What are you listening to right now? video edition

Taste the Cake
(from the days when Valve and Machinima were still amazing)

♬♩ "Chell rises from stasis inside of a glass box.
She isn't greeted by faces, only concrete and clocks.
That's when she first hears GLaDOS, a computer that talks.
She's told to leave the little room but has no shoes and no socks.

She trusted the computer 'cause the voice sounded nice.
So she traveled through the center and followed all its advice.
But when she starts tasting blood, she started thinking twice.
It was the first time that she used a hand-held Portal Device.

She put some holes in the walls and the ceilings then the floors.
It was a weapon to create interdimensional doors.
Still, the tests keep getting harder and she needed a break.
That's when the voice began to barter with the promise of cake." ♬♩

Cue the chorus.

Hozier is back. This is "Shrike".

Eh. I'm on a "Scarborough Fair" kick today. And I'm not even English! English-descended, yes. Ancestors started off as Dark-Age English peasants, fielded huge numbers of the notorious, knight-killing longbowmen who made medieval England a force to be reckoned with (which is why a hand holding a longbow is the crest on my family's Coat-of-Arms) and later fielded great numbers of soldiers for Oliver Cromwell in his campaigns against the Irish, the Roman Catholics and the Irish Roman Catholics, yes. But my chunk of the family tree has been in North America ever since one of them got the bright idea to move to Barbados and become a slave trader in the infamous sugar-rum-slaves triangle, so I'm American. Why do I like this Olde English tune so much?!?


My Dying Bride's mournful take:

Nox Arcana's mesmerizing take:

Sarah Brightman's ethereal take:

Celtic Woman's fantasian take:

Yao Si Ting's haunting take:

Gregorian's timeless take:

...and a couple of schmoes that you probably never heard of:

For extra cacophonous fun, go down that entire list and play all of those embeds at the same time.

1) How old is this song, anyway?
2) What the heck's stopping the singer from just dropping everything, going to Scarborough Fair himself/herself and winning his/her true love back, for Cupid's sake? Orpheus missed his true love enough to go to the Underworld for her! What's your excuse?

...and three days later, I've drifted on to the Killer Instinct 2013 soundtrack, which includes a bunch of my faves:

The Killer Instinct theme, a good oldie with an even better retread:

Orchid's new theme — less sexy, more violent:

Thunder's new theme, now with woodwinds and actual Nez Perce language:

Spinal's new theme — less xylophone, and now with Swedish chanting:

Maya's new theme — just pure jungle-evoking magnificence:

Jago's new theme, now with Infinity% more Tibetan throat-singing:

Fulgore's new theme. Mick Gordon also composed the music for Doom Eternal, and it shows:

*dreams of mastering SimPE, mastering Milkshape 3D and giving Servos Fulgore-like default bodies*

TJ Combo's new theme — add to your MP3 player, go work out at the gym, win!

Cinder's new theme — 19 years later, Cinder still rocks hard:

Newcomer Hisako's theme. In (evidently flawless) Japanese. Can Mick Gordon do no wrong?

Come for the music, stay to watch that Hisako pic slowly inching closer to the camera and freaking you out.

Newcomer Aganos' theme. Mick Gordon flexes his musical muscles yet again:

Newcomer Mira's theme. Because no video game is complete until there's a vampire and some opera music in it:

Newcomer Eagle's theme. Because one tune with Native American chanting just wasn't enough:

ARIA's theme — most certainly worthy of a Final Boss fight:

Yes, most of the soundtrack qualifies as my "faves." That's just how good the soundtrack is!

Ooh! You! I like you! And I like OG Orchid's theme too!

(also! I ain't dead yet! woo!)

In other news, I beat Mario Odyssey! Turns out you can make a ton of progress when the console itself can go quite literally everywhere...Now all I need is that new Animal Crossing and (eventual) Story of Seasons for the Switch and I am SET FOR LIFE.

So here's that jazzy-swingin' tune Pauline belts out when you finish up New Donk City!

Sabaton - Rorke's Drift
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zA06imjl1Q

(08-11-2018 06:49 AM)OracleTicTac Wrote:  Ooh! You! I like you! And I like OG Orchid's theme too!

Yeah, Orchid's theme has been through a few changes over the years, hasn't it?

So has the theme for my homeboy, Spinal. And he has never looked as magnificently menacing as he looks now, proportionately sized skull included.

And after spending last week in Moscow Mills, Missouri with my brother, his wife and my nephews, I finally got to lay my hands on an X-Box One controller and play Mortal Kombat XL with them, and I ended up playing Kotal Kahn (War God) and Ferra/Torr (Vicious or Ruthless) particularly well.

But it makes sense. With my playstyle, I always did do better with the slow but mighty brute-type characters on fighting games; even back in the days of Street Fighter II, while everyone else was playing Ken, Ryu, Guile and Chun Li, I was off in the little dark corner of the airport's arcade mastering Zangief. Then I'd wander back to the brightly lit Tilt arcade and absolutely crush four out of five of those SF2 players, simply because they only knew how to pit their own agile-but-fragile fighters against other agile-but-fragile fighters, and thus they had no idea how to deal with a burly behemoth like Zangief. It usually took a few Spinning Clotheslines shutting down their usual fireball-spamming and jump-over-and-kick-from-behind jazz to show them that they were in my house. You wanna play the Crouching Roundhouse Kick keep-away game, Guile? Your foot sweep is small potatoes next to Zangief's. Now eat dirt! >:]

I never could pull off Zangief's Spinning Piledriver dependably, but I didn't really need it; his Knee Drop > Crouching Jab > [insert throw, slam or grapple of your choice] combo was wicked enough.

...oh. What am I listening to right now? The theme from Injustice: Gods Among Us.

I've played it during more than a few 20-minute workouts on my elliptical machine. Its hammering cadence puts that extra spring in my step.

"We all have a time to go."

Sadly, yes. Yes, we do. The worst thing about life is that it eventually ends.

I think I'll have a glass of wine and sort out my old comic books tomorrow. Excelsior.

*pokes the thread with a stick*

Someone took the Cyberdemon boss battle from 2016's remake of that time-honored run-and-gunner, Doom. Then he monkeyed with the game's sound settings, tossed out Mick Gordon's "Cyberdemon" tune from that stage and overlaid the scene with Andrew Hulshult's Gothic-Metal-esque remake of "Nobody Told Me About Id," the awkwardly named yet blood-pumping theme from Stage E2M8 — the Tower of Babel, where we originally fought the Cyberdemon back in the days of yore (that being 1993).

It's a match made in Hell Heaven. And now I'm listening to it on Repeat.

And it is good.

The fighty-fighty sounds just make it better, especially with how the uploader timed the action to fit the music. Kudos, IRichteri.

(And after I get tired of that video, I have the rest of Andrew Hulshult's Doom soundtrack waiting in the wings.)

(I should just break down and toss a few dollars at Hulshult's Paypal. Maybe next payday.)