolved and for the most part the servers are up and stable.

I recommend all my friends and whoever happens to read this to give this game a try. It's keeping me away from Cataclysm Beta, and that is an achievement all in itself.

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Jul 16, 2010

Dissidia, let's finish this.

So I wanted to go through each character in the game. Well I decided I should not because most of the characters act the same!. It's so silly..


They have slightly different motivations, but its so silly that they just seem to be slashing their way to the end of the game. They want to resolve everything with one thing: fighting. Most of the conversations can be resumed in 1-enemy appears 2-useless banter occurs 3-let's solve this by fighting!

I think this game would have been so much better with a lot less story. Yeah, it's weird to say that with a Final Fantasy game, but this is a fighting game. In most fighting games you get a couple of lines of dialog before each important fight (which is just the final one, most of the time) and that's enough. This game grinds its way through the conversations, and its all so hollow discussion and sometimes it just doesn't make sense at all. I was skipping EVERY conversation and cutscene on the last characters because I knew it was just 5 to 10 minutes of the character and the enemy taunting each other while delivering asinine comments about some silly quest or purpose.

To recap things real quick:

1-The warrior of light is an asshole
2-Firion is a pussy and wants a world covered in roses so he beats the living snot out of everyone who stands in his way.
3-The onion knight is supposed to be like a super smart genius but he falls in such silly traps and delivers lines so crappy that I ended up feeling a bit dizzy from all the eye rolling I did over all his nonsense. so stupid...
4-Cecil was actually cool, his story made a lil more sense than the others, and there was some conflict goin on with him.
5-Bartz was a breath of fresh air with his cheery attitude but the humor was a bit childish and.. not so funny.
6-Tera is as insecure as ever but I was very glad she wasn't sulking around all the fucking time like in ff6.
7-Cloud was just cloud being cloud. That is, a crappy character that is emo all the fucking time for no reasonable reason and is lusting for sephirot all the time, pissing me off to no end in the process.
8-Squall... was... *gulp* actually an interesting character! wow! what the fuck, I thought I would never say that in my life. But in this game, he wasn't emo, he was kinda badass, and there weren't ALMOST any "whatever.."s and the "I will be a stupid asshole for no reason"moments were almost non-existant! He wanted to be a lone wolf, but just because he wanted to protect the friends he cared about! best interpretation of squall, ever.
9-Zidane was as meh as ever and as interesting as the coffee-soaked napkins sitting below my empty coffee mug.
10-Tidus is cheery, brave, and all around the same character that I love in ff10 but that some retards tend to hate because he isn't emo all the time about stupid crap.

About the villains, I can safely resume them all in 4 words: boring, pointless, blabbering idiots. Except for Kefka. Kefka is great, he's the same psychotic clown that enjoys inflicting pain on others just for the sake of it, or because he's just bored. Or maybe he doesn't have a real reason and just want to see everything buring and each one of his enemies suffering while he eats popcorn and watches, literally. He's the ultimate troll. He's the same Joker on steroids plus superpowers, and I loved him for staying in character since ff6.

So there you go. Some of them I felt changed for the worst, and really, this game should have been much, much more lighter in story. Anyways, this game is still a must for anyone who enjoys FF games, even if it's not a classic FF RPG.

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Apr 26, 2010

Final Fantasy Dissidia

So I've been playing final fantasy dissidia lately, I was never interested on psp games but after seeing my brother play for a while (and my internet being down at the moment) I decided to give it a try, and I must say I'm pretty much blown away. This is the definition fanservice. It reminds me of castlevania judgement for wii, it's a mediocre game but omfg it oozes fanservice. But comparing dissidia to cv judgement is a disservice because this game just plain rocks. It's fun, it has a crapload of replay value, its easy to play but deep at the same time, and again, it just gives FF fans wet dreams.

Of course, the game isn't perfect. Well, it kinda is. As far as the gameplay, it's really addictive, it just works, and it's fun, so the game is perfect in that department as far as I'm concerned, but the story and particularly, the characterization of well-known FF heroes (and sometimes the villains) leaves a bad aftertaste. Sometimes a really, really bad one.

So stick around while I dissect each chapter as I play them. The game has 10 basic chapters for each final fantasy, and in each one you play as the protagonist of that game (in some cases... well that isn't very clear. I'm looking at you, Firion!). Of course I'm not doing this in a single post, so for now, I'll leave you with the 8-bit perfection that is the black mage sprite:
If you look closely you can see a tear coming out of his eye. He's gazing out into the distance, disappointed, and sad. He's a sad black mage because he's not in this game.

Next up: "The asshole of light"

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Feb 10, 2010

Help Overclocked Remix do the Sonic 4 soundtrack.

Overclocked remix's Darkesword:

So, it's started out as a harmless little comment on Twitter.

Then it got picked up by a gaming blog.

Now it's a full blown movement.


OverClocked ReMix wants to do the music for Sonic the Hedgehog 4.I've mentioned before that some artists from Overclocked Remix got in contact with Capcom and did the soundtrack for Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. Now we're starting a movement to get some publicity out and reach to SEGA, for the soundtrack of the upcoming Sonic the hedgehog 4.I'm pretty excited about this because I have done several sonic remixes over the years. 3 of them got published at Overclocked Remix, and several others at the now defunct VGMix. Plus some others that I've done for fun or for competitions. One of the most well known: Lightspeed, a remix of the Twinkle Park theme, has been very popular and I've seen lots of videos on youtube using it, and even a feature video at screwattack, so you may understand my excitement about all this because I could end up (with some luck) doing a song for this.

Of course there are still bif IFs, because this could come to fruition IF Sega is interested in doing the same that capcom did and ask OCR to make the soundtrack. And then IF I get picked to do a song among all the other really talented artists at OCR. Still, it's a possibility and I would love to be a part of it.

So I'll keep my fingers crossed, in the mean time I'll keep spreading the word about this, and hope that we get yet another OCR-made sountrack for a mainstream game, regardless of my participation on it!.

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Feb 8, 2010

Retro Gaming... and everything.

I'm a retro gamer. I'm a rare breed of geek that shuns the so-called new generation of games and prefers to sit down and play the same old ass games he used to play almost 2 decades ago. And I gotta say, it's a fucking great time to be one!


Not that I don't like new games. I play them, often beat them and enjoy them, but I can't remember the last modern game I played that I had beaten more than once and still want to play now. I mean, I remember beating F.E.A.R. several times and loving it. And I was playing super mario galaxy again the other day trying to beat it for the second time. Hmm and crysis, I think I beat that one 2 or 3 times.

So what's the difference? just nostalgia? well I don't really know. Those last 3 games I mentioned don't have much in common. I think they're just fun as hell and while challenging, are based on simple concepts. I think that's what I like about old games, specially from the NES era. Sure there were a lot of shitty games but the good ones, the classics, are simple, fun, and hard as fuck.

There's also something that I miss from old games, specially PC games. It was the ambition and scope of the big classics. Take star control 2 for example, it's a game where you can explore the galaxy, visit different solar systems, actually drop down to the planets which are different from each other, meet alien races, build a fleet, and all of this in a galaxy filled with hundreds of solar systems. The last game that tried to do something similar was Spore, and it fell short, really short.

Then there's this other game I blogged about some time ago, Covert Action. I could talk for pages and pages about how complex, yet simple and addictive this old PC game is. Then you add other games like alpha centauri... and well, it's sad that all we get today is brown and drag, blood-filled, testosterone-packed action games, and that they're the most celebrated.

Ugh, I got way too sidetracked...

Back to topic, it's a good time to love retro games. The videogame companies are following the trend implanted by hollywood lately: "Let's take and old show or movie, reboot/sequel it, and milk it to hell and back". But unlike the shit that hollywood comes up with, videogame companies are doing it right for the most part. Let's take a few recent examples:

Megaman 9: AWESOME game, worthy of being a classic megaman, and probably right up there with megaman 2 and 3. Also: Megaman 10 is coming to kick some 8-bit ass again.

Bionic Commando Rearmed: Unlike it's 3d counterpart, this game reboots the original while making it awesome and fun and again, hard as fuck. It feels a bit different from the original but it feels right.

New Super Mario Bros(DS/Wii): Some people say this game could have been more, and I agree they got lazy with some stuff (2 toads for player 3 and 4..) but still its a great, classic but modern mario game. I loved it and got all the coins and all the shit you could get.

Contra Rebirth: Digital awesomeness. It screams "silly action movie parody from the 80's" which is what contra was in a sense. Great, classic contra gameplay.

Castlevania Rebirth: Loved it. The Metroidvania games for the handhelds are good, but I love some classic castlevania. Give me a whip and some undead and vampires and I'm set.

A boy and his blob: Haven't played this one yet but I hear good things about it.

And very soon, I will be able to play a new Blaster Master remake, along with Sonic 4, which is the classic 2D sonic-only we have been waiting for.

So far I've got my favorite classic NES games remade in its classic format: Clastlevania, bionic commando, contra, and now blaster master. If I get a new classic ninja gaiden game, It would be the icing on the cake.

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Dec 16, 2009

OverClocked Remix turns 10

So, most of the people I know are familiar with OverClocked Remix, a website famous for hosting some of the best re-interpretations of videogame music out there. Its hard to believe that the website has been running for 10 years now, and that I've been part of it for a good 9 years and a few months.


I remember finding this little jewel back in 1999, it was this crude website which had this eye-burning orange background and where the only way to navigate through the songs was this huge combo list with the name of the songs, and you could only download the songs at certain times of the day because the songs were offline for a good part of the day everyday.

But all this really didn't matter, it also didn't matter that I had to download every song at a whopping 2 kbps, I knew I had to download every and each one. McVafee, AE, Joe Redifer, Disco Dan, Evil Horde, Virt, and the very owner of the website, djPretzel, were some of the remixers around in the day, that made some of the songs that I still listen to even today.

I've seen the website going from its humble beginnings to the big community that it is today, and I'm always happy when the website manages to go one step forward. Now this community is recognized by the very own artists they make remixes for, and has gone as far as making a soundtrack for a commercial game, which is also a remix of an older videogame, Super Street Fighter II HD Remix.

In the end I have a lot to thank OCR for. It gave me a motivation for learning music composition and software synthesis, which turned into one of my favorite pastimes, it gave me great music, and it also gave me some good friends. So although I'm not as active in the community as I was 3 or 4 years ago, I have to say thank you OCR, and thanks to David Lloyd and his staff.

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May 1, 2009

Sid Meier's Covert Action



If there's one thing I like about old DOS games, is that back then, the guys who did the games didn't have to investmost of their time and resources in implementing or developing a fancy state-of-the-art 3D engine with real-life physics, complex filters and all the mumbo-jumbo that games today have to carry. It was just a few guys (sometimes even just one guy) and a cool idea.

Not to say there weren't bad games back then, or that games today are generally worse (though some may argue). It's just that sometimes games today can get lost by worriyng too much about fancy graphics, or following stablished clichés, and some other things that not necesarilly improve what is most important: the gameplay.


But this isn't going to be a rant about that. This post is a bout a little game called Covert Action, created by the genious called Sid Meier (the mind behind Pirates!, Civilization, Alpha Centauri, Colonization, Railroads!, F-15 Strike Eagle). This is one of my favorite games of all time.

I started off with the long introduction because I felt it was needed in order to explain what makes this game so great and unique. There's simply no other game like it out there, and believe me I've looked.

So what is it about? well, in this game, you are an international detective/spy, part of the CIA. Sort of like a James Bond with Batman brains. The game is divided in missions, at the start you get a few clues about the crime. It can be about what the crime is going to be about, or who is involved, or what organizations are involved, or in which city is happening, etc. After that it's up to you to find out what's going on, who's involved, and how to arrest them or prevent the crime.

The game is a mix of a lot of things. Part carmen sandiego, mixed with an action game, mixed with several puzzle games. You have several tools at your disposal, you can travel to a known hideout of an organization, or an unkown address obtained in a clue or investigation, you can decypher coded messages, you can contact other agencies, it's pretty complex.

Say for example that you have a clue leading to a known hideout. You first travel there, and you have the option to watch the building for anyone suspicious coming out of it, or you can try to tap the phone lines, or you can try to break in. If you decide to wait and someone suspicious appears, you can try to follow him/her by car, or you can put a tracker on his car and let him/her go (maybe it will lead you to another suspicious address). If you tap the phone lines you enter a little minigame that will look awfully familiar to people who have played bioshock or Fallout 3. If you decide to break in, you enter a top-down perspective and the game becomes an action game.

After the break in, you can look into the hideout and open file cabinets for clues, take photographs of files, open safe boxes, hack computers and search for a topic related to the crime for answers, kill bad guys, and if a suspect is actually in the hideout, you can take him as a prisioner and then escape the hideout. If you have enough information on him, you can turn him into a double agent, or just simply arrest him.

Describing the possibilities and all the things you can do in this game will take me pages, needless to say, it's incredibly complex but if you can think of something a spy can do to solve a crime, you can do it here. PLUS, all the crimes are randomly generated, you can never play the same mission twice, and it does it in a way that it feels like a real crime is being planned and commited because all the pieces fall in place, and as time passes so the crimes start developing.

The only flaw of this game is the action parts, because the controls are very clunky. Other than that, this game is a forgotten masterpiece. It has influenced so many other masterpieces as well, like bioshock and fallout 3 as I said before, and the randomly generated missions influenced many other games as well. This is a game that I've been playing for years now, and always come back to it for more. If you want a game that is both complex but addicting and with infinite replay value, then look no further.

If you are a hi-res graphics snob, or old games turn you off just because they are old, then GTFO of my blog you ignorant turd.

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