APRIL FOOL'S DAY
The illustrious saxophoning space ninja Xenon woke me from my slumber through
a Facebook message - it was another one of those first-of-the-month calls
about how I'm supposed to write stuff again, which is not at all unwelcome
since I love being able to tell people "Yeah I'm the guy who writes those
theme summaries on that wildly-popular OCR spinoff." It helps me with women
about as much as telling them "I can't make good music
myself, but I
can drop Shael Riley's name."
Normal operating procedure is, I come up with all of it on the fly, and hope
my
XO misses the subliminal Satanic, pro-segregation rhetoric I carefully
program into all my mildly-homoerotic fantasy fiction. But this time is special
because one of you idiots (I do not know which one specifically) stepped all
up on my tippy-toes and put together his own idea for a theme. Classically,
this is totally kosher and in fact strongly encouraged, because controlling
the next round's funtime wildness supreme has always been the only incentive
to participate; but that ship has sailed, in the sailing tradition of so many
excess kittens in my backpack. This is because genetic surprises who would
amaze and frighten other animals with their own capacity for sheer retardity
should not be allowed anywhere near a leadership position. Observe:
(imgur autocat technology added for shock value)
Thanks to eugenics practices not happening, I get messages like that. Someone's
child is out there in the world waiting to end up on the news, giving his
opinion about a rash of vehicular rapes: "uhm it bad yeah i dun kno why peopel
do it yeah uhm and this neiborhod is so god usally to."
And he won't even
realize it's April Fool's Day so it will never cross his mind to consider the
term "vehicular rapes." Some newscaster is going to make an entire
subdivision look stupid on live TV, and it's all because one father out there
decided it would be hilarious to tell Junior that mom hides her beauty potions
in all the spraybottles under the sink.
But I'm not one to deny a man his dreams, even if they're in crayon. On the
contrary, this mystery remixer's enthusiasim probably taxed his genius so much,
he medically has cancer now - and I salute him for his willingness to push
himself to the limit and beyond for the sake of QEAR. In honor of his courage,
this month's
eligible titles include games where at least one protagonist
and one antagonist have personal theme music.
Eligible Titles
- a whole bunch of Final Fantasy games - I guarantee you, the first
thing anyone will say if you ask them "Name a game with character themes,"
they're going to pick an FF game.
- Toejam and Earl games - the theme music doesn't always play solely
when providing dramatic focus to the character in question, but it doesn't
have to... if the character's name is part of the song title, e.g.
"Lewanda's Love" and "Big Earl Bump."
- select Sonic the Hedgehog titles - You always know when Robotnik's
around, but that's not the case with Sonic until he goes super. In most games,
all playable characters share a super theme, in which case the game actually
does not qualify; the themes have to apply to an individual character.
Ineligible Titles
- Dynasty Warriors and Romance of the Three Kingdoms games -
I guess honestly Liu Bei is the "good guy" of 200 AD China, but you always
root for Lu Bu if you're playing him (and you should).
- classic Megaman games - Everybody gets a theme but Megaman. You'd
think the guy who kills everybody else would have his own soundtrack, man.
- Tetris - The blocks are both your enemy and your friend, but the
game doesn't seem to differentiate between the two. It's just understood
that the ones that kill you are bad. The ones that disappear forever were the
good guys all along. :'(
BONUS
Mashup - And on that note, F4T4L is finally back in IRC, all rejoice! Earn this
bonus if your submission is comprised of two theme tracks from the same game.
They do not necessarily have to belong to feuding characters.
OLD STYLE - (???) For this bonus, Peggy recommends you incorporate samples from
gaming consoles with no more than 32-bit CPUs (Sega Genesis and older). If you
do, you will have BALLS OF STEEL.
East and West - Earn this bonus by simply choosing to remix a track from a game
whose list of credited composers includes both a native to the Western world
(i.e. a white dude) and a native to the Eastern world (i.e. a Japanese guy).
Seanbaby - You can also earn this bonus by remixing a track from a game
that has a review on Seanbaby's website.
Also did you guys know that Richter once did something for Seanbaby? Richter
used to make video games that were often unplayably difficult or hilariously
buggy, just like his websites! The best one he ever made was entitled
Benzer's Crazy Train Flight, and he later made a graphics pack for it
that changed the titular Benzer into Seanbaby!
Seanbaby loved it!
Xenon is the Ailsean of OverLooked.
Mixing begins when you read this.
Mixing ends on April 16th at 11:59 EST (8:59 PM for the PST-ers).
ffuuuuu
