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• 8-Bit Love: The Ten Greatest Vintage Game Songs to Have Sex To, part 2

  Cyriaque Lamar is a New York-based writer with a New Jersey-bred weltanschauung. He’s had original work published at Cracked.com and performed at The New York International Fringe Festival. Cyriaque is thrilled to contribute to 61FPS, as it brings him one step closer to his childhood dream of living on the set of Nick Arcade. 5.) Final Fight CD – “Walk In the Park (Bay Area)” System: Sega CD (1993) Sounds Like: A sweaty nooner with Don Johnson. I always loved the premise of Final Fight. The idea of a city’s mayor stripping down to his underjohns and beating the shit out of unemployed people in order to stimulate job growth was really ahead of its time. Wait? Mike Haggar was actually fighting to save his daughter from an evil street gang? And here I thought the game was some kind of radical Objectivist propaganda. This Bay Area theme is classic whatever console you play Final Fight on, but the Sega CD version pushes it to the limit with gale-force porno guitars. Seriously, these riffs are like an F4 on the Fujita Scale. In my mind’s eye, the person who would get the most out of this track wears a ton of sea foam green and frequents Fort Lauderdale whorehouses. Sometimes, you just gotta be that person. When it comes to the Sega CD, the only thing sleazier is Night Trap. Read More... Posted Apr 16 2009, 05:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: nintendo, actraiser, game boy, rare, capcom, hideo kojima, satellaview, top ten, final fight, sega, commodore 64, atari, chrono trigger, genesis, metal gear, super nintendo, atari 2600, mario paint, sega cd, tetris, star tropics, donkey kong country 2, kid icarus, solid snake, cyriaque lamar, radical dreamers, zoda’s revenge, matt gray, msx, last ninja 2, david wise, streets of rage 2, metal gear 2, yuzo kashiro

• 8-Bit Love: The Ten Greatest Vintage Game Songs to Have Sex To, part 1

  Cyriaque Lamar is a New York-based writer with a New Jersey-bred weltanschauung. He’s had original work published at Cracked.com and performed at The New York International Fringe Festival. Cyriaque is thrilled to contribute to 61FPS, as it brings him one step closer to his childhood dream of living on the set of Nick Arcade. There are three reasons this list exists. First, I felt obliged to highlight 61FPS’s distinction as the gaming apparatchik of an internet sex publication. Second, I wished to showcase the unsung virtuosos of yesteryear who made masterworks using a limited palette of sounds. Finally, I intend to rebut those critics who still dismiss video games as low culture. Using the below examples, I intend to reclaim the carnal legacy of video games by evincing how early console music illustrated the gamut of human sexuality, from atavistic, heteronormative modes of eroticism to polymorphous perversity as delineated by Freud. Plus, the thought of people sticking penises into vaginas to Nintendo music is funny. 10.) Radical Dreamers – “The Girl Who Stole the Stars” System: Super Famicom Satellaview (1996) Sounds Like: Koyaanisqatsi composed on Mario Paint. Since roughly 95% of all human lovemaking involves someone with a XX chromosome pairing, I thought it necessary to seek out my female associates’ thoughts on which game music best applies to amore. The suggestions I received were few yet incisive — responses ranged from “the Kid Icarus theme” to “Who the eff effs to video games?” Ultimately though, I deferred to my own instincts and picked this pan-pipe jam from the Japan-exclusive, text-based sequel to Chrono Trigger. Composed by the legendary Yasunori Mitsuda, “The Girl Who Stole the Stars” is easily the most romantic theme on our list. Read More... Posted Apr 16 2009, 04:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: nintendo, actraiser, game boy, rare, capcom, hideo kojima, satellaview, top ten, final fight, sega, commodore 64, atari, chrono trigger, genesis, metal gear, super nintendo, atari 2600, mario paint, sega cd, tetris, star tropics, donkey kong country 2, kid icarus, solid snake, cyriaque lamar, radical dreamers, zoda’s revenge, matt gray, msx, last ninja 2, david wise, streets of rage 2, metal gear 2, yuzo kashiro

• 30 Years Ago This Week: The CD

  We’re taking a break from our regular 10 Years Ago column this week, but only because nothing happened ten years ago this week—unless you are some kind of terrible extreme sports game aficionado, in which case you can talk about EA’s Rush Down by yourself. Fortunately for the rest of us, something great did happen this week. It’s just something we have to go back a little bit further to discuss. The Compact Disc (released, sort of, on March 8th, 1979) was first publicly demoed thirty years ago this previous Sunday. It went on to become one of the major driving technologies of the digital media revolution. It also broadened the horizons of videogames as a medium, and to an extent democratized the industry as well. Read More... Posted Mar 09 2009, 03:00 PM by Joe Keiser with | with no comments Filed under: sega cd, fmv hell, sony playstation, joe keiser, 10 years ago, cd-i, amiga cdtv, 30 years ago, cd-rom

• Miami Law: Welcome Back Victor Ireland of Working Designs

  Somehow I missed Victor Ireland’s re-emergence last December. I shouldn’t be too surprised. It might be big news to me, but the return of a niche industry icon best remembered by a handful of geeks for his American localizations of niche videogames ten years ago isn’t exactly Edge Online headline news material. It’s sidebar at best. For everyone reading who doesn’t smile when they hear the word Alundra, here’s the score. Victor Ireland co-founded Working Designs. After opening in 1986, Working Designs was one of the only publishers in the Western world devoted to localizing strange Japanese games, particularly those JRPG things we enjoy so much here at 61FPS. Working Designs translations tended to be a bit strange, littered with juvenile humor and American pop culture references. They serviced a very small audience; not only were they putting out games in an unpopular genre, they had a habit of releasing them for doomed consoles like the Turbo-Grafx 16, Turbo CD, Sega CD, and Sega Saturn. Working Design’s golden age was when they started releasing Playstation games at the end of the 1990s. Read More... Posted Mar 04 2009, 08:05 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, nintendo ds, working designs, playstation 2, sega, Playstation, lunar, sega cd, lunar the silver star, sega saturn, hudson, arc the lad, turbo grafx 16, turbo cd, gaijinworks, Miami law

• FMV Hell: Lunar, The Silver Star

  Time once again for a brief look at the Sega CD games that made us women and men (if you're currently a twenty-something, I mean). The full-motion video in games like Lunar, The Silver Star is unique stuff for a few reasons. First, it was an unfiltered assault of glittery, shojo-eyed anime during an age when most game localisers struggled to hide any cultural evidence that video games indeed come from Japan. Of course, Working Designs is still known for taking some, er, extreme liberties with their own translations and localisations, but by God that's another tome for another night. All you need to know is that Lunar saw its US release in 1993, ages before Pokemon made anime mainstream (bonus fact: anime became mainstream in Canada in 1996, thanks to Sailor Moon recieving an after-school time slot). The intro for Lunar is also made special by its...lack of animation. Maybe we were too busy drooling on the television screen at the time, but when you watch Sega CD intros in today's age of a thousand frames per second, you begin to notice that the "cut scenes" that wowed us over a dozen years ago are little more than kindergarten-grade cut-outs with pinned, movable limbs. Read More... Posted Aug 14 2008, 07:07 PM by Nadia Oxford with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: working designs, pokemon, japan, lunar, sega cd, fmv hell, sonic cd, translation, anime, sailor moon, lunar the silver star, localization

• FMV Hell: Sonic CD

  I'm pretty sure most original prints of Sega CD games were long ago ground up into dog food, but the resurrection of Vay on the iPhone got me nostalgic for the anime cutscenes that used to preced certain Sega CD games. Each scene employed about sixteen on-screen colours and had about thirty frames of animation, but there was something charming about those florescent marionettes. They were like figures drawn in an Autistic kid's painting: clumsy, but admirable for the attempt. (And vasty preferable to the grainy live-action FMV that usually gummed up the games in the Sega CD library.) The Sega CD is largely considered a failure, but every failed system has its must-own games. Sonic CD was certainly a gem, easily the highlight of Sonic the Hedgehog's up-and-down career. Sonic CD began with the standard Sega CD animated intro. It's interesting to note that there are a few versions of the anime. Most obviously, there's a Japanese intro and an American one. The animation in both is more or less the same, but wars have been fought over which country has the better intro song. America long ago became familiar with Spencer Nilsen's "Sonic Boom, Sonic Boom, Sonic Boooooom" whereas Japanese children got to hear a song about leather and lace and what might possibly be a chorus that begins with "Toot toot Sonic Warrior." Here's the Japanese intro stacked up against the American one. Engage comparison. Read More... Posted Jul 21 2008, 08:40 PM by Nadia Oxford with | with 5 comment(s) Filed under: music, sega, sonic the hedgehog, sega cd, fmv hell, sonic cd, fmv, spencer nilsen

• Sega CD on iPhone: I Like Where This Is Going

  The iPhone is new and exciting. Sega CD games are pretty old, but still kind of exciting. What happens when you put the two together? I often wish I could go back in time and torment my younger self. I think we'd have some really cool conversations about video games. I mean, who cares about the fact that we've made major medical advancements or that we can travel in space buses (oh shit wait no we can't)? I want my younger self to hear all about how we can play the coveted games of our childhood on our telephones. Not that I have an iPhone. It's totally because I'm not into that useless capitalist waste. It's not like my mom's the only person who ever calls me. Sniff. You know I've never played a Lunar game? I know what I want to see next in the iPhone, thank you. Oh and it must retain the bizarre Working Designs "translation." Read More... Posted Jul 18 2008, 07:10 PM by Nadia Oxford with | with no comments Filed under: rpg, working designs, sega, retro, iphone, lunar, sega cd, vay