So the other I was sitting around, playing this little game called we love katamari. I was really enjoying myself with the game, where you rolled up stuff that make exquisite noises and people and animals that scream in terror cos they know they're going to become incinerated and then transmuted into cosmic-space-material.
Right anyway, i noticed that the music in the game was fuckin incredible, well, not all of the music, but a large portion of the soundtrack was very memorable. So being the irresponsible teenager that I am, i seeked them out on such notorious file-sharing clients like kazzaa and limewire, mostly the latter, because the former sucks and I've uninstalled it's unholy presence from my hard drive.
So I went online and limewired Katamari as it was the keyword that both games have in common.(we love katamri is the sequel to another game called katamari damacy, which was equally as wonderful) And I downloaded the theme song for we love katamari, which was just heavenly. The song was a mix between Swing, Jazz, and Big Band, with japanese lyrics mixed with english lyrics. It called Katamari on the Swing.
As I was enjoying that song, I felt cheeky and googled "katamari damacy reviews" to see what the critics thought about the game. I came across rottentomatoes.com, which is a site that serves to aggregate all the reviews on the net(as many as they can, anyway) of a certain movie, or in this case video-game in one place. I scrolled down the list of reviews, seeing that most critics gave it a thumbs up, I then proceeded to tell myself that yes, katamari damacy for the PS2 is a fuckin good game. I read through some of the reviews that bashed it, mostly saying that the graphics suck. I called them idiots and moved on.
Just as I was about to exit rotten tomatoes, my cursor stopped at the "back" button, I noticed this review, which gave katamari a 'fresh' rating, and yet it's sub headline said " I don't play this game anymore.". Which was, at a glance, obviously contradictory to the "fresh" rating bestowed upon the game. This particular review had caught my attention, and so I clicked on the link that directed me to the review. What followed next was the cleverest game review, that I have ever read. It was more intelligent than all of the mainstream reviews put together times ten. It was the best piece of criticismfor a game that I have ever read. I was hooked.
The site hosting the review was called "insert credit". And to me it was the best thing since sliced bread. I devoured all of their articles, reading like a maniac ale into the night, and after all that jazz I went back to the katamari review. At the end of the review he made a mock-soundtrack for the game, corresponding to his views on the game, which I will not discuss here, since the article is thousands of words long and pretty much speaks for itself. Digressing, the soundtrack had such names as, pizzicato five, lemon jelly, tokyo ska paradise, and a host of others I haven't checked out yet. Referring back to the begining of the entry, I said that the music in katamari damacay and we love katamari is absolutely excellent, and so, detecting that these pieces of music would somehow relate to how the game made me feel, how it played, and other realted stuff, I limewired them.
This japanese band mentioned, pizzicato five, had me hooked on their music. It was a blend of jazz, funk, psychaedelic, electronica and traditional japanese music elements. I thought that they were damn good. So I did a little research on them, and along the way I found out that they were classified under a genre called "shibuya-kei". The wikipedia entry for shibuya-kei listed some other interesting artist that may have rockin good music. As of writing I've already downloaded more than fourty songs under what I suspect would be shibuya-kei music. I'm drenching myself in a whole new world of musical goodness. The last time I felt like this was when I discovered that there was something called jazz in music.
Damn it feels good to be this way.To feel like you've discoevered a new toy to play with, a new continent to explore, a new planet the claim as your own. And to think all this started with a videogame. A very GOOD videogame at that.
Man I love my videogames.
Links to those who might be interested.
Pizzicato five
insert credit
Shibuya-kei
No comments:
Post a Comment