Pokemon Yellow - OMG 8-Bit!

Holy bejezus, it's cold. D:

Say hello again to my team:

Wartortle - L34
Fearow - L34
Venusaur - L34
Marowak - L35
Hypno - L35
Charizard - L36

I was going to freak out inside for a moment if I couldn't find a playlist sharing site that would let me post something up here, because I could easily have a lot of songs to talk about. Thankfully, MixPod had something nice for me. Here you guys go!

Create a playlist at MixPod.com

Thank you, MixPod. Anyway, as you can tell, I'm going to be lightly discussing the musical element of Pokemon Yellow. This could easily  become a complicated subject in my opinion - the music is 8-bit. Why am I mentioning it in a blog post, then? Well, 8-bit was and is the home base of video game music. The first Mario game had it, the first Legend of Zelda game had it, and plenty of other classics had music composed on the silly little chip. Few, however, can comprehend the complexity that goes into its composition, and though I really hate to be borderline judging anyone, few can also truly appreciate what goes into making music with this microprocessor.

Regardless, take a listen to the battle themes above. (For the record, the theme with the artist title 'Unknown' is the Elite 4 Champion Theme.) You'll notice how frantic each of them sound. That was the tactic. Little actually went on in a Pokemon battle during the 90's. If you were to take away the music, the battle would be veeery boring. This frantic music helped wake battle up. In fact, I remember occasionally drifting through tall grass and the wild battle theme startling me - but that was the point.
Not all themes were frantic and fast-paced though. Let me show you Route 11:

My point to make with this theme is what work went into the liveliness of the music. C'mon, it's 8-bit - how can that possibly be lively. Well, with a 8-bit composer's range pallet being so tiny (along with a lot of other aspects in designing a game back then), you really had to think outside of the box and work with what you had. Sounds had to be 'stretched', per say, to make them sound like larger or different sounding 'instruments,' and you'll see that done particularly in this route's theme. And just as a little funfact, 8-bit was also used to make sound effects in video games. You'll notice that they sound very similar to percussion, next time you listen.
Now, take a listen to the remake of this route's theme in the Pokemon remake of FireRed and LeafGreen:

You hear horns, don't you? And drums? Well, that's what you were supposed to hear in the previous video, and you can, to a certain point. But making music dynamic with an 8-bit processor was extremely difficult, and making a theme sound even relatively close to instrumentation was commendable. Next time you're playing the first Pokemon, or any other old school game with 8-bit music, pay closer attention to how the simple broadening of sounds or pitches makes the music come that much more alive.

Give me a little bit of time to get farther into the game so I can talk about my next and last topic in Pokemon Yellow to the fullest - next time we talk about Yellow's philosophy. Don't misjudge me, just wait and see what I have to say.

- Cheryl-Buddy

Chrono Trigger 7 - Reality Check

I have little excuse for having waited so long to post a blog...
But here's my loose explanation: Due to the weekend of the Final Harry Potter movie (-teardrop-) and my days being slightly mixed up in going to bed at nearly 4am as a result (I had never been to a midnight premier before), I completely forgot to play my hour for two days in a row. Shame on me! But I suppose it's for good cause. My poor boyfriend seems to be having a tad of bad luck with his chargers these days, and now his 3DS charger is malfunctioning. He will, however, be returning to Taipei soon, so hopefully this malfunction will only be from China. Until then, here's my most recent hour of Chrono Trigger.

At this moment, I have plowed my way through the majority of the Fiendlord's Castle. After having retrieved the rare stone from Prehistory, the Masamune was reforged and given back to Frog. We then find out why Frog is Frog - poor guy was cursed by Magus, our current arch nemesis, once a guy known as Glen. He has grown much since this curse, however, a 'blessing in disguise', he calls it. I tend to agree. Anyway, after joining up with Frog and entering the Fiendlord's Castle, things get a bit real for me, personally.

I've always been quite fascinated by the horror and suspense features that some movies, video games, television programs and other forms of media are able to conjure. It's an odd and hard-to-explain feeling of mine that I often cannot accurately share with others, but Chrono Trigger certainly knows how to make the chilling feel of horror really stand out to me, especially in the Fiendlord Castle. Horror - to me - strips away the colorful cake icing and loving feelings that characters share in a video game, and makes the world naked, it makes the world vulnerable, and it makes the world as true as it possibly can be. The world's a scary place - I've been told this for years - and when these aspects are thrown into a game in the right place, at the right time, I'm shaken to the very core, as it gives me a true reality check of where I am. It may be a fictional land that I roam in this game, but it's still a world, like the world that I live in.

Chrono Trigger does this in many ways - the silence factor of the Fiendlord Castle, the roaming of souls who resemble characters in the game that you already know who are truly shape shifters, out for your blood, a vast amount of enemies that roam and the teasing feeling of very few save points...I won't go into too much detail, as not to make this blog post too long, but I often found my vision blurring from my sheer concentration on every given element.
It's hard to explain how honest and eerie this Castle has been to me. Watch a walkthrough or two on Youtube and you might then know what I mean.

Regardless, the Castle was absolutely crawling with enemies, including a few high-ranking followers of Magus, such as Slash, Flea and Ozzie. Slash and Flea were formidable enemies, difficult yet rewarding (except for Slash - this fighting was kind of douch-y), but Ozzie...not so much. He's a coward. I spent more time chasing him through the castle than I did actually fighting him, which he didn't even put up one. I rushed conveyer belts with guillotines, ran halls filled with creatures, fell down countless holes that took forever to resurface from, just to find him an easy target.
(No spoilers, since my boyfriend hasn't gotten that far yet.)

Anyway, with all three servants defeated, I gave Magus a shot. I cannot deny it, Magus is a tough son of a bitch. I'll have to do some practice rounds on him before I actually take him on.
Hopefully my next hour will be lucky on my part.
But for right now, I'll take a small break, so I can let my boyfriend fix his charger and have a chance to catch up and surpass me (like he usually does).

- Cheryl-Buddy