Square Wave: SNESology

Before we get to the fun part, some minor business:

1) Music Monday is dead, at least in name. In retrospect, relegating the music section of the blog to a specific day of the week was as arbitrary as it was futile. I'll continue sharing gems from the wonderful world of video game music, but that ship will sail under a new banner: Square Wave. Updates will come on what one might generously call a "quasi-regular" basis.

2) What does Square Wave mean? For one, it means I'm completely unable to dream up an original title for a recurring feature on video game music. More importantly, it refers to one of the types of wave patterns prominently used in producing music by the sound chips of classic 8-bit game systems of yesteryear, like the NES and Gameboy.
In an ancillary sense, it could allude to the fact that video games appear to us via an arrangement of square pixels, or the lingering preponderance of game environment and object design to feature grids, boxes, crates, tiles, blocks, and cubes. It just seems to be part of the elementary grammar of games, born out of necessity once upon a time, yet still sewn into the fabric of today's virtual spaces.
Then again, considering that this blog represents what is undoubtedly one of the nerdiest pursuits of the modern age, "square" might refer to the unapologetic neurosis with which I'm apt to appraoch the hobby of gaming.

But enough talk -- have at you!

I've recently been exploring the chiptune music scene, which as it turns out is a lot more vast and varied than I ever imagined. It's not just the hacking of NES, Gameboy, or other vintage hardware to spit out quaint ditties, but rather a malleable and adaptable approach to music that takes electronics as an influence and can run with it across all genres in any conceivable direction.

For today's purposes we'll be sticking a little closer to home with something that is still very much wrapped in the instrumentation of games, but which does so in a novel and interesting way. SNESology bills itself as "New Original Music for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System," and is a project which has resulted in ripping sound files from a range of SNES games. It's not that the music itself is being edited or remixed, but rather that samples and instrument data have been extracted, creating a kind of "sound font" for artists to write and perform original music on keyboards, sequencers, and the like.

Across the Plains, an early composition for SNESology. As composer, programmer, and performer Shnabubula explains: "After many hours of hard work, I managed to completely rip and build an approximation of the Final Fantasy 6 (3 US) sound engine."


I've previously gushed over the amazing work put out by Shnabubula (Samuel Ascher-Weiss), for both his piano & chiptune tribute album NES Jams and his Metroid series medley with Gabriel Terracciano. As adept as he is at rearranging and reinterpreting video game music, his original material is just as impressive. While a variety of skilled individuals have come together for this project, from what I can gather Shnabubula seems to be the principal contributor and composer so far. As of now, he's written over ten pieces, all of which can be listened to via the SNESology page, the YouTube playlist -- or, best of all, on his Bandcamp page where they can all be downloaded for free.

Infiltration, written using the soundset from Contra III: The Alien Wars.


There are a lot of chiptune artists who are good at crafting nostalgic tracks that approximate "8-bit," or reference common sounds of the NES or Gameboy in general. However, there is no default "sound" of the Super Nintendo. Each game has its own specific instruments and character. A variety of games have been represented within SNESology, including Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Terranigma, Contra III, Super Mario Kart, and Super Metroid. The result is adventurous, new music that doesn't necessarily match the style or tone of the original games, but nonetheless can fade into and out of a familiar atmosphere in ways I'm not sure other forms of music have accomplished in quite the same way.


Hands of Fate, a piece combining the soundsets of three different games: Final Fantasy VI, Terranigma, and Chrono Trigger.


Shnabubula himself is currently taking a break from the project (hopefully for not too long), but other talented contributors have stepped in and provided their own remarkable compositions. It was actually an accidental stumbling across Jeff Ball's imaginative Most Beautiful Seduction that alerted me to SNESology in the first place. He seems to have been inspired by the original game's story and characters during his creation process, and that definitely comes across to the listener in the way the tone shifts over the course of the track, although he doesn't reference motifs from the soundtrack directly.

Jeff Ball writes: "This piece was created using instruments from Final Fantasy 6. It’s a journey into the mind of Terra, a dark and brittle look into her past."


There are many more pieces than the handful I've linked to here, and if you're a fan of the SNES era at all, it will be worth your while to at least browse the playlist.

Music Monday: Yet... Oh See Mind

God Hand is one of those games that I really want to like, but it keeps pushing me away. Being modeled after old-school beat-'em-ups like Double Dragon, and having a charming sense of humour about itself, there's not a lot to dislike about it. People who like this game like it a lot.

But... I dunno, I can't get into it. It's hard, right from the get-go, and there's kind of a high learning curve. You die easily, and if you perform poorly your character levels down. Still, something about it keeps hinting that there will be some point where it all starts to make sense as a game, and once I get in that groove I'm not going to be able to put it down. Books can be like that, tv shows can be like that, music can be like that -- and sometimes, games can be like that.

What already makes a lot of sense, though, is God Hand's music. It may be the most fun thing about this game, and today's track has been stuck in my head for weeks. Don't ask me what that title means, though -- I have no idea.

Track: Yet... Oh See Mind

Game: God Hand (originally released for Playstation 2, Sept. 2006)

Composed by Masafumi Takada and Jun Fukuda

Go Right

YouTuber RockyPlanetesimal has put together a stirring work of video collage and in-game puppetry that uses the simplest of means to say something great:

Sometimes, when the whole world seems to have gone wrong, all you can do is go right.

With Great Graphics, Comes Great Responsibility

A sentiment I've keenly felt throughout this generation of consoles is that games in general are striving for style over substance. Then again, perhaps "striving" isn't the mot juste -- "settling" might be a more appropriate wording. After all, is it fair to accuse the creators of the oft-maligned Final Fantasy XIII of intentionally setting out to produce a stiff, on-rails experience, in which player agency and depth of exploration were all but obliterated? I have no trouble believing that Square-Enix originally sought to craft a worthy successor to an impressive lineage of sprawling, fantasy epics, saturated with curious side-quests, mini-games, and other charming distractions and secrets. Unfortunately, after close to four or five years of development time, what we finally got was exceedingly restrictive and linear. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do -- essentially just a series of very picturesque hallways filled with monster battles, punctuated by scripted dialogue scenes -- truly, the JRPG equivalent of Time Crisis. The bulk of the time and money seemingly went into producing the (admittedly gorgeous) HD graphics, with little to none left over for anything else.

I'm fine with a linear plot, so long as it's captivating, well-told, and moves at a good clip -- but there needs to be something that makes me feel like this playthrough of the game is my own, and not necessarily the exact same as the next person's. There needs to be variety, contrast, and diversion -- occasionally, I need to get lost on a tangent before rejoining the main mission. All the little things we used to take for granted in role-playing games had evaporated.

Graphics: check.   Soundtrack: check.   Battles: check.
Okay, well I guess we're done -- oh wait, did anyone make an actual game?

Like several other frustrated Final Fantasy fans, I found myself wishing the balance of power had shifted more in favour of developing interesting dungeon designs, entertaining mini-games for variety's sake, and perhaps a few towns for good measure. Basically, I wanted a meatier gameplay experience, and if it meant the graphics had to take a hit or two along the way, that was fine.

Be careful what you wish for.

In a blog post on GameInformer, Chris "Warcraft" Kluwe expressed a great amount of anger toward Nintendo for the way Xenoblade Chronicles turned out. Misplaced anger, I'd say, since Nintendo made the Wii console which the game appears on and didn't develop the game itself -- yet despite some bouts of hyperbole, there are aspects of his arguments that I can sympathize with. I've tried out Xenoblade myself, and I'm psyched to give it more focus once a couple more games are off my plate (is there actually an end to Kingdoms of Amalur?), but already I've seen what he's talking about:

"...this game deserves better. It deserves better than gasping fish mouths bobbing up and down through beautifully crafted dialogue. It deserves better than jagged edged fuzzy textures comprising a breathtaking landscape..."

"I have to commend the folks at Monolith Soft. They’ve done the best they can with what they have available, and you can see the vision they’re so desperately trying to make a reality. The ideas on display in Xenoblade Chronicles are nothing short of amazing... Unfortunately, and through no fault of Monolith Soft, the Wii laughs at their dreams."

Xenoblade's graphics are really quite good... for a Wii game.
Is that still a compliment?

"I’m tired of Nintendo having these awesome franchises and brilliant developers and shafting them with an absolute garbage can of a system. I’m tired of seeing Mario relegated to kitschy ideas because there’s no horsepower under the Wii’s hood; I’m tired of seeing Link fighting through the Temple of Brown Textures and Jagged Edges; I’m tired of seeing games like Xenoblade Chronicles, games with a world vision that dwarfs the imagination and fills the mind with awe-inspiring jaw dropitude, get thrown under the bus by Nintendo insisting on Grandma Waggle Party IV as its core demographic."

Nintendo's strategy for the last few generations has been to produce underpowered hardware and seemingly ignore or deny modern conventions. The Wii is clearly inferior to the Xbox360 or the PS3, both in terms of graphical capability and image resolution. Xenoblade does what it can, but to see that game running on the Wii is to lament over what might have been. As Chris alludes, mouth animations when characters speak are primitive and off-putting, and the otherwise well-designed graphics suffer from having just a few polygons less than they deserve, and can only be enjoyed through the veil of the Wii's grainy resolution. If only there were an HD port of this game!

But then, what if it were made for an HD console? Who's to say it wouldn't have suffered from those same problems Final Fantasy XIII had? There are such high graphical expectations on the 360 and PS3, that anything less than the best is quickly criticized. Would Xenoblade's character models and environments have looked anything like this, had the game been designed from the ground up for another system? The game was made with one system's hardware in mind, and wishing for the image resolution of another may be folly. What game developer seriously makes a game for the PS3, with the goal of creating visuals that look only a little better than what's on the Wii?

Perhaps between the two extremes there rests a happy medium -- or, if this is the happy medium, would we recognize it? Those of us who demanded a different allocation of resources in the wake of FFXIII's graphics-mongering may have gotten what we wanted in Xenoblade, even if it is on a console we loathe. All things considered, Xenoblade still looks pretty good -- and if it ends up giving me all the things that FFXIII failed to deliver, then what have I really got to complain about?

Music Monday: Suite for Violin and Piano (Metroid)

Last week's feature was an arrange album by Samuel Ascher-Weiss, a.k.a. Shnabubula, and it was so good that I could almost just devote Music Monday to tracks from NES JAMS for the next three months or so. Despite my desire to highlight more of Shnabubula's amazing work, however, one of my goals for this segment is to maintain variety from week to week. So, my compromise is to show off another of Shnabubula's pieces, with a different tone than we heard in NES JAMS.

Suite for Violin and Piano, performed by Shnabubula and Gabriel Terracciano, is a medley featuring tracks from the Metroid Series. Clocking in at over ten minutes, this incredible piece proves to be an adventure as rich in atmosphere and tension as the games they honor.

Title: Suite for Violin and Piano
Game: Metroid (series)
Arranged by Shnabubula and Gabriel Terracciano