subhumanzoids

Lo, humans! I do beseech thine eyes and ears once more!

Today’s jamfest comes from the unknown genius I can only dub “The Guy Who Composed Shadowgate‘s Music.” As that likely gave away, the soundtrack of this entry is Shadowgate which, in this instance, is available on your Nintendo Entertainment System. You may also remember the Virt cover medley of this music that I linked in an earlier post.

What’s so special about this mythical music, though? I should first confess that I was never very into Adventure games as a child. While their concepts are novel, they are also, for all intents and purposes, novels. That wasn’t very appealing to my younger self, to which extensive scrolls of text in a video game never quite sounded more attractive than the Frog and Toad books I so coveted.

Also, the games are written as if there aren’t visuals to accompany them, like some grease-mitted scribe made a couple beans on the side by penning Adventure titles after nightly sessions with his role-playing club and the developers just crammed the vaguely related text into the game. “Before you is a monster, fair knight!” I know! Give me a sword!

Then again, you also end up getting serious gems like the one below.

Shadowgate was a bit different, though. It can be a horrific experience to an impressionable boy, one that’s only heightened by the haunting music. The soundtrack is almost entirely situational; there’s a track that inspires high adventure, one that signals horror, a couple that reek of the spoils hidden deep within the titular castle, and many songs of death. For your convenience, I have personally tagged each track with custom care, forced to forge my own titles for these devious ditties.

Download it here (MegaUpload – 6.24 MB)

Track listing:
1. Song of Trepidation (2:08)
2. A Hopeful Fellow (1:06)
3. Frightened But Curious (1:32)
4. Delirium (0:27)
5. The Adventure is Afoot (0:58)
6. Deeper and Deeper (1:22)
7. Death Surely Awaits (0:54)
8. I Am Stronger Than You Think! (0:39)
9. Skeletons (Trapped) in the Closet (1:02)
10. Thy Game is Over (1:30)
11. A Brief Treatise Upon Wraiths (0:43)
12. Won’t Ye Come Again? (1:26)

http://www.youtube.com/p/A29D01F560D9ECBB

For someone that moved to an entirely new city not even a month and a half ago, I sure haven’t taken many pictures! Before I attempt to rectify this by taking my aging Olympus out to the mean streets of Hoboken, I present to you two distinctly different images.

The first represents an enterprising young man thrusting his hand in the pool of commerce in the interest of making sure that he doesn’t have to walk around the city baring his feet. Nike Air Max 1! I summon your time-reversing powers to give me the power of the “slam dunk” and teach me to “ball”!

The second picture is one of horror, and has experienced no Photo Shoppe adjustments whatsoever. This young demon, named “Rocky” and aged hardly past a puking pup, immediately turned a fully lit room into Hell once the photo was snapped (also, my fingers were over the flash)!

This should fill your grody book quota for the week. While Amazon’s page offers a tidy explanation of the book’s queasy contents, I rather prefer the synopsis on sillasstoys.com.

Owl Puke – The Book is a kit that contains everything you need to learn about the wonderful world of owl puke. Owls eat small rodents and then throw up the indigestible parts in a fuzzy pellet. With the guidebook in hand, you can inspect the professionally collected and heat-sterilized pellet for the bones of the animals that the owl has eaten. A plastic sorting tray is also included. A great science experiment!

Perhaps they will send me one for “review.”

Yuzo Koshiro is simultaneously the greatest and most flamboyant game music composer of all time. Perhaps you’ve found yourself transforming the squalid pit you call a bedroom into a makeshift gay night club by pounding out his Streets of Rage soundtracks. Or maybe you fancy yourself quite the game-rip aristocrat, swaying your hands to the orchestral groove of Actraiser Symphonic Suite (probably one of the greatest game soundtracks of all time).

I find all of this acceptable, even commendable. Today, however, I must ask that you oscillate wildly to one of Koshiro’s finest moments: Super Adventure Island. Within its reverberating walls, you’ll find that this maestro does, indeed, toot his own horn! He also wets whistles, bangs on enough bongos to make DK jealous, and makes a song so sensual in “Essential Vitamins” that Barry White’s likely to leap from his grave and belt a brisk, boner-bopping baritone behind the beat.

Please, see for yourself: Super Adventure Island OST (Megaupload)

As is expected, you can hear a lot of his typical influences in this soundtrack. Lots of “urban” breakbeats, reggae rhythms and funky freakouts. Through these compositions, Master Higgins is able to hammer, boomerang, and fireball his way through an adventure that, to this day, remains pretty darn difficult. You can practically feel the overwhelming pressure to succeed weighing on Higgins’ shoulders in track 13, “Dark Castle of Living Things.”

Go, save the romance!