This is about a week late, but it wouldn't feel right if I didn't write a review for the followup of one of my favorite albums of last year. Producer Vanilla graced us with the excellent album Sweet Talk last year and a year later he drops Origin, a Japanese and Hip-Hop infused mixtape. The combination makes for quite a relaxing listen. The tunes remind me a bit of Nujabes and DJ Okawari, but it does have that distinct Vanilla flavor. Lutes, flutes, drums, and snares make up the majority of the compositions and his usage of these instruments create a magnificently tranquil atmosphere.
A few of these tracks do shy away from the Japanese sounds. "All in My Mind" is more of the soul inspired beat that Sweet Talk consisted of and it has some strong guitars and a dashing melody that makes it one of the best on the project. "That Dream Again" I can't quite label the kind of Hip-Hop sound it has, but to take a jab at it I would say it's more akin to boom bap. "Swept Away" is also another soul inspired production. It doesn't quite resonate with me as much as "All in My Mind", but it is still a decent track from a great producer. Probably one of the best tracks on the album, "Summer" has a great rendition of "Summertime Madness" by Kool & The Gang. It creates that same nostalgic summertime vibe while also providing that unique Vanilla essence to it. Overall this album is one of the best I have heard from this year vocals or not and it is definitely worth a listen.
In a week's time two new characters have been revealed for Capcom's upcoming fighter Street Fighter V. The first revealed on September 11 was Rashid, a character hailing from the Middle East, and early this morning, Karin, from Japan.
Rashid looks to be a very mobile character. Being a character that can manipulate wind his mobility and special attacks are reflected through it. His dashes are quick, he has a command run, a wall jump, and he seems to move through the air quickly with dive kicks. He has a spinning special move that looks to be good for some applying pressure and chip damage. One version of it seems him vertically which suggests it can be used as an anti-air. He also has a mini tornado projectile that veers in an arc going from low to mid air. His V-Trigger skill appears to give him access to a stationary tornado move that covers both the air and ground good for applying some extra damage or controlling space. Aesthetically I like Rashid's design. His Middle Eastern attire makes him unique from the rest, but it isn't stereotypical, the owl object on his back I'm guessing is a jet pack, but I'm indifferent to it, and I find it funny that he has a scouter like eyepiece over his left eye. Overall Rashid looks to be a good character. I prefer mobile characters in my games and he definitely fits the bill. He will probably be among the first characters I try.
Yesterday Capcom dropped Karin at TGS (Tokyo Game Show). Karin made her debut to the franchise in Street Fighter Alpha 3 as a rival to Sakura. This rich blond Japanese girl sporting the Shirley Temple ringlets and bow, is the rekka character of this game. Her normals have pretty decent range and her special moves all appear to be about lengthening combos and also has a reversal for her V-Trigger. She honestly reminds of Fei Long in playstyle and I don't think I'm far off in that description. She's a mid to close range fighter by the looks of it. The gameplay videos released don't show any high caliber play so it's hard for me to determine if she's to my liking or not. I do like her visual design however, though the color of her eyes look a bit strange. It's looks sort of like hazel, but with much more pronounced yellow in it. If her laugh becomes a taunt I can see definitely see myself using it.
Both of these characters look to be sufficient additions to the game and according to leaks we have about four more characters to go.
A few days ago Overclocked Remixes released their newest project on their site that's an homage to my personal favorite game of all time, Final Fantasy IX. This is a remix compilation album of 48 tracks from the aforementioned video game. The album is composed of about twenty-five different producers which one would think would amount to some great range in sounds, but most of this album sounds to be composed by one artist.
There's an overwhelming amount of rock and metal mixes in this game, but most of them suffer from guitar riffs that may be at a bit of an octave that is too high which makes it a bit unpleasant to listen to as it feels like my ear drums are being attacked and it leaves a slight ring in my ears. The melodies and compositions on these tracks are pretty by the books and fail to differentiate themselves from the massive number of other rock remixes out there on the internet.
The tracks that move away from that range from being bad, to tolerable to decent, and great for a couple tracks. The techno and chiptune mixes I found seem to suffer from the same problems as the rock and metal mixes. The quality of sound is so sub par that it makes it hard to listen to for a while. I'm not sure if it was due to whatever program the producer used, but it would be a lot better if the notes were just toned down a bit. "Terraforming Gaia" I have to point out sounds nothing like the track from the game and it's presence is weird because of it. The first track I found myself moderately enjoying was "Lunar Rebellion" which is a remix of "Jesters of the Moon". The track is more serene and has a slight Latin vibe to its guitars. "In the Hall of the Gangster King" and "Miles and Miles Away" are the stand out tracks to me in this album. The former is a piano piece that sounds like it's straight from the Piano Collections: Final Fantasy IX album and the latter is a jazz mix that has a really delicate and soothing sound to it. It makes me want to hear a jazz album of the game actually.
There are also a few vocal tracks in this project and they are some of the more intolerable tracks in the game. The vocalists on these tracks are pretty average and probably bordering on bad as their vocal range is relatively weak. They are all relatively soft, not a strong soulful voice that guts your insides among them. Katethegreat is relatively popular in the Final Fantasy fanbase, but I find her voice to be very forgettable.
Out of the 48 tracks I ended up keeping 30 of the tracks, but will probably only end up listening to "In the Hall of the Gangster King", "Miles and Miles Away", and "A Rose in the Storm" multiple times. My verdict is that you should at least give this a listen. It's available for free and I posted a link to the SoundCloud stream above for your convenience.
Rap is my most listened to music genre out there with video games being my favorite form of entertainment and art so it's only natural for me to have interest in the integration of the two mediums.
There are some notable and recognizable rappers that make homages to video games in their music. Jay-Z's "Money, Cash, Hoes" samples Sega's Golden Axe and J. Cole's "Dollar and a Dream 3" samples Yoko Shimomura's "Darkness of the Unknown" from Kingdom Hearts II. There are also rappers who reference games in their songs like Jean Grae who titled one of her songs "Kill Screen" and said the lines "I'm going for the kill screen, fistful of quarters
Billy Mitchell, I'm a fiend; jumping barrels, famous sauces," in reference to Donkey Kong and the documentary King of Kong that told the story of two players who hold World Guinness Book records for the game. Raekwon has also made a song for Marvel vs Capcom 2 and both Flying Lotus and Just Blaze were commentators on the Red Bull documentary Diggin in the Carts.
There has also been quite a few games that featured some original hip-hop songs: Persona 3, Catherine, Street Fighter III: Third Strike, and of course Parappa The Rapper. The most popular entry of SSX bore the name Tricky from Run DMC's song and it was also the featured song of the game.
There is an entire sub-genre in rap that particularly focuses on the subjects of geeky culture like computers, comics, science-fiction movies like Star Wars, and of course video games. I became aware of the sub genre somewhere in the late 2000's, but I never paid much attention to it as I had found that most of the content being rather bad. I am not alone in this regard either, even among video game fans the majority do not like the genre and there is a reason for it.
Most nerdcore rappers just simply aren't good. A problem with a lot of these rappers is not the subject matter, but
their execution. Voice is a lot of importance in rap and a good chunk of
these rappers are below standard because they haven't mastered use of
their voice. This is all subjective like music itself, but many of these rappers suffer from voices that have an inflection that comes off incredibly cheesy and stereotypical nerdy. Wordplay and flow are also factors in this, and I also see a
lack in general when it comes to that department and that is why I see
J-Roc from Clear Soul Forces being the pinnacle in that regard and others like MC Frontalot and
Adam WarRock as being terrible. J-Roc has great control of voice and flow.
His method is more of the freestyle approach when it comes to it, as it being mostly game references and word play, but he
makes it good, he owns it. The majority of rappers in the realm who choose to make a theme revolving around a game are also too on
the nose when it comes to the subject matter. There should be a breadth of
subtlety.
Instead of directly talking about the game, choose a theme or story
element that could be the focus of the song without it being blatant.
There are plenty video games out there with themes that are shared in
some of the greatest storytelling rap songs. Vice City and San Andreas
both have tales of rags to riches stories that occur in a lot of rap
songs such as Biggie's Juicy and there are countless games with love as
a theme and there are just as many rap songs on the same subject.
If the rapper is clever enough you wouldn't even know it was even about a
video games unless you paid very close attention to it. Take Common's I Used to Love H.E.R.
for example. Upon a first listen one might actually think he was
talking about a woman he had a crush on, but aside from him revealing at
the end of the song that he was talking about Hip-Hop, you would have
to use contextual clues from the metaphors and euphemisms to infer that he was
talking about how the culture changed over time.
Though I criticize the way video game rap has been used prominently in the sub-genre that focuses on it, there are some that I like outside of J-Roc.
Sammus is a New York rapper who gets her name from the character Samus who leads Nintendo's Metroid franchise. This Ithaca rapper I was introduced to a friend who showed me a video of a collective called NPC (Nerdy People of Color). I checked out her music that night, but I found that I didn't like her much mainly because of her voice, but it wasn't for the same reasons I stated earlier. I had found her voice to sound too much like many of the current trap rappers that I do not like. I took some time off and listened to other artists. I did discover that one of my old favorites, Lin Que used similar inflections so it is not an entirely new thing and it also made me more accepting to the sound. When I came back and listened to Sammus for a second time I enjoyed her. I didn't find her great, but decent and in some cases good. Most of her music, despite her name isn't in relation to Metroid or even video games, but a good portion of her game themed tracks come off pretty decently. In her last album release Another M she took the persona of space bounty hunter. This is not unlike rappers like Kool Keith and Method Man who have the alter egos Dr. Octagon and Johnny Blaze. She recounts tales and aspects of Samus Aran throughout the album. "Cybernetic Armor" being about Samus past of being an orphan and desire to meet her parents and "Power-Ups" simply being about kicking ass across the galaxy. The former mentioned is in the form of storytelling which is also a heavily prevalent approach to rap that adds a bit of adventure and depth to the song. While I praise this I do think that Sammus can improve. Her flow can use just a bit more work and her hooks can sometimes be awful such as in "Power-Ups" and in "School's Out". The issue with the hooks are either that she has vocals on the track with the singer having an awful voice (usually her) or the particular rhythm feels disjointed.
Mega Ran is also another popular video game rapper, but honestly I haven't liked a single track of his with video game as his subject matter and I can't listen to an entire album of his, video game related or not. He suffers from a constant lack of flow for me and despite his long discography he doesn't seem to have improved at all. Overall, video games as a subject in rap has a long way to go when it comes to quality and exploration.
On the opposite side hip-hop has made a few appearances in video games. My first experience with the integration was in the game Parappa the Rapper which is also noted to be the first rhythm based video game. This video game put you in the reins of a anthropomorphic dog who just wanted to hang with his friends. In the game you would play these dream segments where you would time button presses with on screen prompts to a rap song that was related to a particular desire of Parappa's. The game was an odd and forgive the term tongue-in-cheek, but outside of these musical elements, the game didn't have much relation to the genre. The game went on to release a rock spin-off called Um Jammer Lammy in 1999 and a sequel in 2001 for the PlayStation 2.
While typing this video I did find another game that included hip-hop that predated Parappa the Rapper and that game is Rap Jam for the Super Nintendo. It was released back in 1995 by Motown Software and was a basketball game in which the players were all rappers. I want to try the game out for myself some time in the future so I didn't delve deep into it, but I would also assume that rap music is the center of the soundtrack.
As for other games, the next game I would find with a bit of hip-hop in it was Grand Theft Auto III and its following sequels. Grand Theft Auto III featured a rap radio station in the game that blew my mind at the time and later found out that the DJs on the station DJ Stretch Armstrong and Lord Sear were actual real life DJs. The series would continue to feature hip-hop stations and real DJs. Outside of the GTA series I came across Def Jam Vendetta and Def Jam Fight for New York. Both games allowed the player to play as rappers in an arena. Def Jam Vendetta was a wrestling game while Fight for New York was a fighting game with wrestling elements. Fight for New York was my favorite because the roster was a lot larger than Vendetta, the gameplay was better, and it ingrained hip-hop into it a lot more than Vendetta. Fight for New York's campaign had you create a character while you fought through several underground fight clubs leaded by hip-hop icons such as Method Man, Slick Rick, and Crazy Legs. The last one brings up a good subject, because unlike some other games that just feature rap music and rap artists, this game acknowledge the other aspects of hip-hop. All of the celebrity characters in the game weren't just rappers you had people like Crazy Legs who were b-boys, you had Jacob the Jeweler who is a popular Jeweler who have done work for rappers such as Jay-Z, and even reggae artists.
The game also allowed you style your character in many variants of hip-hop clothing and your attire in the arena contributed to your charisma. This was a monumental game for rap fans out there, but the series ultimately came to an end when the poorly received Def Jam Icon came out and its studio closed in 2007.
Mark Ecko's Getting Up took the brand from the once big hip-hop clothing line Ecko and made a game designed around the hip-hop art of tagging. I never played this game either when it was released for the PlayStation 2, but was interested after reading a couple reviews.
There were more rhythm based games that featured hip-hop such as Def Jam Rap Star and DJ Hero, but there hasn't been a game with a theme outside that genre on in general in quite a while. Sometime last year I came across this video of a trailer for a RPG game with a hip-hop focus, but it was never stated if the video was just for fun or if it would become an actual game.
However, I do hope that we see a few more hip-hop inspired games in the future. Metal got Brutal Legend and I would like to see something similar for Hip-Hop, but I don't want it to be a RTS (Real Time Strategy) like Brutal Legend. If one doesn't get made soon, then I will make a hip-hop themed RPG myself. The video game industry is always looking for new subjects to touch upon and hip-hop would be a great one in my opinion.
Through Famitsu, Capcom has announced the latest entry to the Ace Attorney series, Ace Attorney 6 which appears to be a placeholder name at the moment. On the game website there are a few screenshots and concept art to be found. It is also revealed that the game will be for the Nintendo 3DS and there will be a live stream of the game and a playable demo at this year's Tokyo Game Show.
From the Famitsu page the following details have been revealed:
Phoenix Wright reprises the role of attorney and travels to a foreign nation for an undisclosed objective.
This nation does not use attorneys and judges rely on oracles to conduct verdicts.
Bokuto Tsuani, a tour guide, is on trial and Mr. Wright jumps in to defend him at the last minute.
A new water mirror mechanic is mentioned, but it is not explained along with other changes in the court room stating that the "usual roles don't apply".
The developers decided to put Phoenix Wright in a new location because they felt that over in the recent games Wright's successes in the courtroom has ostracized him from any competing lawyers in Japanafornia and his talents could be used in a country where they seemingly don't need him could create a sense of turnabout in trials.
Option to enable and disable hints included.
Capcom wants to defy players expectations in a good way.
There is currently no release date for the Japan release nor an announcement for a North American localization.
