Tetrisphere!

Ahh, Tetrisphere. This one takes me back to my childhood in 1997, where I spent quite a bit of time at my friend Danny's house playing GoldenEye and Starfox 64. We'd play games at Danny's just about every weekend until all hours of the night. One time I brought Tetrisphere over and just mopped the floor with everybody...because everybody else was confused on how you were supposed to play.

Tetrisphere isn't a complicated game, but it's a pretty unique one that does take a moment to understand. In essence, there's a little robot dude trapped inside a sphere made out of Tetris-style block shapes, and it's your job to help him escape by drilling down through to sphere to create a big enough opening for him to escape. You drill down by manipulating and sliding blocks on the sphere to create situations where three or more blocks of a kind touch. Then your cursor will light up white over the touching blocks and you press A to drop a block. Once the block is dropped, the blocks will blow up and exposed the next layer beneath. It's pretty simple once you understand it, but even trying to explain the game here is making me understand why my childhood friends had a tough time figuring out what was going on.

This game has a bit of an interesting backstory. It was originally developed by H2O Interactive for the Atari Jaguar, titled Phear, but Nintendo execs saw the game being demoed at a Consumer Electronics Show in 1995 and offered the developers a better deal for the game to be published as a Nintendo 64 exclusive instead. H2O accepted but Nintendo's development deadline was too ambitious and H2O was unable to make the October 1996 deadline. The game was eventually completed, though, and it's still a fun game to play today, a rarity on the Nintendo 64.

No small part of my continued enjoyment of this game is due to the excellent electronica soundtrack, composed by Neil Voss. This soundtrack even won 'Best Soundtrack' of 1997 in Nintendo Power magazine. It's easy to see why when you first hear "Prophecy" on starting the game:


Neil Voss - Prophetic


Voss's techno soundtrack was incredibly varied and ambitious for video game music of the time, utilizing samples of things like Balinese singers and scatting vocals. The Nintendo 64 was not an especially amazing platform for video game music, but this is definitely one of the shining moments of the platform. Check out why:

Neil Voss - Faze


Neil Voss - ManicDrumMix


Neil Voss - Extol


Enjoy!

Skyroads!

In 1990, Bluemoon Interactive, an Estonian games developer, released its first game, Kosmonaut, which was remarkable in that it was published in Sweden; it was the first time an Estonian computer game was published outside of the country. Bluemoon released a sequel to Kosmonaut in 1993, Skyroads. It is one of the most fiendishly difficult games I've ever played. It's also fiendishly addictive. Complete mastery of the game has eluded me, but I'm proud to say that I've had my share of small victories against the game's nefarious roads. 

Skyroads is a game in which you attempt to pilot a spacecraft through an intense series of obstacles to reach the final goal.The only real ability your craft has is a jump, the height of which differs based on the gravity of the current level.  You can control the speed of the craft too via the accelerator. Some levels require you to collect oxygen and fuel in order to progress, which are obtained by driving over specific colors on the road. If you die, you begin the level from the beginning. 

It's interesting how so many games that weather the tests of time are the simple ones. Early arcade games such as Asteroids and Defender have aged considerably better than games borne of the 64-bit era such as GoldenEye. The graphics of these old-school style games have now aged to the point where they're the equivalent of the monocle; quaint, but cool in a retro way. Skyroads' gameplay is still every bit as fresh today as it was in 1993; the game could be released on the Nintendo Switch today and people would still buy it. 

Of course, the one thing that dates the game and is simultaneously one of the best things about it is the soundtrack. If released today, there would probably be some slick electro or techno soundtrack in the background. In Skyroads' case, you get a remarkably unique electronica soundtrack, composed by Ott M. Aaloe (with the exception of the title track, which was composed by Hasso Bruck). Originally composed on an Amiga program, Oktalyzer, the soundtrack to this game when composed sounded drastically different than the final version of the game. For example, every tune in the game was pitchshifted up a half a tone, and the timbre of the sounds significantly differs. 

This is my favorite track from the game, the haunting, desert-like Road 6 as it appears in the game.

Ott M. Aaloe - Road 6



And here's the original composed version of that song, so you can hear the difference! It sounds less harpsichord-y, for sure:

Ott M. Aaloe - Road 6



Here's another, desert-sounding song:

Ott M. Aaloe - Road 5



And here's the main theme:

Hasso Bruck - Skyroads Theme



Enjoy!

Fester's Quest!

From 1987-1992 or so, Sunsoft published some pretty decent NES titles, including 1988's classic Blaster Master and 1990's Journey to Silius. This game, unfortunately, is not one of the decent ones. The titular character, the infamous Uncle from the Addams Family cartoons of old, deserved better than to make his NES debut in this poorly-designed flop. The plot of the game is that random hostile aliens have shown up and Fester feels compelled to save the day. As lame as that plot first sounds, now that I think about it, it would be pretty rad to see a random old bald guy fight off an alien invasion with blunderbuss in hand and a lightbulb in his mouth, so I guess I'll have to concede that point.

With all of the rich, colorful characters that the Addams Family universe contains, why are the antagonists of the game random alien creatures? Why is it that when you get a power-up in this game, your gun actually becomes way more cumbersome to use? Why do you only get two health? Why are you slower than molasses when you move? Where is all the thematic flavor? The sound effects aren't even original; they're pulled from the far superior Blaster Master game.

The one thing that I have always enjoyed about this game is the soundtrack. There's not very much of it, and hearing the same few tunes over and over does get old, but this one at least is pretty awesome:

Naoki Kodaka - Fester's Quest Overworld Theme



I also dug the boss music:

Naoki Kodaka - Fester Quest Boss Theme



The composer of the music for Fester's Quest is a man named Naoki Kodaka, who also composed the music for many other Sunsoft titles, including Journey to Silius, Batman, and one of my favorites, Gremlins 2: The New Batch. Today Kodaka teaches composition at the university level.

Enjoy!

Faceball 2000! (GB)

This game is an interesting little gem in Game Boy history. Released in 1991, this game was developed by Xanth Software F/X and is actually a rework of an earlier game called Midi Maze that the same company released on Atari ST in 1987. For the time, Midi Maze was pretty novel; the game was one of the earliest first-person "deathmatch" style video games that allowed up to 16 people to play simultaneously. This was made possible by the developers' utilization of the Atari ST's built-in MIDI port, which was usually used for keyboard and synthesizer inputs. It even supported chat!

Years later, the game was rewritten for the Game Boy platform and like its predecessor, was able to support 16 players with seven of the Game Boy's Four-Player Adapters linked together. The Faceballs themselves were also given distinct personality types. The game could be played in two different modes: "Cyberscape" and "Arena", but they may as well have been named "Single-Player" and "Multiplayer".

Looking back at this title, it's interesting to note how aggressively non-violent this game is, considering it's an early example of a first-person shooter. If you are shot by one of the Faceballs, you are treated to a picture of the ball that shot you saying, "HAVE A NICE DAY!" In the Super Nintendo version, which came out the year after the Game Boy version, you even have this classic sound byte:




It makes a bit more sense if you think of the game in terms of 1987, when Pac-Man was still at the height of his popularity. Video games were still primarily thought of as kid stuff and violent video games were not the norm.

The composer for Faceball 2000 was David Whittaker, an incredibly prolific video game composer who has created music for over 400 different video games. Check out the pulse-pounding beats of Faceball 2000 below:

David Whittaker - Cyberscape



Here's the main title tune:

David Whittaker - Faceball 2000 Intro



Enjoy!

Epic Pinball!

Epic Games is better known today as the company that brought you the Unreal Engine, a gaming development engine that has been used to program many first-person shooter games. However, from 1991-1993, Epic MegaGames released a few PC shareware games that I still love today. One such game is Epic Pinball, developed by James Schmalz.

This was a straightforward pinball game, but pretty slick and polished for its time. The shareware version included just one table, "Android". This table was later updated and changed into "Super Android" for subsequent releases of the game, adding an extra lane on the left side of the table and a brand new theme song. I was a little disappointed when I played Super Android for the first time that they changed the theme song because I loved the first theme so much, but the new theme was also pretty awesome. If you registered the game, you'd get 11 more unique pinball tables (12 if you had the special CD-Rom edition!).

The music for Epic Pinball was composed by Robert Allen. One of the biggest early hits for Epic MegaGames was a game called Jill of the Jungle. Allen, a composer at that time, was impressed by the music from that game and called Epic MegaGames' shareware ordering hotline and asked if they were looking for a music composer. As luck would have it, the owner of the company, Tim Sweeney, got on the line and told him that he could send in a cassette. Impressed by Allen's music, Sweeney called him in to do the music for the games Traffic Department 2192 and Dare to Dream (both of which I quite enjoyed and had good soundtracks!). He kept on with the company afterwards, eventually doing the Jazz Jackrabbit game soundtracks and Epic Pinball.

Due to technical constraints, Allen could only use four sounds at any given time while making the soundtrack, but you probably wouldn't notice that listening to the Super Android table theme:


Robert Allen: Super Android Theme


And here's the original Android theme I like so much:

Robert Allen: Android Theme



Apart from the Android themes, there are several other tracks worth listening to, including the main theme below:

Robert Allen: Epic Pinball Theme


And one of my personal favorites is the Deep Sea table theme. Starts out all mysterious and slow, then becomes a techno slow-jam:

Robert Allen: Deep Sea Theme


Enjoy!