GameSpite.net – Verbal Spew

2012, man. What an asshole.

I mentioned that I’ve been re-ripping my CD collection lately into higher-quality files, which has had the side effect of prompting me to listen to music I haven’t bothered paying attention to in years. For instance, Rush.

I know Rush is kind of a joke band for most people, though apparently they were in a movie recently that caused them to do the Journey thing where people hated them, then started liking them ironically, then eventually came around and began to enjoy them in earnest. Rush is pretty funny when you think about it: Three dudes whose virtuosic approach to rock gives them the sound of a much larger band (despite that they can play it all on stage, live, without cheats — or at least they could back in the day). The vocalist shrieks more than sings, yet he plays the manliest damn bass lines in the industry. The drummer is some kind of insane superman, and I mean that somewhat literally since he’s a hardline subscriber to Objectivism and writes all of the band’s Randian lyrics. And the guitarist is talented enough that he’d be the star of practically any other band but pretty much shrinks into the background here. Also, they’re Canadian, which some people find inherently amusing for some reason. I dunno.

But man, those guys can perform. Their work is super uneven — the early stuff wanders from blatantly Zeppelin-lite to tortuously conceptual (Caress of Steel is a travesty of an album), and about ten years ago they decided to reinvent themselves with a harder sound but foolishly went all-in on the loudness wars, so everything they’re recorded in the past decade is a monotonous wall of indistinct Hard Rockin’. But in between the two extremes, they put out some pretty amazing music, if you can get past the wailing banshee of a singer.

I spent a lot of time listening to Rush in high school and college, so I’m well indoctrinated in their “essentials.” These days, I find myself listening more to the tunes that tend to slip between the cracks — the solid songs that somehow didn’t become concert standards, that haven’t been compiled to hell and back. At the moment, my musical obsession is “The Camera Eye” from Moving Pictures. I’m pretty sure Moving Pictures is the band’s best-selling album, containing as it does “Tom Sawyer,” “Vital Signs,” and “Red Barchetta.” But you never really hear much about “The Camera Eye” — probably because it’s an 11-minute track recorded in an era where the band was beginning to move away from epic-length productions.

It’s a pretty strange song in some ways. The emphasis on synthesizers is really uncommon for Rush, and the particular synth sound they used here doesn’t really appear in other tracks by them I can think of. It is extremely late ’70s/early ’80s-sounding; in fact, it might be the single most dated thing in the band’s oeuvre besides maybe the rap from “Roll the Bones.” I think that’s why I like it. Rush has this really clean sound that, past about 1976, is fairly timeless. Hearing a tune like this, one so clearly anchored in a specific era of music technology, is a small novelty in their catalog.

I highly recommend watching the video above. The washed out still photos of New York City set to music makes me think of a Sesame Street musical montage from around the same era as the song. The whole thing is just wonderfully nostalgic. If you’re as old as me, anyway. Which you aren’t. Sigh.

I was always a little torn on Mega Man 7; on one hand, it had really nice graphics, and the return to the more lighthearted classic series was nice after the dark angst of Mega Man X. On the other hand, it never quite felt right. The way it played, I mean. Also, the weird robo-pectorals on Mega Man’s box art depiction really gross me out. He’s a little robot boy who fights for justice! He doesn’t need to be, you know, ripped. Eugh.

I am not a fan of Killer Instinct, but I have to give author Rene Decoste credit: This write-up makes me begin to respect it ever-so-slightly. Just a bit.

Recently, I have been re-ripping my iTunes collection into lossless audio files. This may sound like a needless and laborious process, and I suppose it is. But I can hear a difference between even a good AAC file and a lossless file, and while CD-quality audio may not be as amazing as some kind of non-compressed high-bit-rate magical Blu-ray music, the improvement is sufficient to have inspired me to begin listening to old favorite albums again with a more critical ear. It’s funny, because back when I used to listen to music on CD, I used crummy headphones and wasted the relatively higher audio fidelity; now I own some pretty solid headphones but have been constrained to AACs and MP3s. In a small way, it is a high point in more than two decades of loving music. So, hoorah.

One album I’ve been drawn back to in particular is Marillion’s Brave from… 1993, I think? Brave was vaguely monumental for me. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but Brave was published shortly after I’d been introduced to the band responsible for it. Their existing catalog had struck me as fine and sometimes interesting, but nothing they’d produced really grabbed me. Then Brave arrived, and suddenly it clicked.

Brave was a watershed moment for Marillion, too. The band had been around for more than a decade by that point, though their original lead singer and lyricist had bailed about midway through after four dark, lyrically complex albums. The first two records produced with their new front man weren’t bad, but they lacked the depth and intricacy of the older music, and people were convinced Marillion had more or less abandoned its roots in a vain bid for pop chart success.

Brave proved them wrong. Nothing on this album was radio-friendly. It was a 70-minute story album (yes, the dreaded concept album) whose entire first half was a continuous segue a la Pink Floyd. It was sonically dense, with layers of audio wrapped around one another, and producer Dave Meegan guided the band’s sound to become more melodious and, well, richer. Gone were the strident production values of their ’80s albums, with harsh, high bass, hollow drums, strident synthesizers, and wailing guitar. The bass line was richer, the drum sound more relaxed, the keyboard work broader and encompassing more analog instruments, and guitarist Steve Rothery finally came into his own with a style reminiscent of Dave Gilmour at his best, yet unique nevertheless. Brave was pretty great.

The more somber sound of the album fit its subject matter: It was the tale of a teenage runaway, a girl desperate to escape from a broken home and unspecified abuse. The framing scene for the album concerns her stepping out onto the edge of a bridge to jump and the efforts of passersby to talk her down, and most of the songs are flashbacks of sorts that illuminate her fears and frustrations. This could have come off as incredibly cheesy, but it worked thanks to the quality of the music and the lyrics of songs like “Runaway”:

The one real drawback to the album is that it was produced in the early ’90s, and while it managed not to sound like much else at the time — it lacked the brittle emptiness of the ’80s leftovers that still dominated the radio, but wasn’t as raw or angry as the Seattle scene — as a piece of music it suffers from a common mindset of that era: Hey, a CD can hold 70 minutes of music! Let’s fill the whole thing. Honestly, Brave would work a lot better if a few of the somewhat extraneous tracks on the second half were left off. “Hollow Men” and “Paper Lies” loosely fit the themes of the album, but they’re tangents and ultimately serve to make the album feel overlong. Ironically, the worst offender is the title track, which comes toward the very end of the album and is a contemplative, atmospheric piece that ties together the albums themes… but does it verrrry slowly.

The liner notes for this album include the instructions, “Play it loud with the lights off.” I did, and it turned me into a fan for life.

Being at Game Developers Conference last week was almost comforting. People were wearing hats! Lots of hats. Granted, this is mostly because the creator of Minecraft sports the “dashing I.T. pro” look, but it’s always nice to see a bit of millinery appreciation in action.

Unnnnfortunately, the show also served a chilling reminder that wearing a hat is more complicated than “grab crown, place atop head, orient peak forward, secure headband around skull.” It’s all well and good that you admire Indiana Jones, sir, but part of why everyone thinks Indiana Jones is dashing and cool is because he did not wear his fedora with a free swag T-shirt from the Nvidia booth. A hat is like any other kind of accessory and needs to be matched by the rest of its ensemble! Unless you are a cute girl (which allows you to wear any damn thing you want and get away with it), you need to avoid wardrobe dissonance. Just as you don’t wear a tie with a polo shirt, nor do you tuck a starched white button-down into a pair of cargo jorts, you have to be mindful of the gestalt of what you’re wearing before putting anything atop your head.

For your convenience, I have selected five different styles of men’s headwear — top hats, classic fedoras, trilbies (short-brimmed fedoras), flat caps, and ball caps — and placed them on what I call the Sliding Scale of Fashion Formality. Gauge the dressiness and overall put-togetherness of your apparel and hat up accordingly!

Of course, there is a great deal of variety even within these styles of hat. A really nice professional-quality woolen ball cap works higher up the scale than a cheap mesh cap with a foam front. (Blinged-out Ed Hardy-style ball caps are never acceptable, however.) Flat caps can range from very simple to very ornate and stylish, and you might be able to get away with wearing one right up to the edge of “business” level apparel if it’s nice enough. The formality level of a trilby varies according to its design and materials, and a colorful straw version is a lot more casual than the high-end felt one with satin band and feather I wore for my wedding photos. I put trilbies at the very upper edge of casual, but exercise caution with that combination: Therein danger lies.

The trickiest hats are top hats and classic fedoras. Top hats are pretty much strictly relegated to costumery, because they’re so over-the-top and dated. Fedoras are perhaps the hardest of all to pull off, because they carry so much Hollywood baggage; you have to be pretty awesome to wear one and not look like you’re trying to be Indiana Jones or Don Draper and failing miserably. Certainly I am not brave enough to try it.

This has been a small, pointless public service announcement.

Another great artist has passed away: French artist Jean Giruad, aka Moebius. Unlike, say, Ralph McQuarrie, I had only tangential familiarity with his work. French comics rarely make their way into America, so I mostly know his work through reputation, its influence on others, and disconnected images like the one below:

I don’t know the context or origin of this image, but it’s a gorgeous piece of art. Narrative, yet perfectly framed. It demonstrates Moebius’ extraordinary control over the pen, his ability to create shape and volume with a minimum of lines. His pen-and-paper artwork possessed the precision and evenness of a wood carving or lithograph, and his vision bordered on the surreal. Always evocative, always crisp, always beautiful. I could stare at the most trivial piece of throwaway art penned by Moebius and glean more meaning and wonder from it than from a portfolio of work by most other comic artists.

I’d be hard-pressed to overstate the breadth of the man’s reach and impact. The news of his death, for me, was bookended with a talk by the director of Gravity Rush yesterday and playing through a certain Mass Effect 3 mission today. The former touched on the influence of French bande dessinée on Gravity Rush’s visual style, and Moebius’ art in particular. The latter was a strange action sequence set in a virtual world that took blatant cues from Tron, lifting not only sound effects but the film’s entire visual style — a look crafted in large part by Moebius. Moebius was indirectly responsible for getting me into manga; he was a major influence in the work of Yukito Kishiro, and the bande dessinée-inspired Battle Angel Alita was my gateway into that particular medium. And so on, and so forth. Moebius was, arguably, to his country’s medium what Jack Kirby was to American comics and Osamu Tezuka was to manga.

Please stop taking away our creators. We’re running out of greats.

I’ve been pretty busy this week with Game Developers Conference coverage. That’s a link to our hub! Go on and click it. Go on, it can’t hurt you.

GDC ’12 is the first major event we’ve tackled under 1UP’s newfangled editorial focus of “not just writing up the news.” Instead, each writer has elected to take on a different perspective — a lens through which to view the event, so to speak. Each of us is attending events and keeping appointments specifically relevant to our thesis. The we are writing about them! It’s super great. I love you all.

Anyway, here is how this shakes out for my own stuff. (I will let my collaborators speak for their respective work.) TA DAH:

• A piece about how hearing some inside perspectives on Mario 3D Land has brought me around on the game.
• A blast from 2011 noting the tenuous parallel between Keiji Inafune and Charlie Sheen.
• A sequel to a Square Enix localization history panel write-up I submitted five years ago.
• On making a sequel to Deus Ex and not sucking at it.
• And finally, the piece I’m proudest of: Unraveling the political overtones of Monday Night’s very strange EA SimCity reveal event.

What I have learned this week is that sometimes we color stories ourselves (the Mario 3D Land one in particular); sometimes we simply need to unravel the message (e.g. SimCity); and sometimes, the best story comes from simply being a conduit for someone else’s insights and reflection (the Deus Ex panel). Everyone else is still finishing off their stories, but even before it comes to its conclusion I am quite happy with the nature of our GDC coverage. I hope you have enjoyed it as well. Amen.

This brief piece on fan-favorite RPG Chrono Trigger attempts to answer the question, “Why is this RPG so good?” But I think a more valuable question might be, “Why can’t every RPG be this good?” The day everyone looks to the success of the original Square/Enix dream team for advice on how to make a role-playing game worth playing is the day we all win. I think the shiny, new Mass Effect 3 does a pretty respectable job of hitting some similar notes to Trigger, by the way. Unfortunately to get the most of it you probably ought to invest about 100 hours into the previous games. Sad trombone indeed.

It’s a busy time this week what with Game Developers Conference in full swing. I’m about to head off to the event to check out a localization panel, because covering that is exactly the sort of thing that will make 1UP’s traffic soar as the Internet rushes in to learn more about concurrent multi-regional voice recording sessions. Yep.

Also big this week? Mass Effect 3. I didn’t review the game for 1UP because I didn’t have enough time to finish it; our original plan was for Thierry to do a “renegade” review while I would tackle the “paragon” angle, but since I haven’t seen the controversial ending yet I decided to settle for letting him fly solo and taking part in our video review instead. I still have a lot to say about the game, though; it’s just that I’m going to say those things in the form of a series of op-ed pieces over the coming weeks instead of a single review. I posted my first one this morning, in fact.