DD #45: “Lucasarts Presents: True Detective”

Family Exorcism (ファムリー ふつまし), developed by Coal in 1984 for the Nintendo Famicom.

Well

Happy Halloween

(more to come)

lost property control organization (samidare/hoshibackyard)

Sweet Home (Walkaround Ambiance #1) [from “Barnbellow’s Estate”] (Gonkaka)

This is something long overdue; actual music for my Barnbellow’s Estate project.

For those of you that haven’t been around long or don’t follow my exploits closely, Barnbellow’s Estate is a Clock Tower inspired project that has existed, in some form, since about 2007, though it has gone through quite a few tweaks and changes within that time frame. Like a lot of my projects, it started out as an idea for a game I was certain I’d somehow make, but once reality caught up with me a bit I rejigged it into a “fake soundtrack” Gonkaka project. Because I might not be able to make full games, but I CAN make soundtracks and write an obscene amount of flavour text!

There are two primary modes of ‘gameplay’ in Barnbellow’s Estate, were it to exists: one wherein you explore the impossibly large estate the game takes place in, solving puzzles, reading lore, and engaging with all manner of survival horror tropes; and one wherein you have to escape from the designated pursuer of whatever area of the estate your in, using the environment to your advantage (either to hide from or hinder said pursuer), or in a pinch, use Yuna’s digital camera to stun and temporarily disable them. This is a piece that would play during one of the former sections- specifically, it’s intended to be the primary walkaround music for the very first area of the game (the hysterical laughter and/or sobbing sample that I messed about with in the final section is a giveaway here, as it’s intended to tie into the game’s first pursuer; the Vengeful Mother, whom makes an appearance in and has some of her backstory expanded upon in this short story I wrote). It’s also a good demonstration of the general sound direction I wanted to take the walkaround tracks in: a sorta free-form, experimental semi ambient style with more melody driven breaks and a shot or two of some 80s-styled synth patches for cheesy horror flick fair.

This piece does have some more specific sources of inspiration, though; the use of rave stabs owes itself more to the music from G Darius than more dance-floor ready tracks, as G Darius’ score did tend to make use of orch hits and rave stabs in unsettling and sometimes dischordant ways (here’s an example track). The track’s general vibe also owes a lot to the Ancient Castle Stage music from the first Devil May Cry - the idea to use some effect-ladden and otherwise messed with samples of orchestra tune-ups and an opera singer belting out in a freeway in particular were inspired by the sudden appearance of a pleasant string melody overlaid atop the offputting ambiance (the big, bombastic organ/string section also owes itself to the Ancient Castle Stage track). The name is also a deliberate reference to the NES/Famicom horror title Sweet Home, because I don’t think I’ve made my love of that game quite clear enough yet.

Fun trivia fact: this is technically a stealth remake of an older attempt at the first-area-walkaround-track for Barnbellow’s Estate, called “Tragedy United Them”. About the only thing it borrows from the original is that organ section, though.

This song includes the following sounds from freesound.org:

orchestra warming up (BeeProductive)

underpass (Simon Gray)

Chamber Ensemble Tuning 2 (Cunningar0807)

G51-09-Woman Sobs and Laughs (Craig Smith)

Video Game Idea: A Shmup inspired by US labor history, particularly in Appalachia in a way that @afloweroutofstone and @lang-lassiter might dig.

Basically a group of miners working in horrible conditions on a planet far in space go on strike. The corporation who owns the planet collaborates with the Galactic Federation to take ‘em out. The player character is an old; beardy hillbilly-lookin type veteran of some long-ago space war who still owns the ship he used in it, albeit in somewhat ramshackle condition.

It’d be part classic SHMUP/rail shooter/aerial-dogfight-game, but also part resource management as you have to pick up parts from destroyed foes to repair and add on to your ship, because it;s constantly breaking down and in need of repairs.

As for the inspiration…

Keep reading

If I could make whatever I wanted (independent of my programming/modeling ability).

Kazuo Umezu’s horror manga The Drifting Classroom may have reigned in the 70s, but it wasn’t until a decade later that game developers in Japan would begin to cash in on its popularity. The Famicom title, as seen above on a bootleg NES cart, sold millions, and was lauded for its 2D platforming depiction of the manga’s harrowing events in a slightly truncated form. In fact, the game was so popular that an official soundtrack was released, containing every piece of music from the title. Whether you’re familiar with the manga or not, you can surely find excitement in the tale of an elementary school zapped to an uncertain, desolate future, where adults resort to barbarism while the children devise a new world order.

Ah yes, that's what people typically think the title refers to. But due to the lack of anything car-related in the game or any depiction of Mansell in the game itself, people still question who the title actually refers to.

Fourteen obscure NES/Famicom ROMs that were never released in North America, according to a neural network:

Power Punker (Europe)

Business Gaiden (Japan)

Astro Robin Hood (Japan)

Entity Rad (Europe)

World Championship Shting (Japan)

Star Trek - The Atlantis Bone (Japan)

Insection - The Arcade Game (Europe)

Captain Player Earth (Japan)

Magic Dark Star Hen (Japan)

Murde - The Fingler’s Quest (Europe)

Metal Fighter Blaseball (Japan) (Rev A)

Smurf the Edify (Japan)

Skate or Space Dive Bashboles (Europe)

Chack'van, Ultimate Game of Power Blam (Japan)

Nigel Mansell’s Font Fighting (Japan)

Witness all of Famicase 2018′s brilliant designs ⊟ 

All 250 entries from this year’s My Famicase Exhibition – Meteor’s showcase of cart designs for made up Famicom games – are now available for you to click through and enjoy! This is way more convenient than opening a million tabs from Twitter’s #famicase hashtag, and you can get a better sampling of the contributions from Japanese artists. Plus, there are descriptions for all of the concepts, though you may need to open Google Translate for some.

The designs we featured above come from Anna Dittmer, イイヌマ, ヤマダユウス型, 廸, NEKONOKO, イズ, Dima Goryainov, rayzones, Chris Furniss, and Liam Higgins. You can see all of the cartridges on display at Meteor’s game shop and gallery in Nakano, Tokyo until May 13.

► THE NEW CLUB TINY IS HERE  Support Tiny Cartridge!

In Never Say Never Again, Super Villain Maximillain Largo challenges James Bond to a round of “Domination”, a competitive realtime strategy game that combines elements of Risk and Missile Command with betting and electrical shocks as feedback. The game uses a pair of screens on each player’s side to display information as well as a transparent display between them. The whole thing fits very well within the Architecture of Villains. It’s also interesting how frequently Risk-style war games occur. This is the third we’ve seen after Eschaton and Nuke ‘Em.

(Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a clip from the movie on YouTube otherwise I would’ve included it here.)

Video Games That Maybe Only Exist in My Head, Part 1

Nebulous (Infocom, 1984).