Wherein a Mexican Extols On the Virtues of Chiptunes

Let's make one thing perfectly clear. I grew up in the '80's and '90s. The former not so much, but the latter definitely. I was a child who's lullabies were the bleeps and bloops of their NES, particularly Zelda and Mario. Duck Hunt is a close 3rd, but let's face it, we all hated that smug little bastard of a dog whenever he laughed at you. Don't even shy away from that one, you hated hearing his snickering as he delighted in your failure. Particularly when you failed to shoot down all of the ducks in the last wave. Smarmy little jackass would come up out of the bushes and then...

HOOHOOHOOHOOHOO

Back to my point, one of the most telling things about these games oddly enough was the music. It's pretty impressive when you can hum a few bars from Zelda and someone will look at you and say 'Hey! That's the item collection jingle from Zelda, isn't it?' It's not the visuals we remember, but the music, and it's worked it's way into modern culture. Video Games Live is an amazing reminder of why game music is not to be looked down upon, considering that people take the time to re-score simple 8 bit melodies into full on orchestral pieces.

As an added twist, we're finding that these simple MIDI quality musics are actually being integrated into schooling even. I'm not 100 percent on this since I can't compose worth dick, but I've heard that making your own original digital score of this type, or 'chiptune' is becoming requisite for submitting any type of portfolio for a musical job. It shows flexibility with limited tools for real composers, and above all, originality. There's only so much you can do with basic sounds, but people can pull off some damn DAMN impressive pieces.

In particular, one group by the name of Anamanaguchi caught my eye. Officially, they're a group that "makes loud, fast music with a hacked NES from 1985." (From their Wikipedia article) Among other things, the group has some INCREDIBLE tracks, available for purchase which I highly recommend. Their music is an obvious love letter to the bygone era of 8 and 16 bit games, and the fact that they've found a way to integrate electric guitar and drums into their music to create strange, terrifyingly surreal and flat out inspiring chops is nothing short of impressive.



We keep on wanting to remake old movies and old games, but why? Splatterhouse is being made into a 360 game (with the original three games being part of the deal), King Kong had a graphical facel ift (old news but still, the concept is the same). Not that I'm complaining mind you, but why the revisits to eras gone by? Granted, with technology advancing as it it, looking back to old media and giving it a fresh coat of paint can prove to be quite marvelous, but there's also the risk of it falling flat on it's ass in a stupendous fashion. League of Extradordinary Gentlemen comes to mind. You could've boiled water for ramen off of Allan Moore's skull following that disaster. No amount of Sean Connery could have saved that shipwreck...

But I digress. It's refreshing to hear this kind of thing happening, particularly because older miscreants like myself are really the only ones who can understand the full scope of things like this. And really, that's quite a large slice if awesome.

Wherein a Mexican Explodes A Barbecue Grill

Here's a tip folks. Lighter fluid, while immensely useful during the grilling process and getting it started, is not to be played with. And while it's common knowledge that gasoline + fire = manly explosions, it's a bit of common sense that may or may not slip one's mind. Now, I'm an idiot, at least to the point where I'll forget what I was talking about if I'm really excited about something and I'm literally tripping over my words. But I can at least light a pile of charcoal briquette's up, right?

Now in my defense, I was able to get it lit up. I might have gone a bit exact on the pyramid I had to stack though and arranged it with a 5x5 briquette base. Applied the lighter fluid, lit it up, and let the charcoal ash over for about 15 minutes. Simple yes? Now, unfortunately for me, I'd neglected to spread the coals after the ashing, and a lot of them had cooled off. So I had to add more charcoal to it and proceeded to ass more lighter fluid to aid in the process.

I didn't have my little idiot moment there. See, there were no glowing embers at the time, so I figured, "Hey, I should be safe" so I added the fluid and lit up. Impressive when it went up, but hardly enough to get the ball rolling for cooking. So mom comes out and says 'We need more charcoal on it."

And more.

And more.

And yet more again, until the entire bottom was nothing but ash and unsoaked briquettes to the untrained eye. (IE, mine) So effectively, I'd gone right back to square one. So there I stand, frumping a bit as there's little to no heat coming off the coals. Upsetting, naturally. In my haste to get things started again, I added more fuel to the fire, totally forgetting about the hot embers glowing softly to themselves beneath the pile.

On the plus side, I know now that 'FWOOMPH' is indeed a sound, and it's actually very impressive when you hear it.