Saturday, July 13, 2013

Dragon Quest- The music.


The Dragon Quest/Warrior games are some of the most iconic Nintendo/Enix RPG's of all time. One cause to their rise to superstardom was the unbelievably beautiful music that kept you exploring through the realm of Alefgard. Koichi Sugiyama, who composed these masterpieces, was the first video game composer to record his music with a real, living orchestra. He recorded with the London Philharmonic, the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, and the Tokyo City Philharmonic to name a few. Listening to any of the Dragon Quest scores is like going on an epic journey of the imagination, like watching a film that hasn't been made yet. I throw these into the Basement for your enjoyment...

[Dragon Quest I]

[Live(ish)]

[From DQ2//Personal fav]

Haunting Depressive BM from Greece...

Cry of Silence- "In my Dreams"

Friday, July 12, 2013

Fauna- "The Hunt"


Setherial- "A World in Hell"

Excellent vid by Swedish BM band, Setherial.

Echtra- "A War for Wonder"(2008)


[Full album]

Abobo's Big Adventure

No comments. Just ass kicking.

Super House of Dead Ninjas. Epic Win.


This brutal return-to-classix platformer is one of my favorite projects of the last year. Moderately difficult yet infinitely challenging, SHDN is a bloody race to the finish line that remedies all the frustrations I had with the Gaiden series. Definitely some inspiration there. There are multiple bosses, weapons, upgrades, and extra-game features which why I put SHDN at the top of my creative revisited classix list. The developers even wrote a comic book to go with the game, which ushers you into a full understanding of characters, their legend and why the beasts in this game are running amok. Gameplay is smooth and fast. Enemies are not very difficult but in great number. The joy of killing is really celebrated here...Truly awesome. 


Prince HarWHO? Yes, there is a Mario anime full length...

[Prince Haru, before Nintendo told him to get fucking lost]

Yeah, that's right. I am going here. Princess Toadstool was engaged to this dude(ish) named Prince Haru and he made ONE appearance within the franchise, then disappeared forever. He was apparently the Prince of "Flower Kingdom" and was probably offed in his sleep by one of Mario's cousins. Who knows.
 "Super Mario Brothers: Mission to save Princess Peach!" is a gem for many reasons. Obviously Prince Haru's surprise intervention is a shocker, but stuff like Luigi dressing and acting like Wario the entire movie, the horrific Japanese musical numbers, and the casual cursing from all parties is enough to merit some lols. The whole thing is pretty much just ridiculous from start to finish, but worth the watch. Dust this one off and press play...


Wolves in the Throne Room - "Two Hunters"

2007
[Full Album]

Megaman IV controversy

With the advent of the Megabuster in Megaman IV, Megaman games got a whole lot cooler. It completely revolutionized Megaman gameplay. What a lot of people don't know is that the idea of a chargeable megabuster came from an earlier game with zero market appeal called "The Krion Conquest". Krion was a poorly made, pseudo-Wizard-of-Oz, Japanese platformer which stole a lot of it's design from Megaman games in the first place. Yes, right on down to the sprites. In the game you play a few different colored witches, shooting enemies and making your way to the boss. The differences here are upward shooting, ducking and the golden calf: charging up your shot. This game emerged in 1991, then MMIV in December of that same year. Since Krion went literally nowhere (stayed on the store shelves, really.) and Megaman exploded into an even more powerful franchise, one has to wonder how many people on that developing team were kicking themselves for attempting a copy, then BEING copied by the original game they were attempting to copy... Wtf, right? In any case, I submit BOTH games in hopes that this interesting story survives.
Enjoy the games!


[Play Megaman 4]

---UPDATE---
There was a hack made which combines these two games into one magically mutated material leftover of this age-old conflict: MAGICAL ROCKMAN.
[Play this abomination HERE]

Indie Game Documentary





Yeah, it's the link to the actual movie. Not messing around here in the basement.

Wicked Basement 101

Obscure heavy metal plays in the background as you rifle through hundreds of old NES games, seated on a limited edition Pee-Wee Herman "Chairy" chair, covered in comic books like The Tick and Conan The King. A laptop in the corner is paused in the middle of some new revivalist 8-bit platformer, hooked up to a USB gamepad that harkens back to your first time destroying Dr. Wily. Your host insists that Electric Wizard's Dopethrone is the "album that saved his life" and as he flips you a copy of  SEGA's Desert Strike, you realize you have arrived. This is a Wicked fucking Basement. Fully equipped with the dark wonders of your childhood while completely aware of the evolving culture that surrounds classic gaming, transcendent metallum, and the music of 8bit legends that kept us up until dawn. 

2013
Titles like Super Meat Boy, Megaman 9, Super House of Dead Ninjas, and plenty more have reshaped what gaming means for audiences. A return to the classic platform gives hope to a market flooded with ultra-graphic first person shooter masturbations and MMORPG soul-eaters. The goal? Give games back to the developers. A market for fun, evocative games that are the heart of creative gameplay reemerges. A new environment is created from the bones of the old world.

Similarly, the United States and Canada experience a wave of music in the early-to-mid 2000's that reignites a genre: Black Metal. A genre rife with theatrics, BM music was an extreme music genre that combined the cold, lonesome sounds of the frozen north with mind melting tremolo riffs and ultra Satanic symbolism. It was an answer to rampant Christianity and a protest of a church and state union which trampled on the pagan cultures in Scandinavia.  Flash forward to 2005: Metalcore and Nu-metal have destroyed heavy music culture. Much like the games market of the time, metal has been turned into a homogenized, overproduced nightmare. 

However deep in the forests of Cascadia, bands like Echtra, Fauna, Wolves in the Throne Room and Threnos are reigniting the flames of old with a new brand of metal which breaks free of the mindless consumer culture surrounding the genre at the time. A return to the black sounds of Norway, with a new message that reflects an almost spiritual communion with the Pacific North West. Cascadian Black Metal and it's contemporaries are emerging. In the coming years, the Cascadian style spreads across the US and Canada, birthing new bands in new areas. Bands like DeafHeaven, Slashpine, Ash Borer and many more take cues from the early Black Metal recipe and create a new environment for music.

Wicked Basement is dedicated to these ideas. It seems like culture lost it's way at the turn of the millennium. It's like we got so excited about Y2K and what the "future" was supposed to be that we forgot about what made the present so great. I'm not saying that every game from here on out should be an 8-bit platformer, re-imagined with smoother controls and modern(fkingawesome) programing sense; or that all music needs to reflect a melancholy yearning for the lush mountain forests of the Pacific North West and the Occult...But here in the Wicked Basement, every bit of that will be appreciated to the fullest. It's why you came down here, right?
-N