Finally! The Seventh Fantasy (VI)

[CLOUD runs across a narrow metal pipe in a narrow industrial metalscape. Steam billows out from a pipe. A blue glow emanates from the metallic, industrial abyss below. CLOUD twitches back and forth as he attempts to grab a slowly swinging chain. He jumps on the chain, then accidentally jumps back on the platform, then twitches until he jumps back on the chain. He climbs down the chain and jumps onto the broken pipe below. He deftly jumps across the gap where the pipe is broken onto the other end of the broken pipe. Steam continues to billow in a cycle of two repeating frames. CLOUD runs across the narrow metal pipe above the blue light until he reaches a platform near a piece of industrial metal machinery covered in wheels, switches, levers, blue diodes, and pipes that emit two-frame loops of billowing steam. You know, technological science stuff. BARRET and TIFA ignore the laws of conservation of mass and walk out of CLOUD.]

BARRET: Shinra! %$@!

CLOUD: SOLDIER.

TIFA: Mako materia SOLDIER Shinra.

BARRET: %#$%#! Damn!

TIFA: Midgar Sephiroth Shinra. Mako Planet life-force.

[TIFA waves her arms expressively.]

CLOUD: Ex-SOLDIER.

[CLOUD waves his arms in a way that expresses nothing.]

BARRET: #%@&! AVALANCHE Jenova! Promised Land. Midgar &$#@!!!!!!!!

[CLOUD slowly walks in an arbitrary direction, pauses, then walks back to his original place. He raises his arms, then lowers them, and places his head in his palm. He shakes his head, as if to say, "..."]

CLOUD: ...

BARRET: Damn! @%#*&!

[A SOLDIER from Shinra appears. He is defeated by CLOUD, TIFA, and BARRET. CLOUD is a good soldier because he is ex-SOLDIER. He is very good at selecting ATTACK from the menu until the SOLDIER (not from SOLDIER) turns red and fades away. Everyone receives EXP. The party receives a potion.]

CLOUD: ...

CLOUD: Mako Shinra. Midgar Sephiroth.

[BARRET and TIFA walk into CLOUD. The platform shakes. CLOUD falls. Fade to black.]

CLOUD: Materia Jenova... Sephiroth.

[Fade to a slum made. Buildings are made from sheets of discarded metal. The ground is dust with no traces of plant life. Neon lights are everywhere. A MAN walks east, then west, then east again, repeating this cycle for the duration of his existence, pausing only to wave his arms and say, "Shinra Mako inn potion!" when interrupted by strangers.]

AERIS: I have a bodyguard. Planet.

BARRET: #%@!

[The party runs out of the desolate neon slum in search of the next steamy, industrial tower lit by blue lights.]

THIS IS THE

GREATEST

STORY EVER

TOLD!!!

Read previous installments of Finally! The Seventh Fantasy

Here Are Some Links Related to Video Games

Well, well, well! At last, my overtime has come to and end, only to replaced by...temporary unemployment. That's life in the video game business. I don't know yet if that means I'll get back to regularly updating Hot Lavy or if I'll find other ways to busy myself. All I know is that I have a bunch of links.

Andrew Groen - Game|Life
‘Routine’ Game Industry Layoffs Kill Creativity
Hey! Yeah!

Adam Conover - CollegeHumor
Hardly Working: Most Retro Video Game System Ever
The hilarious Adam Conover introduces us to the Skaris One-Bit.

L. Rhodes - Culture Ramp
The Critic
A wonderful interview with my wonderful friend, Jenn Frank, about video game journalism, games as time travel, our generation's "Odyssey Years," and so much more. Brilliant and heartbreaking. Part three in Rhodes' series, "The Ludorenaissance."

Bill Harris - Dubious Quality
"Value"
EA re-released FIFA 12 for Wii this year, but now they're calling it FIFA 13, pretending it's a new game, and charging $50 for it, which is just one example of the wonders of modern video game market. Says Bill Harris, "This is why I've stopped caring whether any of these companies survive. Their incompetence and greed has destroyed the traditional retail ecosystem. Not piracy. Not used games. This is not dinosaurs getting destroyed by an exogenous event. It's strip farming, followed by starvation when the soil is depleted."

Ryan Rigney - Game|Life
Apple’s Favorite Strategy Game Is a Financial Disaster
$300,000 to make; $40,000 in return. This is a fantastic and terrifying look at the luck and economics of iOS and free-to-play games.

Patrick Klepek - Giant Bomb
The Authorship of a Video Game
Patrrick Klepek talks to 5th Cell's Jeremy Slaczka about the collaborative nature of studio game development and the intent behind putting one author's name on a video game.

Jest
50 Attempts At Speech In Early Videogames
You know what I like more than hearing super-compressed speech being force out of video game systems that had no business reproducing human voices? Neither do I. My only problem with this list is that it's too short. No Awesome Possum? No Bubsy? No World Class Leader Board? What a drag.

Jason Tanz - Game|Life
How a Videogame God Inspired a Twitter Doppelgänger — and Resurrected His Career
That would be Peter Molyneux and @PeterMolydeux. The story is actually kind of weirdly heartwarming.

Leigh Alexander - Gamasutra
'As a woman': Misconceptions in the diversity discussion
As a dude, I think diversity is pretty neat.

Jim Sterling - Destructoid
Deadly Premonition: the cult of split-personality
A special edition of Deadly Premonition, the best game on Xbox 360, is coming to PS3. This is good news not only because more people will have an opportunity to play the bizarro not-Twin Peaks adventure, complete with all new bicycle-riding, but because it means this should be the first of many interviews with director SWERY I'll be reading in the coming weeks. One question: When did everyone start calling him Swery65? I thought his name was SWERY, and Swery65 was just the name of the bar in Deadly Premonition. Right? I know some gamemakers have unusual nicknames, but let's not get SWERY mixed up with Suda51.

Alex Navarro - Giant Bomb
Major Round of Layoffs Reportedly Hits Zynga
Yep, life in the video game business.

Ryan Creighton - Untold Entertainment
Men Helping Women Use Computers
Because evidently women can't figure it out on their own.

Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw - Extra Punctuation
It's About Characters, Stupid
I got into a conversation with some people at this summer's Penny Arcade Expo about Resident Evil. At one point, I stopped the arguing and asked each person, one by one, if they care about the series' increasingly prominent and convoluted story. A few hemmed and hawed, trying to defend it, but, in the end, not a single person could feign interest. In this article, Yahtzee breaks down why we find it so dull, and reaches a convincing conclusion about entertainment and storytelling in general.

Game Center CX
Game Center CX: Special Feature - Iwata Asks the Chief
Arino talks to Balloon Fight creator and Nintendo president Satoru Iwata on a recent episode of the delightful Japanese TV show Game Center CX. Both guys are just so likeable that it's impossible not to smile through the whole clip.

Please, just call me York. That's what everyone calls me.

Takin' Care of Business and...

Updates will continue to be light for a while longer. I'll be working overtime every day until the higher-ups tell me otherwise, and I have some additional demands on my free-time that will limit my ability to write about video games to the extent that I'd like.

Escape From the Lavy

There was not a proper update yesterday because I spent my afternoon walking across town to pick up free a guitar. And what better way to test out a new axe than with melancholy covers of Sonic the Hedgehog songs?

I was hoping to have two updates ready today, but scheduling gets a little hard to predict when you start recording music and video. I've planned for a week of Dreamcast music, though, and all the songs I picked will make it onto Hot Lavy in as timely a manner as reality allows.

Good News and Bad News

The good news is that my plans for today's embarrassing Dreamcast Music update have been rudely disrupted.

The bad news is you're getting double updates tomorrow.

While I'd hate to waste one of the bet Dreamcast songs on a half-hearted update, I'd feel terrible if you traveled all the to Hot Lavy for Dreamcast tunes and left empty-handed, so I'm going to spend a few minutes browsing YouTube for music from games I haven't played as a consolation...

This is a cool background track from Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future entitled "Dolphin's Intrigue." It's not the kind of music that demands your attention, but there's certainly a lot going on if you want to pick it apart, especially in the instrumentation. There are so many sounds here that don't typically go together. I think I can hear a sitar, an organ, and something that sounds oddly similar to the Dreamcast start-up, just to name a few.

...And that's all I have. I was really hoping to blow some minds by discovering a secretly-wonderful song from PenPen TriIceLon or Floigan Bros. or something, but, nope, it appears those games have terrible music.

I'll do something extra stupid tomorrow, I swear.

Samba de Hot Lavy

Samba de Amigo is a great Dreamcast game with great music.

This video is...I don't know, you guys.



Dreamcast Music Week continues tomorrow. I'm so, so sorry.

Happy Birfday, Dreamcast!

13 years ago today, a great video game system was released in America. (It was a Dreamcast if you didn't know. Maybe you're allergic to that goofy font I use for titles?)

Dreamcast, as we liked to say back in 1999, was da bomb. Like, groovy, baby. It was most Napster, dawg, and it deserves a grand tribute, but I've been kind of a loser on this site lately, so I'm instead going to go with a little tribute. Each day this week, we'll have ourselves a listen to one of the best songs to grace the Caster of Dreams.

To be clear, this week will not be highlighting the Dreamcast's best games, but the Dreamcast's best tunes, although the overlap between the two is pretty remarkable.

We'll start this feature, as is so often the way, with the beginning. Admittedly, it's stretching the definition of the word "song" to include this on the list, but when you're writing a sporadically updated video game site with an average of three hits per month, little things like "consistency" and "making any sense at all" don't seem terribly important. Jackhammer petunia dice.

What are we actually hearing here? Some echoing rain drops? A cymbal crash, slowed and played in reverse? It's remarkable how effectively a few abstract sound effects can create a mood. Every time I listen to this audio and watch that little orange bounce and swirl around, I'm back in 1999, witnessing the future. It's simultaneously traditional and forward-looking. These aren't video game sounds, or the wild techno-laser blasts we loved so much at the turn of the millennium. I think I'm picking up a Japanese vibe, which would be appropriate, but it's nothing overt. There's a sense of vastness and grandeur, but the whole thing is over in less than ten seconds.

We're dealing more in feelings than absolutes, and I think that fits a console called the Dreamcast just right. When I try to describe why I love the Dreamcast, there's always something more to it than I can convey. I can talk about the games, the controller, the modem, the VMU, its place in history, my own nostalgia...there are plenty of concrete reasons why the Dreamcast is remembered fondly more than a decade after going out of production, but the feeling of the Dreamcast - that je ne sais blah blah - goes beyond reason. We Dreamcast nuts are all a little crazy, and I think that's why the system crashed and burned in the marketplace. It was weird, and it did aspire to be great in ways that weren't easily communicable. Financially, Sega needed for it to be a console for everybody, but, fundamentally, it wasn't.

It's unsatisfying as a writer to say something like, "This is good and important and interesting just because it is," but that's the case. This sound was pure magic for me the first time I heard it, and it's remained that way ever since. For most people I know, it has no such effect. You hear this sound that so perfectly encapsulates the Dreamcast experience, and you either get it or you don't, and nothing I write will change that.

Tomorrow: Actual music!