Verdammt!! I only have 89 days left on this thing and I haven't posted or edited this thing in months!! What the hell is wrong with me!?!?!?!?
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J-pop. BWA-HAHA-- No.
Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours
Stevie Wonder: Stevie Wonder: The Definitive Collection
Now this has SOUL. *AIIIIIIIE-HAY* Yes, that imitation was pitiful. I guarantee you my imitation in person will be far more pitiful. (*****)- Akatsuki no Kuruma
Fiction Junction Yuuka: Destination
Okay, so the translation isn't literal, but seriously, what does "Carts of Dawn" compare to "Chariots?" Anyways, this is one of those rare songs where everything, the vocals, the instrumental melodies, the lyrics, BLEED emotion. Before you make any remarks on the usage of the word "emotion," let me say this: No. It will however, depending on your mindset, either fill you with awe at its beauty or set you crying on the same token. That good. The full song is now on this site-- hopefully I can put a player up without sucking bandwidth. (*****) The Beautiful Ones
Poets of the Fall: Signs of Life
Believe it or not, it's a Finnish group that recorded this song, among many other songs they've recorded, all completely in English. Almost all of the songs they've recorded are either tearjerkers or by and large depressing, but the thing that's even more sad is that their work is leaps and bounds better than the crap that passes for music on the American airwaves. Highly recommended, but it's very sad music, sometimes "emo" in lyric choice. (*****)Superstition
Stevie Wonder: Stevie Wonder- The Definitive Collection
Superstition AIN'T the way. My mantra. (*****)Manor House Rally
Michael Giacchino: Medal of Honor: Frontline
Need an example of bombastic movie soundtrack music in a video game? Look no further. If it weren't for the soundtrack, for this very piece and its like brethren, the Medal of Honor series would've been long forgotten in the bargain bins by now. By the same guy who did the Alias soundtrack and The Incredibles. There's a good reason he was recruited to compose for these big hits, and I suspect this piece is just one part of it all. (*****)Mona Lisa
Origa: Aurora
Not sure why, but I think Russian folk song when I hear this song even though I've never even heard a Russian folk song before. I think it can be pretty safely assumed that such a judgment is erroneous. Nevertheless, the beat is of a suitable rhythm, and though the computer audio effects are somewhat overused in my opinion, the vocals are excellent. (*****)Liposuction
Da Vinci's Notebook: Bendy's Law
Is there nothing that Da Vinci's Notebook can't parody? Even if their stuff wasn't funny, they've also got strong acapella talent in their work, meaning that they're not harsh on the ears. Actually... this thought just occurred to me: Jibjab + Da Vinci's Notebook = Greatest Political Parody Ever. (*****)Medal of Honor
Michael Giacchino: Medal of Honor
Bombastic, patriotic, stirring, soaring. These are the adjectives that will come to mind as you listen to this piece. This is the kind of music that the U.S. government would've killed to have in its wartime newsreels to put a better spin on the European campaign during World War II. Regrettably, there are better pieces than this, but this reflects entirely the mood of the Medal of Honor series: do your duty, do it with pride for your country, and take heart in the fact that you have a soundtrack bordering on godly to accompany your wanton evisceration of Nazi tanks. (****)
Film/Gaming
Namco (Bandai Namco): Ace Combat Zero
AC Zero takes place 15 years before the events in Ace Combat 5, focusing on the Belkan War, the conflict that shaped the world of AC5. In this title, it swaps functions between AC04 and AC5, leaving a somewhat odd, yet also somewhat satisfying mixture of options during combat. Back is the special weapons assignments from AC04-- each plane has three special weapons to choose from instead of the single special weapon per plane in AC5 which made for a ridiculously long list of planes to choose from and unlock. However, gone is the ability to command a squad of three other planes and the ability to select the plane your wingmen fly-- all you are able to do is choose their special weapon, which in the long run simplifies the AI for the wingman, resulting in some notable increases in wingman performance, but the nuance of outfitting your wing so precisely is missed. Gameplay in this title is largely simply AC5's system, with a small twist thrown in. That is, certain targets can now be bombarded into submission rather than outright destroyed, though the choice to finish them is always available should you choose to. This factors into a pilot's morality system of sorts, ranging from the wanton-destruction Mercenary to the merciful Knight who destroys only what the mission requires of him; and then thrown into the middle is the Soldier, who destroys the mission's allotment, but also smokes things that might make his job easier in the future not being there. Interestingly enough, certain dialogue and cutscenes change based on this morality system, as well as what squadron of "boss Aces" you end up flying against at the end of certain missions. The storyline is simple enough, somewhat lacking given the rich and engaging story found in AC5, but it gets the point across-- after all, what do mercenaries care for story? It's the money that matters; all else comes secondary. (****)Raven Software; Activision: Quake 4
Quite frankly an excessive gore-fest and nothing more. Pretty graphics on the Doom 3 engine, sure, but what gets rendered on it? Dark, dank corridors full of cables and sparking wiring, sandstone canyons in the midst of a foggy atmosphere, ridiculously excessive pools of gore-- it's Doom 3 all over again, but this time without the intent to scare you, only gross you out. Gameplay is extremely linear. Extremely. I have never played a shooter quite as linear and repetitive as this. War may not be much else but pointing a gun at your enemy and pulling the trigger until dead then repeating the process, but somehow it actually gets repetitive in this game, like you're somehow expecting every enemy you come across to just drop dead in sight of you. I swear I've never played a shooter where shooting became a chore. Sad. I give you fair warning, when I say this is excessive gore, I mean it. I suspect there are several who would find themselves with nightmares of Stroggification if they played this without properly steeling themselves. It's also what rates this game down further-- it's so ridiculously prevalent that the initial shock factor gives way to boredom and then in fact to disgust at the tastelessness. It may look realistic, but it's used far too much, and that hurts. (**)Stanley Kubrick (Director): Full Metal Jacket
This is one of those movies that makes me glad I was in AP US History for something other than the AP exam credit and the extra weight on the GPA. It's a look at the dehumanization of US soldiers during the Vietnam War and the comparative disdain with which they regarded their Vietcong opponents, despite the fact that each side was probably as animalistic as the other. On another note, ever wondered where "Me love you long time" comes from? Look no further than this film. (*****)Namco: Ace Combat 5
|| Plot Summary: Fifteen years ago, there was a war that split the world apart in its ferocity. From the ashes of the ruined superpower Belka rose two new ones, Osea and Yuktobania; the countries that had challenged the Belkan campaign for dominance. As a rookie Osean fighter pilot in the present day, your career begins with a tense standoff between the two powers, rapidly degenerating in what looks to be more trouble for you and your wingmates. || Ever wanted to feel the thrill of a dogfight at Mach 1.5, but were frightened away by the ridiculously complex control scheme of jet fighter simulation games? Here's your solution, right here. Photorealistic graphics, authentic jet fighters, arcade-style physics that allows you to carry out maneuvers that would rip a real jet fighter apart as well as carry more ordinance than is physically possible, and a plotline more compelling than one would think could come out of a game genre so fraught with rote military planning and objective-based gameplay. Hook up the Hori Flightstick accessory and you'll feel like you're flying a jet fighter-- the game and controller construction is that good. One of the PS2's best. (*****)Bungie: Halo: Combat Evolved
Here because eventually someone's going to complain that I'm not putting up any "real" video games. What can I say? It's an FPS-- woooooo. All special. Well, for its time, it was one of the most advanced FPS games in existence, combining new graphical lighting effects and an early ragdoll physics engine into character model animation, making the ringworld of Halo come alive like no other FPS world before it had. Other than that... pretty rote sci-fi story, nothing real special about it save for the challenge factor, which seems to always be neither too easy nor too hard. Very interesting, that. (****)Sony Computer Entertainment: PS2 Shadow of the Colossus
(Also known as: ワンダーと巨像, "Wander and the Colossus") || Plot Summary: Sixteen colossi scattered throughout the land stand between you and your lost love's soul. Striking a deal with a spirit in the temple where you left your love's cold body to lay, you ride off into the horizon to find and slay these colossi, that each death may empower this spirit to bring her back from the beyond to where she rightly belongs. || Well, not much to say here except that all I've seen of this title are a few trailers. That said though, all I've seen is a ridiculously well-crafted game. The environments are massive, the details surreal, the score hauntingly beautiful, and above all, there are only 16 enemies in the entire game. However, with a title like this, 16 enemies could prove to be quite a lot... || As Medal of Honor's soundtrack superbly accentuates its World War II-themed play setting, Colossus' soundtrack does the same for its fantasy-themed setting. Several pieces are devoted to the surreal appearance of a landscape bereft of civilization but for myriad stone structures scattered about the plains by some long-lost people, capped off by a massive castle at what seems like the very center of the world with bridges at all cardinal directions running towards the castle over dry riverbed chasms. Save for those mentioned landmarks, it is a very lonely landscape, and the music is sparse in instrumentation and lilting in tone to reflect this. Contrast this with the pounding, threatening, and yet still free-flowing music heard upon an encounter with one of the 16 colossi, and you definitely know you're not alone anymore, though you might have preferred it while you were alone simply on the logic that then, you didn't have a 200-ft.+ stone titan trying its best to crush the life from you. Whatever the situation, lonesome wandering or the panicked heat of battle with a creature many times your size, Kou Ohtani's soundtrack accompanies it well. A favorite OST already.Terry George (Director): Hotel Rwanda
Tell me that chorus of little chanting African children wasn't haunting your dreams after you saw this movie. Simply a chilling film that, if you were completely ignorant of the situation in Africa before, shatters that ignorance with as many rounds of ammunition as were used on the population during the Rwandan genocides. I don't use that analogy lightly, either. Don Cheadle's performance in this film as the embattled Paul Rusesabagina almost earned him an Oscar-- that alone should tell you how good this film was. (*****)Konami (KCEJ): Metal Gear Solid
The first of the Solid generation and modern stealth actioners, and quite frankly still one of the greatest in terms of story presentation. A revolutionary game at the time it was released for PSX and still respectably entertaining today even without the graphical upgrades and gameplay mechanics tweakage done for its GameCube remake, "The Twin Snakes." Very good cinematic presentation accomplished with comparatively primitive models and above-par voice actors. The human drama of war and the hardships involved in taking lives (at least ones that aren't half-clones made via gene therapy techniques) are explored in dramatic but none too gory detail. Once again, feels like playing a movie sometimes; it's that good. Game director Hideo Kojima reportedly always had a penchant for film directing, so I guess that bled over into his game work. (*****)Namco: PS2 We Love Katamari
Well, if there's any conceivable good thing that can come out of a conference room filled with smoke (draw your own conclusions here), it's this. Sequel to the hit Katamari Damacy (塊魂- katamari damashii), the game premise is absurdly simple-- you are the Prince of All Cosmos (and smaller than a rat), called upon to roll up material on Earth to recreate the heavenly bodies that your father, the King of All Cosmos destroyed one night after going a little heavy on the sauce. This time, instead of just stars, you're making planets and other bodies. Roll up... pretty much anything in the game, mostly to make your katamari the requisite size, but sometimes just to see what kind of reaction you get out of the object when it gets swept up (people are hilarious). These simple play mechanics and absurd humor mean that this is the perfect game for adults and children to play. (*****)Blizzard Entertainment: Warcraft II Battlenet
An oldie, but a goodie back from the old glory days of computer gaming when there wasn't all these "GTA Hot Coffee" issues running around (don't get me wrong, GTA actually has some impressive coding in that hooker-face-smashing engine, but it's pretty much ruined it for the rest of the game industry by getting the government on its back). Warcraft II is not hard at all for the layman to pick up and play, but still deep enough to satisfy serious fantasy buffs to an extent. Not Tolkien deep, not even close, but still suffices. (*****)CAPCOM, Shinji Mikami: Resident Evil 4
This actually could fit inside the realm of either game or film quite neatly, both on account of its play mechanics which renders this title like a top-grade, very interactive horror/action flick. Anyways, bye-bye Umbrella and walking dead, and hello to religious nutjobs sporting wriggling ancient parasites from their brain stems. The change from zombies to "Los Ganados" as the primary enemy likely came as a shock to many seasoned Resident Evil veterans, but the change in control scheme, from the archaic camera-angle dependent movement and rough directional aiming system to a rotatable camera and precision laser sight system made it a joy to play. Throw in context-sensitive actions, a new inventory management system, a good story and actual good voice actors to carry it out and you've got what some termed the greatest survival horror experience ever made. One marked change a lot of people will notice is the pacing of this title and its predecessors. Previous RE games depended on a player's paranoia to deliver the fear, introducing several scenarios where a player would be alone in several rooms, then all of a sudden scripting some horrible creature out of your nightmares to come bounding into the room through door, window, wall, ceiling, or otherwise. Sure, it was scary, but it got old after 3 titles and countless spinoffs. RE4 though relies on a more visceral fear, the fear of real danger, not paranoia. The initial level which surrounds Leon with a swarm of psychotic villagers bent on taking his head is a good example of this, and it's up to the player to adapt and fight his way out of the village area, lest his head really be taken by the village's chainsaw-wielding maniac (referred to as Dr. Salvador apparently...). Once you get used to it, it's a thrill to take on the swarms and win, not completely unlike watching a kung-fu flick where one man takes on an army and wins with nary a scratch. Hardly the case in RE4, because you will inevitably be scratched, but avoiding damage becomes second-nature as you develop maneuvers and a solid offensive strategy. Now, not to say that this game doesn't have its share of nightmarish creatures that will deliver their own share of fright, they just don't have as many opportunities to take an entire cutscene to leave you a babbling, frothing-at-the-mouth wreck on the floor. No, these are bolder creatures that will let you know they are there and out for blood. It's the fear of their presence, not the mere possibility and memory of, that inspires the fear this time, and it plays on the psyche to plentiful effect. (*****)EA Games, 2015 (developer): Medal of Honor: Allied Assault
... Firstly, you can add video games too. Thank you G-d, I was ripping my hair out thinking of movies to put up that are outside of the mainstream. "You don't play, you volunteer," is the tagline on this, one out of many first-person shooters dedicated to recreating the experience of ground fighting during the Second World War. Respectable graphics for when it was released, certainly, but it's definitely the soundtrack here that you'll remember. Every Medal of Honor game before Rising Sun has had a stellar soundtrack by Michael Giacchino, and here it certainly gives the player that heroic motive to blow through what seem to be endless squads of Nazi soldiers (see level "Die Sturmgewehr"). (*****)Square Pictures (defunct): Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within (Special Edition)
This had high, high hopes for a lot of the nerd community when it was announced: photorealistic graphics that can even today hold some weight against competitors and a story from Square itself. Well, it delivered on the first promise. Obviously you can't squeeze the kind of compelling storyline that 20+ hours of gameplay holds into a scant 2 hours, but this story was seriously subpar for a lot of people familiar with FF. It sounded pretty rote sci-fi in almost every aspect. (***)Tom Cruise (Algren): The Last Samurai (Widescreen Edition)
Yes, I was thinking the same thing as I'm sure many of you were when that first movie poster went up: "Why is the last samurai a white guy, much less Tom Cruise?" That is to say, samurai are typically Japanese, so... Well, that question aside, this movie kinda blew aside all of those conceptions by being, in my opinion, suitably harsh towards Cruise's character without being too realistic and chopping off his head, which quite honestly sounds like what samurai would've done based on what I've seen of pre-Meiji and Meiji-jidai Japanese history, especially temperaments towards foreigners and guns. Of course, suspending disbelief and keeping in mind that fact that the director has to make a movie instead of a quick clip depicting Nathan Algren's head being lopped off at the shoulders, you can really come to appreciate the movie, especially Ken Watanabe's performance as the eccentric head samurai. Battle scenes are suitably brutal, seppuku is portrayed from the back as expected, Algren has a fling with the kind of Japanese woman you might expect would make a good geisha, stuff and so on. I don't know, this particular movie seems to defy explanation for me. All I can say is that it is very enjoyable while it lasts. (*****)Russell Crowe (Nash): A Beautiful Mind
What at first seems like an intrepid spy thriller in the first half turns into something else entirely-- a question of where reality ends and the imagination begins. Where the human mind starts to imagine? Who knows. "We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism?" Well, okay, it's not so much based on solipsism so much as it simply broaches the possibility on a shallower level, but it's still there to an extent. (*****)
SLI/TARC Photo Journal
- Oakton High School's Student Launch Initiative team and Team America Rocketry Challenge teams are featured in this photo journal.
