Prelude to a Top Ten: Sidelong Epics

I normally don't post on the weekend, but today and tomorrow I've got a special rock music treat for you!

As did just about every middle-class white American male a little too into literature and the arts, you better believe I had my progressive rock phase. Not that I don't still love prog and seek out new (old - please, nothing later than 1975) bands I haven't heard in the genre, but I mean, there was a time when I liked Dream Theater. I'm not embarrassed by the silly things I may have liked at any point in my life, because hey, at the time it was what I knew, and if I enjoyed it, that wasn't hurting anyone. E.g. I'm happy to admit to you that at age 13 I liked System of a Down and collected swords. But Dream Theater? Man, I was a college freshman for Cripe's sake, listening to some leather-fairy sing about teenage pregnancy and justifying it by telling people "you know he's an opera-trained singer?". I'll let you guess exactly how many friends that garnered.

Perhaps the most instantly recognizable element of prog is the sidelong epic - see, back in the oldie days when dinosaurs rode Jesus to get to their job at the fossil factory, record discs had recording on both sides, making for a natural division of the album into two halves - you had to stop listening at some point and flip the vinyl. If you listen to albums that were originally recorded in this format, you can usually pick out where the start/stop midpoint was from the pacing of the content. Starting in the year I don't know which, with I don't know what album, some probably British dude had the idea to put a long song, a "suite", on one side, and usually a handful of normal length radio-ready songs on the other. Hence we have the likes of Atom Heart Mother, 2112, Tarkus, and the works you'll find listed below. Some cRRAAAAAAAAZY artists even recorded double albums with multiple epics, like Yes on Tales from Topographic Oceans and Can on Tago Mago.

Side A looked like this...                                                      ...and Side B looked like this

Keep in mind that these are a completely different beast from prog's other calling card, the concept album. Epics have thematic unity, but don't always take the form of a narrative, and are (supposedly) composed in an emulation of classical style, including themes (musical), motifs, movements, whatever. I'm no music major, but you can see the difference between these and concept albums, which can be musically identical to non-concept albums (that is, how would you tell the difference between Captain Fantastic and Honky Chateau without the lyrics?).

Criteria time: a sidelong epic is a single song that takes up half of a vinyl. Songs not originally written for vinyl won't qualify, though none would have made it anyway. The rest of the album has nothing to do with my call - that's the only reason you might see ELP on here. I'm going to keep it to one per band and try to give you a little scope, and I think we're ready to begin. As usual, in no particular order.

Aw fuck, while researching this list I came across an annoying little trend. Since the epics usually left a little space on their side of the record, occasionally an extra one or two minute track is jammed in there, like "Pigs on the Wing Pt. 1" is thrown onto Side A of Animals along with the 17+ minute "Dogs". So I'm just going to ignore that and consider, for instance, "Dogs", as sidelong.

Come back tomorrow afternoon to check out the list!

La-Mulana, first reactions (and link to original)

Still sick as a dog that has mono, so I've got a bit of time to play La-Mulana while I'm in bed. This game is being presented as downright terrifying by those who've played it, with horror stories of no healing items, no way to progress without a guide, and a secret hard mode that can be permanently activated simply by reading the wrong stone tablet. The difficulty is being played up without much discussion of reward - I suppose proclaimed old-schoolers find difficulty a reward in and of itself.

The game has some great sprite art that ranges between 8-bit and 32-bit styles

That being said, I took the plunge because I like adventure-style platformers (Monster World, Muramasa, Ufouria (weird game)), loved the music, and can generally get a kick out of a good puzzle. I have a pretty strict no-guides rule when I play a new game; it's my opinion that if it takes me three hours to solve a puzzle, that's three hours the game intended me to spend. Then again, when I spot the hallmarks of poor design (poorly translated clues, indecipherable pathways (the "holy shit, I can go there?" effect), click everything rooms), I'm not going to hesitate to let GameFAQs save the entire game from being ruined by one moronic puzzle. See Simon's Quest for a game where I think it's perfectly legitimate to use a guide, and Wonder Boy III for one where you never should.

So where's La-Mulana gonna fall? With the puzzles being labeled simultaneously as "brilliant" and "I needed a guide", I wonder if some people know what good design is at all. For me it sounds like there might be a frightening amount of wandering and wondering. Or trial-and-error, and in a game with save points spread thin and limited health reserves, trial-and-error is a grim prospect.

La-Mulana was born as a freeware game with MSX-style graphics (MSX is an old game computer that never made it big in the US, for my readers who don't know that, which is none/all zero of you). If you don't want to spend ten bucks on the WiiWare game, check out the link below - but be warned, this version of the game is MUCH more difficult

So far none of those dark prophecies hold true! Two hours have gone by in no time and had me moving along without a hitch. The hardest puzzle so far was an Indiana Jones reference that I deciphered in all of ten seconds, and anywhere that I've had to experiment, the negative consequences were never a significant setback. Screwing up a puzzle usually just landed me in a completely different room with more secrets of its own - I never felt the need to trudge back to step one and start over because there's been so much else to do. Thus far it's a far denser game than Metroid, so the situation never feels hopeless. There's always somewhere else to investigate. If the game can keep this up for the rest of its duration, it'll be a smashing success. If anything, the biggest challenge at this point is that there is so much to do and so many places to look that I feel like I'm forgetting things. Hopefully that non-linearity is intentional and doesn't come back to bite me in the ass.

Oh yeah, and the whole limited health thing. The platforming is a bit rigid, so you can always take it slow when things start to get tight. In general the feel is of Metroid (can't believe I have to provide a link for Metroid but I have CERTAIN readers who don't know up from down - which is okay, you SHOULD be learning), where each individual hit from an enemy is barely a scrape in your life reserve, and only the cumulative damage of a long and reckless expedition will put you in danger of dying. Rarely will you find yourself shockingly low on health - it's a gradual process. This creates a sense of going on individual adventures, gauged in length by how long you can make your health last. You won't find yourself with fingers crossed hoping the next room is a save point, a la Castlevania, because you have to go home to heal (luckily, as soon as you find the necessary item you can warp to any save point at any time, even from midair).

Still working on figuring out up from down? Here's a start.

Alright. Enough details, I need to go play Dragon's Trap, because I've had this playing in my head since the minute I typed "Wonder Boy". Greaaaaaaaatttttttttessssssst soundtrack everrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

You can get the original freeware La-Mulana here:
http://agtp.romhack.net/project.php?id=lamulana

Grab the English patch and the game itself from the links on the right-hand side of that page. It's all perfectly legal, the game was released for free. As aforementioned, this 2005 edition has primitive (authentic) MSX graphics and sound, and lacks almost all of the guidance the remake provides, rendering many puzzles painfully obscure. Then again, it is free. Either way, if you like what you're hearing or what you play there, go download the WiiWare game and support a developer that jumped through a lot of hoops to get you to play his game.

Sister Sonic??? I barely even know her Sonic!

Got a good laugh earlier when I stumbled across the 1993 history of the would-be action-RPG Sister Sonic, based on, yes, the notion of Sonic having a long-lost sister: Popful Mail!

Makes a good exclamation, doesn't it? - that's what I just demonstrated for you using a technique I call "learning through reading". If American public schools could just discover this blog and this methodology, they'd be a lot better at making our youths today legible. Legetable. Literate. Whatever. Popful Mail! In fact, Popful Mail! (emphasis mine - this ain't no Tomba!) is a somewhat unknown Sega CD adventure-RPG-platfomer - you know, in the vein of Tomba!. I'm insisting on appending RPG to that genre description because the game was developed by Nihon Falcom*, so I have to assume it'll be at least slightly more RPG than Wonder Boy. In the sense of having worse/less platforming and more dialogue. Never played it myself. Popful Mail! It kinda puts a spring in your step. I'm really trying to say it without the exclamation mark here but I can't.

Uh oh losing you - you're here to hear about Sonic's long-lost sister and perhaps see a comedy MSpaint mock-up. I know what you're up to, guy. The idea was, since Popful Mail (!) had such a moronic title and featured such forgettable RPG stock-a-block characters (to my knowledge "Popful Mail" is the name of the main character), Sega would localize it in the west as a Sonic spinball-off with a few sprite swaps and dialogue edits. You'll recognize the technique from a little game known in the West as Super Mario Bros. 2, which began its life as Doki Doki Panic (hm does that one get an exclam.?) until Nintendo jammed Mario and Co. down its throat. The logic being that Americans needed to be gradually introduced to Shy Guys, even if they came quite naturally to the Japanese. The tradition is still alive and well - 2010's Kirby's Yarny Yarn could've come into being as a simple Yarnic Tragedy, but Nintendo wanted to hedge their bets by throwing in their most popular genocidal maniac. That's why the game plays so little like traditional Kirby - just like SMB2 is vastly different from SMB and Sister Sonic would've been from Brother Sonic.

This one came out really poorly; but also, really well?

Sister Sonic: the modern, empowered woman.

No Sonic post is complete without fanart (mine doesn't count because
I'm not a fan). In case you didn't get it the third time, this is SONIA.

After some delays, the deal fell through and Falcom was left to release Popful Mail into obscurity on the Sega CD. Not that a Sega-mascotted game would've done much better on that most misguided of platforms. Christ Sega's history is hilarious. But that's a tale for another day, and one Golem can tell better than I. The rumor goes that the Sister Sonic project was abandoned because of "a massive letter-writing campaign from fans of the original game". I am EXTREMELY skeptical of this - beyond the difficulty I have believing that there was an organized, non-trivial community of Western gamers who knew of Popful Mail (and cared enough to want its original characters), it just doesn't make any logistical sense. You're telling me that a handful of these supposed letters convinced Sega that the existing US Popful Mail audience was a bigger market than the existing US Sonic audience? At the end of the day, there's zero evidence to prove or even suggest a shred of truth to this rumor - the closest mention I could find was this interview with the game's actual localizer, Working Designs, who makes no mention of fan involvement. 

So that's about it for Sister Sonic. It's an idea that never got off the drawing board, and we lamentably had to wait until 2009 to get a glimpse of a hedgehog wielding a sword, and then until 2008 to get a Sonic RPG.

I made this image years ago and HA just noticed that I changed it from Seven Stars to Rings

*I'll tell you the story of Nihon Falcom in the near future

Does Microsoft have something against Xbox Live Arcade?

Huh, guess XBLA games don't come out on Wednesday anymore? They were moved to Friday? That must be new as of last week or something because DDN definitely was on a Wednesday. Anyway, means I have to wait another two days for NiGHTS. 

I really hate that; I always used to have something to look forward to early in the week thanks to VC Mondays and XBLA Wednesdays. Now they're respectively Thursday and Friday, which does nothing for me, because I have plenty else to do and look forward to on the weekend. Honestly seems like a real bad sales move - there've gotta be less people sitting at home playing Xbox on Friday night then Wednesday, right? But they must have some sort of data to back it up.

Their advertisement also seems to have gotten worse - which only bothers me because it seems like it's become a much less friendly place for small releases. First of all, back before the interface overhaul (when commercials were added to the menus), the first image you saw for Game Marketplace was whatever arcade game had come out this week. Now the new releases page is four clicks deep and at higher levels all you can see is whichever MS game they've been featuring for the last eight months (anyone else tired of seeing fucking Wreckateer? they shouldn't even be advertising Kinect games to me when I don't have one). 

Bitching complete. Just sat down tonight expecting to play NiGHTS and was pissed it wasn't there.

Witcher 2 referencing BioShock?

In Chapter 2, I ran into an NPC quest-giver with an Irish accent who sounded awfully familiar. I swear it's BioShock's Atlas, or at least someone doing an impression. Atlas is performed by Karl Hanover, who according to IMDB has never done another voice role. Of course, the NPC in the Witcher is too insignificant to be credited, and Atlas himself wasn't even credited in the original BioShock, so it's kinda hard to prove. Plus Atlas' voice always has that radio effect so even the sound bytes are hard to compare.

Anyway, that alone doesn't exactly constitute a reference - it's that he gives you a quest called Little Sisters (the Little Sisters are a major plot element of the BioShock games). How could that possibly be a coincidence?

Just raised my eyebrow. That kind of subtle acknowledgment is usually reserved for universal classics (e.g. Mario, Final Fantasy) or in-company properties (try to find a Namco game that doesn't reference Pac-Man). Since there is no developer/publisher/staff link between The Witcher 2 and BioShock, it seems to imply the former case, which would suggest BioShock is being canonized.

Or, much more likely, that some bored voice actor was having himself a little joke when he saw the name of the quest he had to read.