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Hello readers. In this series I will be chronicling how I came to love videogame music, and how, as an older gamer, it has gone from being an expected component of quality titles to it becoming an unexpected component of my life. I'll be telling this from my perspective, but I hope there's something in it for you all to relate to.
-Xenomorph
When I was 11, the only thing that mattered to me was my SNES. It was my life, my center, my all. Buddhists that have achieved Enlightenment have nothing on the Zen my Super Nintendo provided me; to (badly, badly,mis)quote The Narrator from Fight Club, 'I was the warm little center that all life crowded around'. (I just couldn't be bothered loading up the DVD to get the wording just right, so please feign indifference.) Anyway, my SNES gave me pleasures that, as an adult, I've found no equal to.
After that, I leveled up to the PlayStation, and when I say 'leveled up' I mean it literally: At school, I'd attained the rank of Grand Master, to the point where even the cool kids that wouldn't be seen dead with a geek were bailing me up in darkened corners and empty classrooms begging for cheats and playguides, making the whole thing very drug deal-esque. And I was smarter and more aware of not just the games themselves, but the industry as a whole, and because these were the pre-internet days for us small town Aussies, the transformation was due to Australia's oldest and most successful videogame magazine, Hyper. If I can go off on a tangent for a second, that magazine has been the one constant in my very tumultuous life. I bought issue #1 when I was 9, and I've continued to buy it every month since (I'm now 28), and I still get excited about every new issue Back to the topic at hand, my gaming skillz were at the '133+' level, and all I cared about was hiring/trading/stealing (we were poor, sue me) more and more new games for my PS, each one placed into the console and shredded, like wood through a wood chipper. Of course I was impressed by the graphics, especially by first-gen titles Destruction Derby and WipeOut, Tekken and Toshinden, but it wasn't until a Japanese game came along that I came to appreciate the music in games. A lot of people were banking on this title becoming a hit despite it belonging to a genre that was, to put it kindly, under-appreciated. That game? Why, Final Fantasy VII, of course!
If you'd like to read more from Xenomorph, a.k.a Vadim Stoger-Ruitz, visit his blog at http://shadowfilter.blogspot.com/ He'll be there all week! And please, try the fish...
-Xenomorph
When I was 11, the only thing that mattered to me was my SNES. It was my life, my center, my all. Buddhists that have achieved Enlightenment have nothing on the Zen my Super Nintendo provided me; to (badly, badly,mis)quote The Narrator from Fight Club, 'I was the warm little center that all life crowded around'. (I just couldn't be bothered loading up the DVD to get the wording just right, so please feign indifference.) Anyway, my SNES gave me pleasures that, as an adult, I've found no equal to.
After that, I leveled up to the PlayStation, and when I say 'leveled up' I mean it literally: At school, I'd attained the rank of Grand Master, to the point where even the cool kids that wouldn't be seen dead with a geek were bailing me up in darkened corners and empty classrooms begging for cheats and playguides, making the whole thing very drug deal-esque. And I was smarter and more aware of not just the games themselves, but the industry as a whole, and because these were the pre-internet days for us small town Aussies, the transformation was due to Australia's oldest and most successful videogame magazine, Hyper. If I can go off on a tangent for a second, that magazine has been the one constant in my very tumultuous life. I bought issue #1 when I was 9, and I've continued to buy it every month since (I'm now 28), and I still get excited about every new issue Back to the topic at hand, my gaming skillz were at the '133+' level, and all I cared about was hiring/trading/stealing (we were poor, sue me) more and more new games for my PS, each one placed into the console and shredded, like wood through a wood chipper. Of course I was impressed by the graphics, especially by first-gen titles Destruction Derby and WipeOut, Tekken and Toshinden, but it wasn't until a Japanese game came along that I came to appreciate the music in games. A lot of people were banking on this title becoming a hit despite it belonging to a genre that was, to put it kindly, under-appreciated. That game? Why, Final Fantasy VII, of course!
If you'd like to read more from Xenomorph, a.k.a Vadim Stoger-Ruitz, visit his blog at http://shadowfilter.blogspot.com/ He'll be there all week! And please, try the fish...
Labels: Music, Vadim Stoger-Ruitz, video games
