Monday, November 29, 2010
I can see how you may have confused those
I was chatting with a Spanish-speaking friend a bit ago and I was trying to remember how to say "I am lonely." So I googled it hoping for the best, and here I found this...
My personal favorite is 'I am in business school at Victoria and eventually want to do chinese business," but "I am going to rape you" is pretty funny, too.
My personal favorite is 'I am in business school at Victoria and eventually want to do chinese business," but "I am going to rape you" is pretty funny, too.
Labels: helmholz, search engine, translation
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
It's better with no shirt on
Originally posted on insert credit, I literally cannot stop watching this video every few hours or so the past couple days because it brings me that much joy. What is it? Well, judging by the author's tags and what we see, it's a guy playing Galaga in New Jersey in an arcade with his shirt off...and really getting into it:
There are so many minute happenings in this glorious 0:26 second clip, but let's start at the beginning. 0:01 in, where is that left leg going? It looks like the machine's pushing him away or he is a runner ready to bolt at the start of a race. How this helps him or is natural at all to anyone playing games baffles me. 0:03 in, there it goes again, but this time it looks like he's playing Twister and he just got left foot yellow and the only yellow dot left is somewhere in the back. He then plays pretty intently for about 9 more seconds when at 0:12 he does some sort of swatting motion with his right arm, which could possibly be construed as a fist pump. It's hard to say. He resumes playing and whoever keeps pulling the rope on his left leg tugs it just a little, and then again at 0:20. But then something changes, and he closes the gap between himself and the machine. Knees bent, torso mostly parallel to the arcade cabinet's upright position, he begins to rock and thrust his pelvis toward the coin slots, 3 pumps perfectly synchronized with the 'wahs' coming from the game. Soon after, the 26 seconds of pure voyeuristic pleasure ends. Great stuff. (Also worth mentioning is his presumably sweaty tee hanging over the Pac-Man machine.)
There are so many minute happenings in this glorious 0:26 second clip, but let's start at the beginning. 0:01 in, where is that left leg going? It looks like the machine's pushing him away or he is a runner ready to bolt at the start of a race. How this helps him or is natural at all to anyone playing games baffles me. 0:03 in, there it goes again, but this time it looks like he's playing Twister and he just got left foot yellow and the only yellow dot left is somewhere in the back. He then plays pretty intently for about 9 more seconds when at 0:12 he does some sort of swatting motion with his right arm, which could possibly be construed as a fist pump. It's hard to say. He resumes playing and whoever keeps pulling the rope on his left leg tugs it just a little, and then again at 0:20. But then something changes, and he closes the gap between himself and the machine. Knees bent, torso mostly parallel to the arcade cabinet's upright position, he begins to rock and thrust his pelvis toward the coin slots, 3 pumps perfectly synchronized with the 'wahs' coming from the game. Soon after, the 26 seconds of pure voyeuristic pleasure ends. Great stuff. (Also worth mentioning is his presumably sweaty tee hanging over the Pac-Man machine.)
Labels: arcades, crazy legs, galaga, helmholz, no shirt
Thursday, May 8, 2008
My Windows Misadventure: Older Games with Dual Core (or More) Processors
Seven months ago I finally got a PC that was capable of playing games from say, oh, the last 7 years. (My last computer had 4 MB VRAM. Yeah.) It's a Dell Inspiron 531 and it came with an AMD64 X2 3800+ 2.0 GHz Dual Core processor, 1 GB of RAM and Vista Home Basic installed, and shortly after getting it I installed a GEFORCE 7300GT video card which is fairly outdated now but it's still not a bad card by any means.
So now I say to myself, "Well, now that I have a relative beast compared to what was needed in the last 15 years, I can play whatever games I want," and for awhile this was true. I had trouble getting some games working properly such Command & Conquer, Red Alert and SHOGO: Mobile Armor Division, and they were certainly far from stable, but with some updates and compatibility mode toggling they ran and I was happy.
More recently PerfectCircle suggested that a few of us at the blog here play Serious Sam: First Encounter together, so I installed First Encounter and when I went to run it, it was chugging/stuttering majorly. So much so that I could barely manage the menus. I poked around on the internet and found a couple forums saying that the first two Serious Sam encounters won't work on Vista, and after months of contemplating it I came to the conclusion that it was finally time to install Windows XP.
What I decided to do was make a partition on my main drive (which involved a lot of tinkering around with settings, see: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/working-around-windows-vistas-shrink-volume-inadequacy-problems/) so I could install Windows XP and dual boot so that I could keep Vista around, too. Well, that didn't work out too well as the XP install went awry, and I formatted the whole drive thinking that it was some sort of conflict. It wasn't, and I determined that the problem was the XP installation disk, so I had to get another one and that one did work. However, it wasn't smooth sailing after that.
The XP disk had no drivers for my nVidia network controller or my onboard Realtek soundcard, and this is where I delved into Linux head first for the first time. Before I tried dual booting I made an Ubuntu Live CD (Gutsy build, for those curious), and I didn't plan on using it but it really came in handy because running right off the CD I could do everything I needed to including go online and download drivers onto my other hard drive. It was really convenient and saved me the trouble of switching computers and burning those drivers onto a disk. For anyone who hasn't tried Ubuntu, it's really rather impressive how great it is 'out of the box' and can be useful for troubleshooting something that could be wrong in Windows, and I liked it so much that I'm now dual booting Ubuntu and Windows XP instead. Moving on...
So everything's installed, I get XP running and a bunch of the programs that I usually use installed and wow, I am impressed. XP users out there might be wondering why, but after using Windows 2000 for the past 5 years and then jumping to my Vista setup directly, I entirely skipped Windows XP except for when I had to use it at work and at school for mostly non-intensive things. It's not as lightweight as 2000 is, but it runs one hell of a lot faster than Vista did for me.
Anyway, I get around to setting up Serious Sam, and it installs fine, but when I go to play the framerate's jumpy, and it's not nearly as bad as when I installed it on Vista, but bad enough to the point where it hampered gameplay. So what the hell, right? Why wouldn't this work? I've literally spent all this damned time trying to get shit to work and it STILL won't work properly!? I had remained amazingly patient throughout this whole learning experience and process, but goddamn it I wanted things to work right for once. I was all out of answers when Dirkmenace found a forum post that suggested that the reason why the game wouldn't run smoothly was my dual core processor. In order to get it to work properly, what it said to do was hit Ctrl+Shift+Esc during gameplay to bring up Task Manager, right click on the program's .exe process, select Set Affinity and uncheck one of the cores. And...it worked! Hallelujah!! No more stuttering framerate: it was incredibly smooth, it was perfect, huge success, etc.
However, as I moved on to some other games, I noticed that it was pretty much every game that I wanted to play that seemed to have stuttering problems. From both First and Second Encounters of Serious Sam to Call of Duty 2 to even a game as recent as NHL 08 (side note: EA doesn't really care about their PC sports ports), none of them seemed to utilize my dual core processor without any hiccups. It gets kind of annoying to do that process every single time you start up the game, and by chance I discovered a way to make the game's executables start up using one core every single time.
This permanent method (it changes the executable, so be sure to make a backup of the .exe before trying anything) involves using imagecfg.exe. I grabbed it off a site via searching on Google (http://www.google.com/search?q=download+imagecfg) which probably isn't the safest thing to do, but if you want to pull it off certain Windows CDs you can.
What imagecfg.exe does is hardcodes the affinity a program starts up with and uses. Here's how I did it for CoD2 (after backing up the CoD2MP_s.exe and CoD2SP_s.exe files to another location, of course):
1. I copied imagecfg.exe to the main CoD2 folder where the executables for both single player and multiplayer are located.
2. Made 2 new .bat files, one for single player and one for multiplayer. (Right click in the folder, make a new text document, and just save it as something like cod2mp_affinity.bat. The .bat is the important part, and you can name it whatever you want.)
3. I edited those .bat files in Notepad, and inside the multiplayer one I put:
4. I doubleclicked on the newly edited and saved .bat files and just like that my CoD2 executables now load up and run with just one core instead of two.
Basically the imagecfg is what calls the imagecfg.exe in the folder, the -a sets the affinity, 0x1 chooses my first core, and CoD2MP_s.exe is the program this batch file is doing all this to. If you want more information about how this works and what these commands mean, I suggest you look at these links because they explain it pretty well:
EDIT: Seeing as how CoD2 uses the Punkbuster cheating/hack guard, CoD2 prrrobably isn't the best game to change your MP .exe, seeing as it got me booted off the server when I failed the MD5Tools check. So yeah, don't do it.
So now I say to myself, "Well, now that I have a relative beast compared to what was needed in the last 15 years, I can play whatever games I want," and for awhile this was true. I had trouble getting some games working properly such Command & Conquer, Red Alert and SHOGO: Mobile Armor Division, and they were certainly far from stable, but with some updates and compatibility mode toggling they ran and I was happy.
More recently PerfectCircle suggested that a few of us at the blog here play Serious Sam: First Encounter together, so I installed First Encounter and when I went to run it, it was chugging/stuttering majorly. So much so that I could barely manage the menus. I poked around on the internet and found a couple forums saying that the first two Serious Sam encounters won't work on Vista, and after months of contemplating it I came to the conclusion that it was finally time to install Windows XP.
What I decided to do was make a partition on my main drive (which involved a lot of tinkering around with settings, see: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/working-around-windows-vistas-shrink-volume-inadequacy-problems/) so I could install Windows XP and dual boot so that I could keep Vista around, too. Well, that didn't work out too well as the XP install went awry, and I formatted the whole drive thinking that it was some sort of conflict. It wasn't, and I determined that the problem was the XP installation disk, so I had to get another one and that one did work. However, it wasn't smooth sailing after that.
The XP disk had no drivers for my nVidia network controller or my onboard Realtek soundcard, and this is where I delved into Linux head first for the first time. Before I tried dual booting I made an Ubuntu Live CD (Gutsy build, for those curious), and I didn't plan on using it but it really came in handy because running right off the CD I could do everything I needed to including go online and download drivers onto my other hard drive. It was really convenient and saved me the trouble of switching computers and burning those drivers onto a disk. For anyone who hasn't tried Ubuntu, it's really rather impressive how great it is 'out of the box' and can be useful for troubleshooting something that could be wrong in Windows, and I liked it so much that I'm now dual booting Ubuntu and Windows XP instead. Moving on...
So everything's installed, I get XP running and a bunch of the programs that I usually use installed and wow, I am impressed. XP users out there might be wondering why, but after using Windows 2000 for the past 5 years and then jumping to my Vista setup directly, I entirely skipped Windows XP except for when I had to use it at work and at school for mostly non-intensive things. It's not as lightweight as 2000 is, but it runs one hell of a lot faster than Vista did for me.
Anyway, I get around to setting up Serious Sam, and it installs fine, but when I go to play the framerate's jumpy, and it's not nearly as bad as when I installed it on Vista, but bad enough to the point where it hampered gameplay. So what the hell, right? Why wouldn't this work? I've literally spent all this damned time trying to get shit to work and it STILL won't work properly!? I had remained amazingly patient throughout this whole learning experience and process, but goddamn it I wanted things to work right for once. I was all out of answers when Dirkmenace found a forum post that suggested that the reason why the game wouldn't run smoothly was my dual core processor. In order to get it to work properly, what it said to do was hit Ctrl+Shift+Esc during gameplay to bring up Task Manager, right click on the program's .exe process, select Set Affinity and uncheck one of the cores. And...it worked! Hallelujah!! No more stuttering framerate: it was incredibly smooth, it was perfect, huge success, etc.
However, as I moved on to some other games, I noticed that it was pretty much every game that I wanted to play that seemed to have stuttering problems. From both First and Second Encounters of Serious Sam to Call of Duty 2 to even a game as recent as NHL 08 (side note: EA doesn't really care about their PC sports ports), none of them seemed to utilize my dual core processor without any hiccups. It gets kind of annoying to do that process every single time you start up the game, and by chance I discovered a way to make the game's executables start up using one core every single time.
This permanent method (it changes the executable, so be sure to make a backup of the .exe before trying anything) involves using imagecfg.exe. I grabbed it off a site via searching on Google (http://www.google.com/search?q=download+imagecfg) which probably isn't the safest thing to do, but if you want to pull it off certain Windows CDs you can.
What imagecfg.exe does is hardcodes the affinity a program starts up with and uses. Here's how I did it for CoD2 (after backing up the CoD2MP_s.exe and CoD2SP_s.exe files to another location, of course):
1. I copied imagecfg.exe to the main CoD2 folder where the executables for both single player and multiplayer are located.
2. Made 2 new .bat files, one for single player and one for multiplayer. (Right click in the folder, make a new text document, and just save it as something like cod2mp_affinity.bat. The .bat is the important part, and you can name it whatever you want.)
3. I edited those .bat files in Notepad, and inside the multiplayer one I put:
imagecfg -a 0x1 CoD2MP_s.exeThat's it, and saved the changes. The single player one's the same except you change the name of the .exe to CoD2SP_s.exe.
4. I doubleclicked on the newly edited and saved .bat files and just like that my CoD2 executables now load up and run with just one core instead of two.
Basically the imagecfg is what calls the imagecfg.exe in the folder, the -a sets the affinity, 0x1 chooses my first core, and CoD2MP_s.exe is the program this batch file is doing all this to. If you want more information about how this works and what these commands mean, I suggest you look at these links because they explain it pretty well:
- http://forums.speedguide.net/showthread.php?t=187768
- http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/74860/jsi-tip-3542-how-can-i-permanently-set-the-processor-affinity-for-an-application.html
- http://www16.brinkster.com/salvage/thief/darkengine.htm
EDIT: Seeing as how CoD2 uses the Punkbuster cheating/hack guard, CoD2 prrrobably isn't the best game to change your MP .exe, seeing as it got me booted off the server when I failed the MD5Tools check. So yeah, don't do it.
Labels: Call of Duty, Dell Inspiron 531, dual core, helmholz, imagecfg, PC gaming, quad core, Serious Sam, triple core, Vista, XP
Saturday, April 5, 2008
This isn't Helm and Grungi's thoughts on cucumbers; or, A Review of Utada Hikaru's HEART STATION
Introduction
After nearly two years since her last Japanese album hit the market, Utada Hikaru has released the follow up to her largely successful 'ULTRA BLUE,' entitled 'HEART STATION.' So when two sexy guys like Grungi Ankhfire and myself got our hands on the album, we decided to review it together and look at it from a multiperspectival view and combine our thoughts and analyses.
Here are some of the basics about the album:
Tracklist
1. Fight The Blues
2. HEART STATION
3. Beautiful World
4. Flavor Of Life -Ballad Version-
5. Stay Gold
6. Kiss & Cry
7. Gentle Beast Interlude
8. Celebrate
9. Prisoner Of Love
10. Take 5 (テイク 5)
11. Boku wa Kuma (ぼくはくま I'm a Bear)
12. Niji-iro Bus (虹色バス Rainbow Colored Bus)
13. Flavor Of Life (Bonus Track)
Much like ULTRA BLUE, HEART STATION has a lot of advance singles, six of them in fact, or seven if you count the bonus Flavor of Life, which appears twice on the album in the ballad and original mix forms. This means that half (or more) of the album has been heard already, so the exciting part of the album for those who have heard the singles already are, of course, the tracks that are only on the album.
So without further ado, let's get to some reviewin'!
Helm's Assessment:
Finally. It's felt a lot longer than it's actually been, but I've been really anticipating this ever since ULTRA BLUE came out and simply blew me away. I had never really followed Utada Hikaru before that, except for seeing the Keep Tryin' Promotional Video and liking her theme for the game Kingdom Hearts, Simple and Clean. ULTRA BLUE is easily one of my top J-Pop albums, and a favorite that I come back to every so often. I enjoy it every single time, so my expectations for HEART STATION were pretty high, of course.
So, finally HEART STATION arrived, and I listened. My first reaction upon finishing listening to this album was that "This is the best album I've heard so far in 2008." My second reaction, though, was that it feels like this has been done before, and it has--by Utada herself. I'm just going to say it: This is ULTRA BLUE 2. The album feels like an extension of ULTRA BLUE in the sense that the songs aren't very different sounding stylistically. There isn't anything surprising here: You still have Utada singing with several layers of her own voice over lots of simplistic micro-melodies that cling to your brain, which are accompanied by upbeat percussions, and to top it off they are of course expertly mixed and mastered. This is what Utada does and she does it well, however, it's not as good this time, and it might even be getting a little old. There is less variety, less Passion (pun alert!) and less originality.
In spite of that (and my caustic tone), these are still some very, very good songs that I enjoy quite a bit, with my favorite probably being Kiss & Cry, along with Heart Station, Fight the Blues, and Flavor of Life. Most of the new tracks are pretty good, although I wish there were more of them; I really feel like she releases too many advance singles and the album starts to feel like a compilation album, especially in the first half. (Also, Take 5 is cut tragically short...which may have been the idea.) The melodies that she made here are some of the strongest and best she's made. They're engaging, intricate and touching, yet they have trouble standing out when placed side by side, which leads to...
One of the problems that HEART STATION has is that it never bothers to really slow things down, and I think the album suffers a great deal because of it. The upbeat tempo throughout is almost nonstop. The singles she's released from the past 2 years that made it onto the album have been almost entirely uptempo, with the exception being Boku wa Kuma. These upbeat singles are stacked next to each other so tightly that it just feels like a big blur when I listen. This is due to the very apparent lack of pacing, and the album actually starts to sound kind of samey. The lack of breaks or changes in pace doesn't let the songs set themselves apart, and I think she realized this because she opted to put the Ballad Version of Flavor of Life in the fourth slot for this album. Why is this noteworthy? Simple, really. While I at first objected to the Ballad Version being there over the original mix, it's obvious to me now that the regular single version of Flavor of Life would blend in too much with the five tracks that surround that fourth slot. It's almost as if she was putting the album together and said to herself, "Oh shit! I forgot to write some ballads!" It was put there for a reason, and that reason is to try (furtively) to give the listener a breather because as I said before, the rest of this album is a pretty active listen. Ironically, one of the slow parts of Celebrate she says "Stop...let me breathe." That's about all you'll get to soak in the tracks' differences and nuances.
The bottom line: We all know that people are going to buy her stuff up because of rampant fanboy/girlism for one of the biggest pop stars in Asia, but let's not sell Utada short: there are some damned good songs on here. She is still putting out incredibly catchy and enjoyable music that I think has quite the lasting appeal. As firmly as I believe that last statement, I'm hoping that Utada does a little different the next time around. I'm not saying that she has to reinvent herself, but that she's gotten a little too comfortable with her own sound and that she's not challenging herself enough. However, with her new English album on the horizon we may see some new ideas come to life as she tries to reach different audiences, and it'll be interesting to see what she has in store for the different markets.
Grung's two cents:
Now that I've gotten a hold of Utada Hikaru's new album, I can confirm what I feared from the singles : It's a "disappointment". But don't you go thinking that I don't like it, it's still really good, just not as good as I had hoped it to be. I think that there are a number of things wrong with this album.
As a start, take the tracklist itself : 7 tracks out of 13 were already released on singles before the release, and even if that's just one more than for ULTRA BLUE, they're not as well placed. I mean, after the first track, you get 5 single tracks in a row. That's just too much, and you rapidly feel you're listening to some kind of singles compilation. What's worse, the album closes with Flavor of Life, the ballad version of which you already heard on track 4. Add to that Boku wa Kuma, which may be cute and all, but can't really be compared to Utada's usual tracks, and you're left with something quite weaker than her previous effort.
That said, the singles were good for the most part, so that kinda makes up for the poor ordering.
And after a fair number of listening sessions, as you become used to all the tracks, the "compilation effect" tends to wear off. But another characteristic of the album surfaces then : it's less varied than ULTRA BLUE.
At first, I was sad not to be listening to a second ULTRA BLUE, but after I while, I saw it was for the better. The softer overtone that's dominating HEART STATION kind of make room for a future album with more bells and whistles, while letting Utada try some new stuff. Because if you listen to her back catalog, you'll see that she never went that far into the "electro" territory. Before ULTRA BLUE, she was doing stuff that was close to R'n'B, then she did an album really driven by her voice (that was what really stood out from ULTRA BLUE for me, more than the instrumentations, even if they were her best so far), and now this.
With HEART STATION, Hikki retains the grooviness of her earlier works but modifies her sound palette. The result is a song where vocals really become an instrument, more than something dominating the whole album. Of course, that's not to say she sings too quietly or that her voice isn't well used. But I found myself humming instrumental parts almost as often as I mumbled vocal melodies. And that is something that never happened with her last album, where the singing had a more prominent role in almost all songs. And in addition, the impression I got from HEART STATION was that she somewhat used more layering than before, which certainly explains partly my feelings about this album's vocal melodies...
All in all, HEART STATION is still an awesome album. Take 5, for example, is one of those track I'm sure I'll get back to quite frequently and for a long time. Beautiful World also is one of my favourites Hikki tracks since the release of the single. So there's a lot to love about the disc, despite some "disappointing" aspects. But now that she did something a little bit more toned down, I sure hope she's going to deliver another epic record like ULTRA BLUE was. Still, good job, Ms. Utada !
Reactions:
Helmholz says: It's clear that we agree on a lot of things, including what you called the "compilation effect," which is compounded when you take into consideration that one of those thirteen tracks is an interlude that's not very long, and that Flavor of Life at the end is just a bonus track. Will future reprints even include that one? Not to mention Take 5 really feels like a rip-off because of the way it ends. Although to be entirely fair, ULTRA BLUE had a lot of advance singles, an interlude, and COLORS which was on her first Singles Compilation before it was on an album. Seriously, it took three and a half years for COLORS to be on an album. That seems to be kind of cheap when you think about it.
I'm less familiar with her older stuff so after listening to these two albums it is clear to me that this woman is in love with her own voice. As you said, her voice becomes an instrument for her and she does this while singing the main parts and I think it might be just a little too much. Maybe she should learn a new instrument.
Other than that I'm not sure how you can not call this a second ULTRA BLUE, as some of the songs sound like they were just leftover from the last album. But that's what I think!
And Ms. Utada, indeed. She's single again now, right?
Grungi says: Correct, she is now single. But back to the album, even if I do agree that a couple songs on HEART STATION could almost have made it on ULTRA BLUE, my opinion that it wasn't ULTRA BLUE II comes from the album as a whole. To give an analogy, ULTRA BLUE was akin to riding a rollercoaster, whereas HEART STATION felt more like cruising on a highway. That's exaggerating, of course, but still, it depicts what I felt quite well.
And as for me, one of the few things that I didn't really agree with was the fact that you call listening to HEART STATION a "pretty active listen". On the contrary, even after quite a few listens, I'm still thinking that this new album makes for better background music than her previous offering, but as is almost everything about music, it's very subjective.
But one conclusion that comes quite clearly out of this little joint review is that, yes, it is a very good album, albeit some weaknesses, but that each listener will probably get something different from it, depending on their tastes. And isn't that what music should be all about ?
After nearly two years since her last Japanese album hit the market, Utada Hikaru has released the follow up to her largely successful 'ULTRA BLUE,' entitled 'HEART STATION.' So when two sexy guys like Grungi Ankhfire and myself got our hands on the album, we decided to review it together and look at it from a multiperspectival view and combine our thoughts and analyses.
Here are some of the basics about the album:
Tracklist1. Fight The Blues
2. HEART STATION
3. Beautiful World
4. Flavor Of Life -Ballad Version-
5. Stay Gold
6. Kiss & Cry
7. Gentle Beast Interlude
8. Celebrate
9. Prisoner Of Love
10. Take 5 (テイク 5)
11. Boku wa Kuma (ぼくはくま I'm a Bear)
12. Niji-iro Bus (虹色バス Rainbow Colored Bus)
13. Flavor Of Life (Bonus Track)
Much like ULTRA BLUE, HEART STATION has a lot of advance singles, six of them in fact, or seven if you count the bonus Flavor of Life, which appears twice on the album in the ballad and original mix forms. This means that half (or more) of the album has been heard already, so the exciting part of the album for those who have heard the singles already are, of course, the tracks that are only on the album.
So without further ado, let's get to some reviewin'!
Helm's Assessment:
Finally. It's felt a lot longer than it's actually been, but I've been really anticipating this ever since ULTRA BLUE came out and simply blew me away. I had never really followed Utada Hikaru before that, except for seeing the Keep Tryin' Promotional Video and liking her theme for the game Kingdom Hearts, Simple and Clean. ULTRA BLUE is easily one of my top J-Pop albums, and a favorite that I come back to every so often. I enjoy it every single time, so my expectations for HEART STATION were pretty high, of course.
So, finally HEART STATION arrived, and I listened. My first reaction upon finishing listening to this album was that "This is the best album I've heard so far in 2008." My second reaction, though, was that it feels like this has been done before, and it has--by Utada herself. I'm just going to say it: This is ULTRA BLUE 2. The album feels like an extension of ULTRA BLUE in the sense that the songs aren't very different sounding stylistically. There isn't anything surprising here: You still have Utada singing with several layers of her own voice over lots of simplistic micro-melodies that cling to your brain, which are accompanied by upbeat percussions, and to top it off they are of course expertly mixed and mastered. This is what Utada does and she does it well, however, it's not as good this time, and it might even be getting a little old. There is less variety, less Passion (pun alert!) and less originality.
In spite of that (and my caustic tone), these are still some very, very good songs that I enjoy quite a bit, with my favorite probably being Kiss & Cry, along with Heart Station, Fight the Blues, and Flavor of Life. Most of the new tracks are pretty good, although I wish there were more of them; I really feel like she releases too many advance singles and the album starts to feel like a compilation album, especially in the first half. (Also, Take 5 is cut tragically short...which may have been the idea.) The melodies that she made here are some of the strongest and best she's made. They're engaging, intricate and touching, yet they have trouble standing out when placed side by side, which leads to...
One of the problems that HEART STATION has is that it never bothers to really slow things down, and I think the album suffers a great deal because of it. The upbeat tempo throughout is almost nonstop. The singles she's released from the past 2 years that made it onto the album have been almost entirely uptempo, with the exception being Boku wa Kuma. These upbeat singles are stacked next to each other so tightly that it just feels like a big blur when I listen. This is due to the very apparent lack of pacing, and the album actually starts to sound kind of samey. The lack of breaks or changes in pace doesn't let the songs set themselves apart, and I think she realized this because she opted to put the Ballad Version of Flavor of Life in the fourth slot for this album. Why is this noteworthy? Simple, really. While I at first objected to the Ballad Version being there over the original mix, it's obvious to me now that the regular single version of Flavor of Life would blend in too much with the five tracks that surround that fourth slot. It's almost as if she was putting the album together and said to herself, "Oh shit! I forgot to write some ballads!" It was put there for a reason, and that reason is to try (furtively) to give the listener a breather because as I said before, the rest of this album is a pretty active listen. Ironically, one of the slow parts of Celebrate she says "Stop...let me breathe." That's about all you'll get to soak in the tracks' differences and nuances.
The bottom line: We all know that people are going to buy her stuff up because of rampant fanboy/girlism for one of the biggest pop stars in Asia, but let's not sell Utada short: there are some damned good songs on here. She is still putting out incredibly catchy and enjoyable music that I think has quite the lasting appeal. As firmly as I believe that last statement, I'm hoping that Utada does a little different the next time around. I'm not saying that she has to reinvent herself, but that she's gotten a little too comfortable with her own sound and that she's not challenging herself enough. However, with her new English album on the horizon we may see some new ideas come to life as she tries to reach different audiences, and it'll be interesting to see what she has in store for the different markets.
Grung's two cents:
Now that I've gotten a hold of Utada Hikaru's new album, I can confirm what I feared from the singles : It's a "disappointment". But don't you go thinking that I don't like it, it's still really good, just not as good as I had hoped it to be. I think that there are a number of things wrong with this album.
As a start, take the tracklist itself : 7 tracks out of 13 were already released on singles before the release, and even if that's just one more than for ULTRA BLUE, they're not as well placed. I mean, after the first track, you get 5 single tracks in a row. That's just too much, and you rapidly feel you're listening to some kind of singles compilation. What's worse, the album closes with Flavor of Life, the ballad version of which you already heard on track 4. Add to that Boku wa Kuma, which may be cute and all, but can't really be compared to Utada's usual tracks, and you're left with something quite weaker than her previous effort.
That said, the singles were good for the most part, so that kinda makes up for the poor ordering.
And after a fair number of listening sessions, as you become used to all the tracks, the "compilation effect" tends to wear off. But another characteristic of the album surfaces then : it's less varied than ULTRA BLUE.
At first, I was sad not to be listening to a second ULTRA BLUE, but after I while, I saw it was for the better. The softer overtone that's dominating HEART STATION kind of make room for a future album with more bells and whistles, while letting Utada try some new stuff. Because if you listen to her back catalog, you'll see that she never went that far into the "electro" territory. Before ULTRA BLUE, she was doing stuff that was close to R'n'B, then she did an album really driven by her voice (that was what really stood out from ULTRA BLUE for me, more than the instrumentations, even if they were her best so far), and now this.
With HEART STATION, Hikki retains the grooviness of her earlier works but modifies her sound palette. The result is a song where vocals really become an instrument, more than something dominating the whole album. Of course, that's not to say she sings too quietly or that her voice isn't well used. But I found myself humming instrumental parts almost as often as I mumbled vocal melodies. And that is something that never happened with her last album, where the singing had a more prominent role in almost all songs. And in addition, the impression I got from HEART STATION was that she somewhat used more layering than before, which certainly explains partly my feelings about this album's vocal melodies...
All in all, HEART STATION is still an awesome album. Take 5, for example, is one of those track I'm sure I'll get back to quite frequently and for a long time. Beautiful World also is one of my favourites Hikki tracks since the release of the single. So there's a lot to love about the disc, despite some "disappointing" aspects. But now that she did something a little bit more toned down, I sure hope she's going to deliver another epic record like ULTRA BLUE was. Still, good job, Ms. Utada !
Reactions:
I'm less familiar with her older stuff so after listening to these two albums it is clear to me that this woman is in love with her own voice. As you said, her voice becomes an instrument for her and she does this while singing the main parts and I think it might be just a little too much. Maybe she should learn a new instrument.
Other than that I'm not sure how you can not call this a second ULTRA BLUE, as some of the songs sound like they were just leftover from the last album. But that's what I think!
And Ms. Utada, indeed. She's single again now, right?
And as for me, one of the few things that I didn't really agree with was the fact that you call listening to HEART STATION a "pretty active listen". On the contrary, even after quite a few listens, I'm still thinking that this new album makes for better background music than her previous offering, but as is almost everything about music, it's very subjective.
But one conclusion that comes quite clearly out of this little joint review is that, yes, it is a very good album, albeit some weaknesses, but that each listener will probably get something different from it, depending on their tastes. And isn't that what music should be all about ?
Labels: 2008, album, HEART STATION, helmholz, j-pop, music, reviews, Utada Hikaru
Friday, January 18, 2008
X-MEN (The Arcade Game): One of America's Favorite Beat 'em Ups Revisited
One of my favorite arcade games growing up was X-MEN (1992), known to many as X-MEN: The Arcade Game. In case you've never played the game, it's a sidescrolling beat 'em up which was riding the popularity of games like Double Dragon (1987), Final Fight (1989), and Streets of Rage (1991), which were all very popular arcade-styled games involving hand-to-hand combat (sometimes with various handheld weapons) where the player directs his or her character from one side of the screen to the other, beating up generic thugs and a few other types of enemies before you get to the boss of each particular level. In X-MEN, the same concept applies but instead of weapons you get mutant powers respective to the character you choose, which are a blessing and a curse, as I'll explain later. So basically, you get to the end of the level, beat the boss, and you're onto the next level with a few cut scenes in between to explain the simplistic (but not unwelcome) story for the game.
Recently I decided it was time to go back and see how X-MEN held up. I was also seeking revenge since I don't remember ever beating the game as it seemed to always eat up all the tokens I had. I figured that my older, more talented and experienced self would have no problems tearing through the game on just a handful of credits.
Well, I was wrong. I played through it and discovered a lot of things. Among these the fact that I wasn't giving my former self enough credit. This game is tough, but not in the right way. It is a very cheap game. The kind of game that makes you want to give up but not after already pumping in a few dollars worth of quarters and then discovering said cheapness.
This game has several flaws which hinder enjoyment:
- The Inevitability of Death. This is by far the greatest flaw in the game. You WILL die in this game. Lots. Some of the reasons that follow in this list will help explain this, but it's mainly because the game doesn't follow the ethos of arcade games: Reward the player for being good. The game does no such thing, and being good only entails that you are getting punished less than the average player.
- No Power-Ups. Throughout the level you will be outnumbered and there will be hits which you will almost certainly have to take, and there are no health bonuses or anything that will increase your attacking abilities. There aren't even any interactive weapons that you can pick up, and although that might seem stupid since the X-MEN have mutant powers, you should be able to get some kind of temporary advantage over your foes, if not just to break up the repetition. Your only reward is given at the end of the levels after beating the bosses, an extra orb for additional mutant power usage. This is not a good deal.
- Mutant Powers = Pain? The fact that your character's mutant power hurts you unless you have three or less bars of health is just stupid. When you have three or less, you can use your special orb(s) up, which is usually going to be just one since you will probably have died and not beaten a boss in between deaths. Coupled with no health restoration (unless you count adding tokens to respawn--I don't!), this game is unforgiving and this would be slightly more okay if you could just use your power without simultaneously harming yourself.
- Redundant Enemies. Get used to fighting mini-Sentinels in all their palette-swapping glory, because by the end of the game you will be fighting hundreds of these for no reason whatsoever, along with some bazooka toting Sentinel-esque enemies and some laser machines which look like something you'd see in a metal cutting shop.
- Repetitive and Crippled Attacking. Also get used to the same three-hit combos and a couple of other animated attacks, such as a random throw or turnaround attack that seems to work better for some characters than others. Yes, Colossus sucks in this game because he will be unable to fend off attackers on his backside mostly without using a special, which leads to the Catch-22 of you taking damage to deal damage no matter how you approach the situation. Nevermind the fact that your attack combos can and will be broken by the bosses mercilessly, forcing you to use life-shaving mutant powers which in turn lead to death.
As I said, the game still can be enjoyable. However, this game would have held up better if it had better balancing that worked more in favor of the player's skills rather than his wallet.
Labels: 1992, beat 'em ups, genre analysis, helmholz, konami, reviews, x-men
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