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What are you listening to right now? video edition
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#881
10-04-2020
So the remake of Final Fantasy VII just launched today. And people on YouTube already have videos about the game and its tunes, including the Battle Theme, which has to be the most beloved battle theme in the entire Final Fantasy series. 
Hearing that remixed battle theme in-game for the first time gave me the most beautiful fluttering in my breast, of course! Isn't nostalgia wonderful?
Hearing that remixed battle theme in-game for the first time gave me the most beautiful fluttering in my breast, of course! Isn't nostalgia wonderful?
#883
21-05-2020
Rockin'!
Piano-ey!
Epic Adventurey!
(For reference's sake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT4fI6bfrMg)
Just me getting nostalgic again. So much of my wayward youth was spent haunting video game arcades, with games like Black Tiger, NARC, Forgotten Worlds and Rastan holding special places in my fond little memories. And after I was officially kicked out of the Air Force on June 6, 1996 (a day for which I shall interminably hold rancor in my heart for our former President Bill Clinton; thanks for downsizing the Armed Forces while simultaneously sending us on every deadly milk run you could think of, Slick Willy!), Rastan had the honor of being the last game I played at the video game arcade at Great Falls International Airport, while I was waiting on a Greyhound bus to take me back to Saint Louis, Missouri. It also turned out to be the last time I ever got to play Rastan at all; I've never seen a Rastan coin-op since that day, and the arcades started dying off back in the early 2000's, killed by the advances of home consoles and further ensuring that I would never get to play Rastan, NARC, Gauntlet or any other stand-up arcade game that graced my youth ever again.
I miss video game arcades.
#884
24-05-2020
Sorry, but it's two days later, and I still can't get NARC out of my head! I was just coming down from my Rastan high, and then NARC kicked in....
Reference stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L0jP_VErHs
I love it when some YouTuber uploads a tune that has been extended to 15 minutes or longer! That's enough time for me to wash the dishes with some musical accompaniment! I've already made a playlist of these tunes, of course. I named the playlist "Oh, No, the Narcs, Man!"...also of course!
We all remember that first stage of NARC, right? Yeah, it was the mid-80's and NARC was one of the first video games to use motion capture. Of course all the brown-trenchcoat-wearing crack dealers looked the same! Apparently, when your street gang is wildly successful at selling illegal narcotics to the masses, you can afford to swell your ranks with human cloning.
I still don't quite understand how the game decided which goons could be Busted and which goons couldn't. I used to think that if a goon was randomly carrying drugs on his person and your Narc walked into him and frisked him, he'd be Busted for a cool 5,000 points after the stage. But then I noticed that you'd frisk some of the goons, they'd walk away without getting Busted, then you'd shoot them dead, and half the time they'd drop crack baggies! What the hell, NARC?!?
(By the way, don't try to frisk the big, hulking PCP guys or the knife-wielding psychos dressed up like clowns; it'll only end in tears. And don't shoot the prostitutes in Stage 4; they're innocent bystanders, believe it or not, and you'll lose points if you kill them.)
The theme for Stage 2, the stage with all those "Dr. Spike Rush" heroin dealers whose idea of attacking you is to throw hypodermic syringes as big as your arm at you. NARC was a delightfully gritty and seedy game, though peppered with a few moments of mood-befouling weirdness: those huge hypodermics, the attack dogs turning into puppies and running away when you shoot them, the giant attack beetles...not to mention Mr. Big the kingpin (at the very end of the game) turning into some bizarre kind of giant putty-skull-hubcap-snake-hat-bedspring hybrid sort of thing.
Even though it's just a hill of beans compared to the gory-bloody-killy messiness in some of today's video games (yes, Mortal Kombats 10 and 11, I'm looking at you...), NARC was also an unusually violent video game for its time. My Mom and I never did talk about video games much, mostly because I was a teenager and she was annoyed by my video game habit. (Same thing with my Dungeons & Dragons hobby; I loved it, she hated it.) Then I played a shiny new NARC coin-op for the first time at the now-defunct Aladdin's Castle arcade at Saint Louis' now-defunct Chesterfield Mall, Mom gave me a ride home and I was excited out of my own mind because NARC was brand spanking new at the time and it was a wonderful experience for me! Then Mom gasped rather loudly — clearly startled or dismayed — when I got to the part where my last round of NARC ended because my Narc had gotten dragged down by attack dogs, who spent the entire ten-second "Insert coins to continue" countdown chewing up his body and dragging it around.
That didn't exactly coax me into sharing more of my arcade experiences with my mother, I suppose.
The tune from those clandestine drug labs, where KRAK's finest chemists are brewing brightly colored narcotics in gigantic beakers that you could stuff a Volkswagen into...just like real life, amirite?
Blowing the beakers up with a rocket launcher was always fun.
Then came Stage 3, with that big honkin' hundred-mile-long bridge which was littered with dumpsters for some reason, so you couldn't just fly your Porsche through that stage at Mach 1 or you'd plow into a dumpster — or, worse, drive over a landmine — and die. Or if that didn't kill your plucky narcotics agent, the bridge was also littered with all those Joe Rockhead guys, every last one of them huge, musclebound and raging through a PCP high. Stay back and shoot Joe with your trusty submachine gun? He grabs the nearest dumpster and throws it at you. Try to drive over him? Your car hits his legs and bounces off. Stay in your car? He grabs you by the throat and yanks you out of the car. Then he headbutts you to death.
Joe Rockhead was scary. And aside from the dumpster-throwing thing, he's not too far removed from real life; we've all heard those horror stories from civilians and police officers encountering someone who's violently enraged and high on angel dust, right? My younger brother is a Sergeant and an 18-year veteran with the Saint Louis County Police Department, and he used to work with a patrolman who once responded to a rockhead screaming bloody murder and tearing up his own apartment. The rockhead had already beaten his girlfriend to death with his fists before the police arrived, then he murdered the patrolman's partner during a struggle over a kitchen knife. Then the patrolman jumped the rockhead from behind, got him in a headlock and tried to pull him off the other patrolman (who was already dead or dying by this point), but the rockhead was too strong to yank around so easily, probably because of the "super roid rage". Then our cop drew his duty Glock with his free hand, planted the muzzle against the soft spot at the top of the rockhead's cranium and sunk four hollowpoints right into his brain. The rockhead still got back up off the floor, all bleary-eyed and dazed, and told the cop "You got me..." before finally keeling over dead. Scary stuff, huh?
PCP supposedly came into being when the U.S. Army was trying to develop a super soldier drug around the end of World War II, with the intent of churning out soldiers who wouldn't feel any pain and would continue fighting onward despite taking mortal wounds. But that project was scrapped when the Army couldn't fine-tune the drug to where it wouldn't send the test subjects flying into uncontrollable psychotic rages; why send a soldier to the front lines pumped full of PCP if he's just going to start randomly screaming about rabbits and gunning down his fellow Americans? Unfortunately, the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang has their roots in the Army, so they pulled a few strings, got a hold of the formula for PCP and started selling it as a street drug back in the 1960's; hence PCP's street name, "angel dust". Biker gangs are idiots.
Anyway, back to happier stuff, like video games!
Game Over, time to sign your initials!
Yeah, NARC was good fun. Apparently, the Pixies thought so too!
And this Autonine guy remixed that Stage 1 tune.
Suddenly, a wild RoboCop appeared!
Yeah, YouTube suggested this cover of Basil Poledouris' famous RoboCop theme while I was searching for "NARC Arcade cover music". True story. I guess YouTube's search engine worked "The Future of Law Enforcement" into the search string somehow. But I'm not complaining. RoboCop is a bloody legend!
(RoboCop's in Mortal Kombat 11 too. So is the Terminator. So now you can play out your own "RoboCop vs the Terminator" epic, just like Dark Horse Comics, the Sega Genesis and the Epic Rap Battles of History did! Yay! )
Reference stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L0jP_VErHs
I love it when some YouTuber uploads a tune that has been extended to 15 minutes or longer! That's enough time for me to wash the dishes with some musical accompaniment! I've already made a playlist of these tunes, of course. I named the playlist "Oh, No, the Narcs, Man!"...also of course!
We all remember that first stage of NARC, right? Yeah, it was the mid-80's and NARC was one of the first video games to use motion capture. Of course all the brown-trenchcoat-wearing crack dealers looked the same! Apparently, when your street gang is wildly successful at selling illegal narcotics to the masses, you can afford to swell your ranks with human cloning.
I still don't quite understand how the game decided which goons could be Busted and which goons couldn't. I used to think that if a goon was randomly carrying drugs on his person and your Narc walked into him and frisked him, he'd be Busted for a cool 5,000 points after the stage. But then I noticed that you'd frisk some of the goons, they'd walk away without getting Busted, then you'd shoot them dead, and half the time they'd drop crack baggies! What the hell, NARC?!?
(By the way, don't try to frisk the big, hulking PCP guys or the knife-wielding psychos dressed up like clowns; it'll only end in tears. And don't shoot the prostitutes in Stage 4; they're innocent bystanders, believe it or not, and you'll lose points if you kill them.)
The theme for Stage 2, the stage with all those "Dr. Spike Rush" heroin dealers whose idea of attacking you is to throw hypodermic syringes as big as your arm at you. NARC was a delightfully gritty and seedy game, though peppered with a few moments of mood-befouling weirdness: those huge hypodermics, the attack dogs turning into puppies and running away when you shoot them, the giant attack beetles...not to mention Mr. Big the kingpin (at the very end of the game) turning into some bizarre kind of giant putty-skull-hubcap-snake-hat-bedspring hybrid sort of thing.
Even though it's just a hill of beans compared to the gory-bloody-killy messiness in some of today's video games (yes, Mortal Kombats 10 and 11, I'm looking at you...), NARC was also an unusually violent video game for its time. My Mom and I never did talk about video games much, mostly because I was a teenager and she was annoyed by my video game habit. (Same thing with my Dungeons & Dragons hobby; I loved it, she hated it.) Then I played a shiny new NARC coin-op for the first time at the now-defunct Aladdin's Castle arcade at Saint Louis' now-defunct Chesterfield Mall, Mom gave me a ride home and I was excited out of my own mind because NARC was brand spanking new at the time and it was a wonderful experience for me! Then Mom gasped rather loudly — clearly startled or dismayed — when I got to the part where my last round of NARC ended because my Narc had gotten dragged down by attack dogs, who spent the entire ten-second "Insert coins to continue" countdown chewing up his body and dragging it around.
That didn't exactly coax me into sharing more of my arcade experiences with my mother, I suppose.
The tune from those clandestine drug labs, where KRAK's finest chemists are brewing brightly colored narcotics in gigantic beakers that you could stuff a Volkswagen into...just like real life, amirite?
Blowing the beakers up with a rocket launcher was always fun.
Then came Stage 3, with that big honkin' hundred-mile-long bridge which was littered with dumpsters for some reason, so you couldn't just fly your Porsche through that stage at Mach 1 or you'd plow into a dumpster — or, worse, drive over a landmine — and die. Or if that didn't kill your plucky narcotics agent, the bridge was also littered with all those Joe Rockhead guys, every last one of them huge, musclebound and raging through a PCP high. Stay back and shoot Joe with your trusty submachine gun? He grabs the nearest dumpster and throws it at you. Try to drive over him? Your car hits his legs and bounces off. Stay in your car? He grabs you by the throat and yanks you out of the car. Then he headbutts you to death.
Joe Rockhead was scary. And aside from the dumpster-throwing thing, he's not too far removed from real life; we've all heard those horror stories from civilians and police officers encountering someone who's violently enraged and high on angel dust, right? My younger brother is a Sergeant and an 18-year veteran with the Saint Louis County Police Department, and he used to work with a patrolman who once responded to a rockhead screaming bloody murder and tearing up his own apartment. The rockhead had already beaten his girlfriend to death with his fists before the police arrived, then he murdered the patrolman's partner during a struggle over a kitchen knife. Then the patrolman jumped the rockhead from behind, got him in a headlock and tried to pull him off the other patrolman (who was already dead or dying by this point), but the rockhead was too strong to yank around so easily, probably because of the "super roid rage". Then our cop drew his duty Glock with his free hand, planted the muzzle against the soft spot at the top of the rockhead's cranium and sunk four hollowpoints right into his brain. The rockhead still got back up off the floor, all bleary-eyed and dazed, and told the cop "You got me..." before finally keeling over dead. Scary stuff, huh?
PCP supposedly came into being when the U.S. Army was trying to develop a super soldier drug around the end of World War II, with the intent of churning out soldiers who wouldn't feel any pain and would continue fighting onward despite taking mortal wounds. But that project was scrapped when the Army couldn't fine-tune the drug to where it wouldn't send the test subjects flying into uncontrollable psychotic rages; why send a soldier to the front lines pumped full of PCP if he's just going to start randomly screaming about rabbits and gunning down his fellow Americans? Unfortunately, the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang has their roots in the Army, so they pulled a few strings, got a hold of the formula for PCP and started selling it as a street drug back in the 1960's; hence PCP's street name, "angel dust". Biker gangs are idiots.
Anyway, back to happier stuff, like video games!
Game Over, time to sign your initials!
Yeah, NARC was good fun. Apparently, the Pixies thought so too!
And this Autonine guy remixed that Stage 1 tune.
Suddenly, a wild RoboCop appeared!
Yeah, YouTube suggested this cover of Basil Poledouris' famous RoboCop theme while I was searching for "NARC Arcade cover music". True story. I guess YouTube's search engine worked "The Future of Law Enforcement" into the search string somehow. But I'm not complaining. RoboCop is a bloody legend!
(RoboCop's in Mortal Kombat 11 too. So is the Terminator. So now you can play out your own "RoboCop vs the Terminator" epic, just like Dark Horse Comics, the Sega Genesis and the Epic Rap Battles of History did! Yay!
)
(This post was last modified: 24-05-2020 02:16 AM by Pizzatron-9000.)
#886
24-05-2020
You spent more than a few quarters on NARC too, I take it. NARC was quite the quarter-eater; I can only assume that these YouTubers with one-credit playthroughs spent many hours of practice on MAME or some other emulator where you don't have to spend a lot of real-life money to become good at the game. 
And I love Streets of Rage! Back during my eight months of tech school at Keesler Air Force Base, I was one of the most popular guys in my barracks because of the TVs in the day rooms, my Sega Genesis and my assortment of Genesis games, including Streets of Rage 1 and 2. Sunday Night Football took Second Place to me and my Genesis (even among some of the sports nuts), and we'd sometimes have about two-dozen other airmen sitting around, waiting for one of the active players to get his butt kicked so someone else could grab his controller and take over. One of our training sergeants hated me and my Genesis, and he made fun of me plenty, but nuts to him.
I have the unofficial Streets of Rage Remake on this computer. It has oodles of remixed tunes from the first three Streets of Rage installments, and they're all wonderful (except for most of the tunes from Streets of Rage 3, but that's because SoR 3's tunes were completely computer generated, most of them were therefore utterly terrible, and there's only so much that the Remake team could do to spit-shine those turds). I still play the Remake now and then.
And recently Streets of Rage 4 launched, finally, after about two decades! I'm a bit sad that my man Max (from SoR2 and the Remake) only came back for SoR4 as a boss villain, which makes me a bit sad; I do like playing the "slow but strong" type of fighter, and Max was not without his charms. But I also like Blaze, and she came back (of course), and now she even does a complete rollover to get back on her feet after tossing some goon with her infamous Sacrifice Throw! She's adorable, as always.
Mr. X is still dead after the ridiculous storyline in SoR3 (since there's not much you can do after you've been reduced to a brain in a jar), but now we get to deal with the twin children that we never knew he had. But it's nice to see that these Y Twins saw fit to keep Shiva on the payroll. Shiva, being the archetypical Evil Karate Master that he is, has been a huge draw since SoR2. And it's still funny remembering how back in that Air Force dayroom, many of us airmen would improvise Kung Fu Theatre dialog or start singing random fight tunes during the penultimate boss fight with Shiva. Then we'd finally drop Shiva after a long, pitched skirmish, and Mr. X would get up out of his throne and start shooting up the room with his Tommy Gun, which was always a bit anticlimactic. One does not simply one-up Shiva, not even the crime lord who hired him.
And I love Streets of Rage! Back during my eight months of tech school at Keesler Air Force Base, I was one of the most popular guys in my barracks because of the TVs in the day rooms, my Sega Genesis and my assortment of Genesis games, including Streets of Rage 1 and 2. Sunday Night Football took Second Place to me and my Genesis (even among some of the sports nuts), and we'd sometimes have about two-dozen other airmen sitting around, waiting for one of the active players to get his butt kicked so someone else could grab his controller and take over. One of our training sergeants hated me and my Genesis, and he made fun of me plenty, but nuts to him.
I have the unofficial Streets of Rage Remake on this computer. It has oodles of remixed tunes from the first three Streets of Rage installments, and they're all wonderful (except for most of the tunes from Streets of Rage 3, but that's because SoR 3's tunes were completely computer generated, most of them were therefore utterly terrible, and there's only so much that the Remake team could do to spit-shine those turds). I still play the Remake now and then.
And recently Streets of Rage 4 launched, finally, after about two decades! I'm a bit sad that my man Max (from SoR2 and the Remake) only came back for SoR4 as a boss villain, which makes me a bit sad; I do like playing the "slow but strong" type of fighter, and Max was not without his charms. But I also like Blaze, and she came back (of course), and now she even does a complete rollover to get back on her feet after tossing some goon with her infamous Sacrifice Throw! She's adorable, as always.
Mr. X is still dead after the ridiculous storyline in SoR3 (since there's not much you can do after you've been reduced to a brain in a jar), but now we get to deal with the twin children that we never knew he had. But it's nice to see that these Y Twins saw fit to keep Shiva on the payroll. Shiva, being the archetypical Evil Karate Master that he is, has been a huge draw since SoR2. And it's still funny remembering how back in that Air Force dayroom, many of us airmen would improvise Kung Fu Theatre dialog or start singing random fight tunes during the penultimate boss fight with Shiva. Then we'd finally drop Shiva after a long, pitched skirmish, and Mr. X would get up out of his throne and start shooting up the room with his Tommy Gun, which was always a bit anticlimactic. One does not simply one-up Shiva, not even the crime lord who hired him.
(This post was last modified: 24-05-2020 08:20 PM by Pizzatron-9000.)
#889
13-06-2020
LOL! Lee, so NOT old Hubster looked at my most recent playlist last night and literally pointed and laughed (...with me, not "at" me)
Here it is:
Hubster looked at my most recent playlist last night and literally pointed and laughed (...with me, not "at" me) Here it is:
