The Sounds of the SNES

It's been said that contraints often liberate rather than limit creativity. Give a musician a state of the art recording studio and he'll come back to you with an over-produced and boring piece of music. Give him the SNES's sound chip and he'll write some of the greatest melodies of all time.

Koji Kondo - A slightly sinister looking genius

Hit the break for a walk down memory lane, and maybe feel a little despair that videogame music today isn't quite what it used to be.

1000 Words on Secret of Mana

Get me. I've written what could almost be described as a "proper" review of Secret of Mana for Savy Gamer. Someone's even gone and commented on it already, so clearly it's been a wild success.

Woo.

Single-player, fantasy-based roleplaying videogames are often a lonely, tedious experience. You spend hundreds of hours developing your character, trudging through predictable environments, and repeating the same attacks over and over again. Japanese developers in particular have a track record of making games where the core mechanic consists of battling against wave after wave of easily defeatable enemy, who exist solely to dispense the Experience Points you need to beat the more challenging and interesting boss encounters. Any time spent in combat with enemies who never realistically pose a threat is no fun, because a fight without some sense of peril is inevitably dull. Yet it’s become so commonplace in modern RPGs that fans of the genre have learnt to accept it and even name it: ‘grind’.

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