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Video Games and Music
I've been playing the Humble Indie Bundle V. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nemesisjk8 pointed me in its direction and thus this time suck is her fault. (For those who may have been interested in this, I apologize for not posting about it earlier. I had been planning to but never got around to it.)
Super Meat Boy: Balls-to-the-wall platforming. It's the type of game where I never let go of the "run" button (gamepad gamepad gamepad--it's much more of a challenge using the keyboard, I think) and die about a thousand times through any difficult run-through. (KER-SPLAT!) It's also the type of game where you tend to perform worse and worse over a period of time as you get more and more frustrated. But it's fun and if you're a time trial junkie/perfectionist or someone who likes to get all the collectables, you'll be wasting a lot of time. (While cursing and/or laughing and/or crying! KER-SPLAT!)
Superbrothers: Sword & Sorcery EP: When I finished this game--it's very short--I had a "What the hell did I just play?" moment. S:SS EP is a little bit of a head trip, teasing and tickling the fourth wall, so that you're aware of your existence as the clicking cursor. (I'm sorry, the Scythian!) It has some repetitive gameplay, but I found some of the elements really fascinating. Usually the arc of an RPG has the character player growing stronger as the protagonist completes more and more of the quest and acquires the fetch quest items. S:SS EP takes the opposite tact, to the point that I was momentarily confused after the first part. The Gotholithic Mass (I think?) did cause some moments of anxiety too. (I hate being chased by indestructible things!) I enjoyed the music by Jim Guthrie. Plus the maker is Capybara Games. CAPYBARA! Those over-sized rodents always crack me up.
Braid: "What the hell did I just play?" Braid offers an alternative to the Super Meat Boy platforming experience and makes you use your brain a little. When I initially started playing, I thought, "Oh, Prince of Persia time mechanics." Not at all. I found myself delighted with some of the gameplay mechanisms. The difficulty starts kicking in once you hit World 4 or 5, where time starts to move forward when moving from left-to-right on the screen and then goes backwards when going right-to-left. There were a few puzzles that gave me a hard time and one I absolutely butchered, but what really got me was the final world/epilogue. It's an artsy game and I'm not really sure I understood what the heck was going on in the story, but the last level was a "Whoa" moment (besides having one or two "FUCK YOU, PUZZLE!" moments), I think. I liked the art, even though I couldn't figure out what those baddies were supposed to be.
Bastion: I am currently playing Bastion. I like it except for minor gameplay quibbles (ok, maybe one not so minor: I keep falling off the goddamn map, so annoying). You get an arsenal of delightful weapons . . . of which you can only use two at a time! Levels are short, though, meaning if you aren't all that happy with your weapon choice combo, you can switch them out soon enough.
I have not yet started Psychonauts, Lone Survivor, or Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The latter two make me hesitate because I'm not very good at playing horror games! I couldn't even get through playing Eternal Darkness myself and it's not that scary, really! XD I've always left the horror games to my brother. :( When Amnesia first came out, I watched one of the Let's Players I follow play it, so I already know what happens in the game, but the experience of playing it yourself is always different. D:
I also finally got around to addressing my long-time intention of wiping all the music off of my Zune and starting from scratch. I kept some things (like Ilaria Graziano, a little Yoko Kanno, The Dream, Black Kids, some You Say Party! We Say Die!, and of course all the tracks from the CD that came with the Children's Erhu Lesson Book [which, trust me, makes for very interesting shuffle play with four or five of those songs coming up to every "normal" track]) and went through my collection to see what else I could throw on there:
Electrik Red - How to be a Lady. Electrik Red is produced by The Dream, so naturally this is an addition courtesy ofiacus. I really like this album and probably enjoy listening to this album walking about and in the car way too much. I really do have a soft spot for down-and-dirty, put-it-on-me hip hop/R&B/whatever you want to call it. Something about the dirty frankness makes me smile and grin. Mmhmm.
I should mention that I really like The Dream. I have a lot of his music thanks toiacus and I tend to let a lot of them play when they come up in shuffle. "I need a fast car~"
Latin. I really, really love Latin beats. I really, really love Latin beats with all the sensuality that you can see in any Latina walking by. (You know what I'm talking about?) The radio is currently hopping with a lot of Latin beats and even if Pitbull drives me up the wall, I love grooving to those songs in the car. While I have no recent Latin goodness on my Zune right now, I threw some sensual stuff on there. Or just crazy fun dance beats (so 90s!).
The Cure - Wild Mood Swings. I have many fond feelings for The Cure. It has the same kind of 80s/90s prominence in my mind that Depeche Mode has. This album in particular I know well because I went through a period of time when it was stuck in my CD player (before the CD itself went missing D:). There are some real mellow songs in this album. "Jupiter Crash." "Numb." And then a song like "Round & Round & Round" will come blasting up. XD
Songs from the Donnie Darko soundtrack, bands like Tears for Fears, Joy Division, etc. <3 If you've seen the movie, you know the feel for the music. Man, that movie--and all the memories and associations it evokes for me. "But love will tear us apart again~"
As I was going through my collection, I clicked on songs to remind me what they sounded like. There are some songs that just hit you from the first words. Interpol's "Narc" has always been one of those songs for me: "Touch your thighs, I'm the lonely one." Man, that has always generated a strong, visceral audio-visual response in me. I believe this song was part of the same indie mix that my friend made that also featured "Penelope" by Pinback, which has this little tripping guitar riff that keeps the song floating along--and is now also on my Zune.
I had forgotten the sheer amount of anime music I have and even the sheer amount of anime I have seen. But some of that music is really fun (to revisit, since I did not put much of it on the Zune), like "Kiiro Vacances" (I don't even remember what Pani Poni Dash was about, but I certainly remembered the song!--which is the amazing thing about music. I had a file labeled tamashii.mp3. I stared at a it a bit and then went, "What? Tamashii? The only song I can think of would be 'tamashi no refuran~~'" And that's exactly how the song went. But even though I knew the song, I had no idea what it was from. [Neon Genesis Evangelion. JEBUS!]) I did throw a few songs on the Zune, like "Toki Ni Ai Wa" (Utena Movie--whatever you think about the movie, it was quite ridiculously aesthetically beautiful) and "Shiki no Uta" (Samurai Champloo).
Kelly Osbourne. Which is an oddity in my collection, as all her songs are covers and I have no idea how I discovered her music in the first place. I have a few of her songs: "One Word," "Red Light," "Suburbia." I do know I discovered her during an odd period of time when I was reversing songs and playing them backwards. In fact, I so liked the way "One Word" sounds backwards that I kept it as its own track. And now it's on my Zune. XD
Awesome discovery: The Chinese Botanist's Daughter soundtrack features erhu. I let the track play and my newly accustomed ears perked up hearing all those affectations of trills and slides.
I have a bunch of odds and ends tracks on here, too. Like the super huge Crystal Castles "Go Ask Alice" super compilation track. It just plays and plays and plays and keeps me from getting sleepy if I make the mistake of letting it play late at night. (There are no track divisions in the file. D:) And while most people know The Cardigans because of "Lovefool," I've been grooving out to their "Erase Rewind." I threw Jane Lui's awesome mash ups on there too (an artist I discovered throughjust_keep_on). And if you haven't heard "Wing Stock" by Ashley MacIsaac, it is awesome. I discovered this song through Kubo Tite who listed it as Rukia's image song, I believe. I may have stopped reading Bleach but I took an awesome song away from it!
All said and told, I didn't set out to completely fill my Zune with music again (it was stuffed to the very last byte before), so it feels oddly sparse now--and much more English-language populated. It's got a weird mix of older feeling songs (Elissa, why you feel so 90s?) and randomness. (I have a lot less dance music than I thought I did. Or all my dance music disappeared. ATB, ATC, La Bouche, where did you go? I actually threw one of my car mix CDs into my car today and was hit with "whoa~" nostalgia.) Not too much new stuff, though. I need to hear some new music.
Music recs?
nemesisjk8 pointed me in its direction and thus this time suck is her fault. (For those who may have been interested in this, I apologize for not posting about it earlier. I had been planning to but never got around to it.)Super Meat Boy: Balls-to-the-wall platforming. It's the type of game where I never let go of the "run" button (gamepad gamepad gamepad--it's much more of a challenge using the keyboard, I think) and die about a thousand times through any difficult run-through. (KER-SPLAT!) It's also the type of game where you tend to perform worse and worse over a period of time as you get more and more frustrated. But it's fun and if you're a time trial junkie/perfectionist or someone who likes to get all the collectables, you'll be wasting a lot of time. (While cursing and/or laughing and/or crying! KER-SPLAT!)
Superbrothers: Sword & Sorcery EP: When I finished this game--it's very short--I had a "What the hell did I just play?" moment. S:SS EP is a little bit of a head trip, teasing and tickling the fourth wall, so that you're aware of your existence as the clicking cursor. (I'm sorry, the Scythian!) It has some repetitive gameplay, but I found some of the elements really fascinating. Usually the arc of an RPG has the character player growing stronger as the protagonist completes more and more of the quest and acquires the fetch quest items. S:SS EP takes the opposite tact, to the point that I was momentarily confused after the first part. The Gotholithic Mass (I think?) did cause some moments of anxiety too. (I hate being chased by indestructible things!) I enjoyed the music by Jim Guthrie. Plus the maker is Capybara Games. CAPYBARA! Those over-sized rodents always crack me up.
Braid: "What the hell did I just play?" Braid offers an alternative to the Super Meat Boy platforming experience and makes you use your brain a little. When I initially started playing, I thought, "Oh, Prince of Persia time mechanics." Not at all. I found myself delighted with some of the gameplay mechanisms. The difficulty starts kicking in once you hit World 4 or 5, where time starts to move forward when moving from left-to-right on the screen and then goes backwards when going right-to-left. There were a few puzzles that gave me a hard time and one I absolutely butchered, but what really got me was the final world/epilogue. It's an artsy game and I'm not really sure I understood what the heck was going on in the story, but the last level was a "Whoa" moment (besides having one or two "FUCK YOU, PUZZLE!" moments), I think. I liked the art, even though I couldn't figure out what those baddies were supposed to be.
Bastion: I am currently playing Bastion. I like it except for minor gameplay quibbles (ok, maybe one not so minor: I keep falling off the goddamn map, so annoying). You get an arsenal of delightful weapons . . . of which you can only use two at a time! Levels are short, though, meaning if you aren't all that happy with your weapon choice combo, you can switch them out soon enough.
I have not yet started Psychonauts, Lone Survivor, or Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The latter two make me hesitate because I'm not very good at playing horror games! I couldn't even get through playing Eternal Darkness myself and it's not that scary, really! XD I've always left the horror games to my brother. :( When Amnesia first came out, I watched one of the Let's Players I follow play it, so I already know what happens in the game, but the experience of playing it yourself is always different. D:
I also finally got around to addressing my long-time intention of wiping all the music off of my Zune and starting from scratch. I kept some things (like Ilaria Graziano, a little Yoko Kanno, The Dream, Black Kids, some You Say Party! We Say Die!, and of course all the tracks from the CD that came with the Children's Erhu Lesson Book [which, trust me, makes for very interesting shuffle play with four or five of those songs coming up to every "normal" track]) and went through my collection to see what else I could throw on there:
Electrik Red - How to be a Lady. Electrik Red is produced by The Dream, so naturally this is an addition courtesy of
iacus. I really like this album and probably enjoy listening to this album walking about and in the car way too much. I really do have a soft spot for down-and-dirty, put-it-on-me hip hop/R&B/whatever you want to call it. Something about the dirty frankness makes me smile and grin. Mmhmm.I should mention that I really like The Dream. I have a lot of his music thanks to
iacus and I tend to let a lot of them play when they come up in shuffle. "I need a fast car~"Latin. I really, really love Latin beats. I really, really love Latin beats with all the sensuality that you can see in any Latina walking by. (You know what I'm talking about?) The radio is currently hopping with a lot of Latin beats and even if Pitbull drives me up the wall, I love grooving to those songs in the car. While I have no recent Latin goodness on my Zune right now, I threw some sensual stuff on there. Or just crazy fun dance beats (so 90s!).
The Cure - Wild Mood Swings. I have many fond feelings for The Cure. It has the same kind of 80s/90s prominence in my mind that Depeche Mode has. This album in particular I know well because I went through a period of time when it was stuck in my CD player (before the CD itself went missing D:). There are some real mellow songs in this album. "Jupiter Crash." "Numb." And then a song like "Round & Round & Round" will come blasting up. XD
Songs from the Donnie Darko soundtrack, bands like Tears for Fears, Joy Division, etc. <3 If you've seen the movie, you know the feel for the music. Man, that movie--and all the memories and associations it evokes for me. "But love will tear us apart again~"
As I was going through my collection, I clicked on songs to remind me what they sounded like. There are some songs that just hit you from the first words. Interpol's "Narc" has always been one of those songs for me: "Touch your thighs, I'm the lonely one." Man, that has always generated a strong, visceral audio-visual response in me. I believe this song was part of the same indie mix that my friend made that also featured "Penelope" by Pinback, which has this little tripping guitar riff that keeps the song floating along--and is now also on my Zune.
I had forgotten the sheer amount of anime music I have and even the sheer amount of anime I have seen. But some of that music is really fun (to revisit, since I did not put much of it on the Zune), like "Kiiro Vacances" (I don't even remember what Pani Poni Dash was about, but I certainly remembered the song!--which is the amazing thing about music. I had a file labeled tamashii.mp3. I stared at a it a bit and then went, "What? Tamashii? The only song I can think of would be 'tamashi no refuran~~'" And that's exactly how the song went. But even though I knew the song, I had no idea what it was from. [Neon Genesis Evangelion. JEBUS!]) I did throw a few songs on the Zune, like "Toki Ni Ai Wa" (Utena Movie--whatever you think about the movie, it was quite ridiculously aesthetically beautiful) and "Shiki no Uta" (Samurai Champloo).
Kelly Osbourne. Which is an oddity in my collection, as all her songs are covers and I have no idea how I discovered her music in the first place. I have a few of her songs: "One Word," "Red Light," "Suburbia." I do know I discovered her during an odd period of time when I was reversing songs and playing them backwards. In fact, I so liked the way "One Word" sounds backwards that I kept it as its own track. And now it's on my Zune. XD
Awesome discovery: The Chinese Botanist's Daughter soundtrack features erhu. I let the track play and my newly accustomed ears perked up hearing all those affectations of trills and slides.
I have a bunch of odds and ends tracks on here, too. Like the super huge Crystal Castles "Go Ask Alice" super compilation track. It just plays and plays and plays and keeps me from getting sleepy if I make the mistake of letting it play late at night. (There are no track divisions in the file. D:) And while most people know The Cardigans because of "Lovefool," I've been grooving out to their "Erase Rewind." I threw Jane Lui's awesome mash ups on there too (an artist I discovered through
just_keep_on). And if you haven't heard "Wing Stock" by Ashley MacIsaac, it is awesome. I discovered this song through Kubo Tite who listed it as Rukia's image song, I believe. I may have stopped reading Bleach but I took an awesome song away from it!All said and told, I didn't set out to completely fill my Zune with music again (it was stuffed to the very last byte before), so it feels oddly sparse now--and much more English-language populated. It's got a weird mix of older feeling songs (Elissa, why you feel so 90s?) and randomness. (I have a lot less dance music than I thought I did. Or all my dance music disappeared. ATB, ATC, La Bouche, where did you go? I actually threw one of my car mix CDs into my car today and was hit with "whoa~" nostalgia.) Not too much new stuff, though. I need to hear some new music.
Music recs?
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