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Legendary Original Soundtrack: A high note in an otherwise average performance.

Hey look, another post about this game! But this time, we’re focusing on one little part of it: The music. I briefly hinted at it when I wrote about Legendary, but the music is probably the game’s most shining moment. Which is me kinda lowering my standards here, since we’re talking about something as average as Legendary. Though it had been nearly a decade since I last played the game, the music is the one thing I remember from it besides the literal soul sucking and that time where I fell through the elevator at the end of the game.

For a little context: I like film and game scores, especially when it’s stuff that is mostly forgotten. It’s become one of those things I tend to collect because it’s neat to listen to scores to mostly forgotten films like Paycheck or the TV score for the 2000s reality show The Mole. That also applies to video game scores. Since Legendary was released around the time where companies were going “Oh yeah, we can do soundtracks for our video game,” a lot of games got soundtracks. And of all the games to get a soundtrack, this was one of them.

Okay, it looks fairly cheap, but hey, better than nothing.

Composed by Jack Grillo (the audio director at Spark Unlimited at the time, who’s since moved on to Crystal Dynamics, working on audio for the Tomb Raider games) and Ricardo Hernandez (presumably a drummer friend of Grillo’s, his name is hard to find info on him easily), this soundtrack was released in September 2008 on most digital storefronts, and also got a physical release on Melee Sound Design Records, Hernandez’s self-published label.

So what does it sound like? It’s mostly chugging guitars and heavy drum hits. After “Prologue,” which is mostly a monologue with occasional guitar playing throughout, “Flashpoint” is the first proper song on here, which plays while in the game’s main menu. It starts with a suspenseful guitar intro, before the drums kick in and layers of guitars are blended into this fairly intense menu music, which is probably the best way to get you pumped up to play the game.

It’s also really interesting how there’s voice lines from the game featured. “Prologue” and “Epilogue” are literally featured from the game itself at those particular sections, which is expected, though they are truncated from the actual dialogue. featured However, the way it’s framed makes the album as trying to tell its own story, outside of the game. “It’s Just Business” is framed like Deckard just got severely wounded and about to get killed by LeFey, but in the actual game he says this line from a hijacked video line before a squad of baddies come to murder Deckard and Vivian in a subway. I’ll chalk this up to creative liberty with the material featured, but honestly I could’ve done without the random dialogue bits featured here.

You can kinda tell they had to put a different TV model in front of the original model. That’s game design hotfixes for you, baby!
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Legendary: Maybe we shouldn’t open Pandora’s Box.

I kind of miss the seventh generation of shooters. Sometimes you’d find a game that while not amazing, was at least trying something interesting. Other times you could end up stuck in the sluice gate of Activision’s budget hell, with games like Soldier of Fortune: Payback, Jurassic: The Hunted or The History Channel: Battle for the Pacific. (By the way, those are all by the same developer: Cauldron, a Slovakian game studio that’s since been absorbed into Bohemia Interactive.) But regardless, I miss that B to C-tier type of game, something to waste a few hours of your time with that might’ve had promise but couldn’t deliver for whatever reason. And the game I’m talking about this time around definitely fits that criteria perfectly. Time to open up Pandora’s Box with this one.

Not endorsed by Barney Stinson.

Legendary – which is such a very generic title that it definitely will be hard to find info on in Google searches – is a first-person shooter that definitely fits this seventh gen C-tier mold. Developed by Spark Unlimited, a developer best known releasing Turning Point: Fall of Liberty and this game in the same calendar year, as well as working on the third game in the Lost Planet series and a Ninja Gaiden spinoff before closing up shop just as the seventh generation was coming to a close. They definitely were a C-tier developer.

I can’t see this logo without thinking of Dan VideoGames from Gigaboots, who started the stream of this game by seeing this logo and yelling “GAMECOCK!”

This game was also published by the rather infamous Gamecock Media Group, a publisher that was known for having fairly aggressive marketing tactics. In essence, they were basically the proof of concept of what would become Devolver Digital. (Fitting, since Mike Wilson was one of the head honchos at Gamecock, as well as Devolver.) I tend to remember them for storming the stage during the Spike Video Game Awards while Irrational Games’ Ken Levine was about to give a speech to promote Hail to the Chimp. Besides that, I couldn’t tell you any other game they published that was memorable besides these two games.

Anyway, the story goes a little something like this: You play as Charles Deckard, a generic white dude protagonist who’s a graduate of the Gordon Freeman school of FPS character development. Deckard is given an offer from Osmond LeFey, leader of the sinister-sounding Black Order, to procure Pandora’s Box, which is conveniently hidden in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. After sneaking in and inserting a fancy key and a blood sacrifice, all hell breaks loose, as Pandora’s Box opens a portal to evil gods and beings flooding the city. With the help of Vivian Kane and his new Signet powers, Deckard must close up Pandora’s Box, while making sure LeFey doesn’t get it for evil nefarious deeds that evil nefarious villains do.

Sewers…. why does it always have to be sewers…

Legendary is a bog-standard FPS for the time. WASD moves, Left click to fire, right click to aim down sights, Shift sprints, E uses objects. Deckard can only hold two weapons, following the Halo/Call of Duty formula, alongside his trusty axe and two explosives that you switch between. Despite taking several pages from the 6th-7th generation FPS ethos, there are a few things it tries to do differently, such as no regenerating health, and fancy powers thanks to the Signet on his arm. Though, Deckard also has the cool ability to turn valves and “hack” keypads to open doors.

Deckard’s abilities really boil to down to two things: A kinetic blast that helps destroy objects and stuns Pandora’s foes, and healing yourself. I ended up using the blast a lot to make certain foes easier to fight, and a few times for destroying physics objects when the game asked me to, but the heal feature was the most helpful. That is, if I could find places to heal and have enough animus energy to even heal in the first place.

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Some stuff I bought: Portland Retro Gaming Expo 2024 edition.

Goodness, it’s that time again, huh?

The Portland Retro Gaming Expo has arrived once again, full of cool old video games and lots of vendors willing to sell their wares to folks like me. This time around me and my partner got to peruse stuff on Saturday, while I got to see some friends from out of town. Sunday was me riding solo, but pallin’ around with another friend I don’t see much.

Naturally I was laser focused on deals, and slowly realizing I’m getting old as now I’m seeing booths selling Xbox One, PS4 and even PS5 stuff. Mere years ago I was talking a lot about finding loads of PS2 and original Xbox stuff, but now that’s not the case anymore.

I had three small goals during this trip: Search any discount bin for cheap common games. This paid off in a few places as I got a few fairly notable games in my collection.

The second was to fill the gaps in my game show game library. During the seventh generation, there were a glut of game show games not seen since the days of the NES, and I wanted to add some of those to my collection. Even if some of them are not that great, as you’ll soon see.

Finally, I’ve been trying to find peripherals for my Xbox 360, as the seventh generation of game consoles are slowly reaching “retro” status, and I wanna grab some of these peripherals before they start being sold for a ridiculous premium. I got lucky on one of these, at least.

Note this only covers PRGE finds, I will probably have a “everything else I bought” for a future article. But enough preamble. Let’s get into the lineup, starting with Saturday’s finds:

$2 each:

  • Get on Da Mic (PlayStation 2)
  • American Idol (PlayStation 2)

An auspicious start. Get on Da Mic is basically Karaoke Revolution but for hip-hop. Made by Artificial Mind and Movement (A2M), the studio now known as the Dead by Daylight guys, I was curious about this because rap-based music games are kinda rare, the only other one that comes to mind is Def Jam Rapstar.

From what I gathered from the box is that these seem to hit all the fairly notable hip-hop songs from up to 2004: “California Love,” “Baby Got Back,” “Rapper’s Delight” and even “The Humpty Dance.” I have no idea if these are the originals or covers, as there’s no song credits in the manual, and the back cover uses “As originally made famous by.” Thus it’s entirely possible that an audio production company like Wavegroup Sound did the covers, akin to Karaoke Revolution and early Guitar Hero. Guess I’ll have to find out for myself. Once I find a working USB microphone, that is.

American Idol is a somewhat infamous game. Made by Hothouse Creations, this game is part game show sim, part rhythm game. There’s weird cartoony representations of judges Paula Abdul, Randy Jackson and Simon Cowell, presumably done because the last thing we needed was realistic PS2-quality Simon Cowell.

I’m more familiar with the Game Boy Advance version of this game, where people have posted videos of them constantly failing to hit the notes, and funny pitch shifting being used to simulate bad singing, like in this performance for “Waiting for Tonight.” The PS2 version likely has the same features, complete with the bad singing.

I bet it’ll have some funny moments to play through, but otherwise might be forgettable. At least it has support for a dance pad, I guess?

Also, I realized this technically fits the first two categories like a glove: It was in the bargain bin, and technically you could consider American Idol a game show if you squinted real hard. (I treat reality competitions and game shows as separate things, but YMMV.)

$6: Hollywood Squares (Wii)

Ah, here we go. The first of the game show games I found.

Published by Ubisoft and developed by Ludia, these game show games were often not great. For some games like The Price Is Right, they’re fine enough but may have little nitpicky things that diehard fans might dislike. In other cases, like Press Your Luck 2010 Edition and The $1,000,000 Pyramid, those seem to be made on a shoestring budget with little to no care or passion to the show in question, thus they end up being not fun even as a joke with friends. I fully expect this to be in the former category, where it’s a decent enough representation of the show, but has some particularly questionable design decisions.

This one, naturally, is based off the then-recent version of the show that aired from 1998-2003 in first-run syndication. Tom Bergeron reprising his role as host, alongside clips from the show with Martin Mull, Jeffrey Tambor, Kathy Griffin and… Brad Garrett. Everybody else is generic Ludia contestants without any punny names to go by. Which makes it baffling for them to go for the celebrity endorsement as well.

Well, at least it’s not The $1,000,000 Pyramid…

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The Version Everybody Knows: A rant about music discovery in the streaming era.

A while back, I was looking for an alternate version of Tommy Tutone’s “867-5309/Jenny” that appeared in Rock Band 3, but every time I tried to look for this version, it kept giving me the original version from 1981’s Tommy Tutone 2. Even with putting in the album name (Tutone-ality) and “re-record” into my searches, it kept coming back to the original album version and not this unique re-record. That made me sad, because I genuinely want to listen to this version of the song in a way where I don’t have to hear game sounds from Rock Band 3.

This surprisingly happened a lot with songs in music games. Either the masters were lost to time, or legal issues between the band and record label have necessitated a re-record – similar to the Taylor’s Version fiasco – thus they either got the current lineup in the studio to make a similar-enough sounding version to the original, or they’d opt for a cut from a Live album instead.

One thing that really irks me about the streaming world of Spotify et al is that if you wanna find a classic rock or pop hit, they’ll just give you the most popular version. Usually that’s the version featured on the original album. Which, hey, if you’re just looking for that song to listen to, that’s great, you’ll be happy, end of story.

The thing is that it leads to a problem I’ve called The Version Everybody Knows. You hear about a song, you wanna listen to it, places like Spotify or Apple Music give you the original version. But sometimes, especially in the days before the internet, that may not have been the version that was the hit. That isn’t to say the album version wasn’t popular, but it clouds the history of the songs a little.

For me, I have a softer spot for alternate mixes and radio edits. This was incredibly common in the 1970s, where there would be a song from a hit album of which they’d speed up and edit it down for radio airplay. This continued after the age of album-oriented radio, but usually would be relegated to special remixes and 12” mixes that would be played at clubs. Most of the time they’d play the original song from the album, perhaps cut down so the radio station can get more songs and commercials in.

Here’s a few examples. Example one: Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street.” You search for that, you get The Version Everybody Knows from his 1978 album City to City. A smooth, catchy 6 minute jam with that famous Raphael Ravenscroft saxophone lick.

However, the version that charted in the Billboard Hot 100 was a completely different mix, featured above: It’s a little over 4 minutes, it’s moved up one key, a bridge or two taken out to immediately get to Hugh Burns’ guitar solo. This might sound weird to your ears if you’re used to the album version like I was, but for folks who were around back then when it was new, this is likely the version they remember.

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A little thing about Legacy of Rust, the new Doom level set.

They really didn’t need to do this.

In 2019, Doom got a remastered port handled by Nerve Software, and while it wasn’t perfect, it was serviceable enough. It got a few updates that fixed a few of the major problems – including requiring Bethesda.net to login – but it was fine. A perfectly playable version of the 1993 classic.

DOOM + DOOM II is a bit of an unwieldy title, tbh

Five years later, at Quakecon 2024, they remastered Doom again. This time handled by Nightdive Studios, the wizards who remastered a whole bunch of games, from Turok to Quake II. This time they added support for Boom, a Doom source port framework that added a whole bunch of new features and expanding older ones. But they weren’t done with that. Of which has become tradition with all id Software remasters by Nightdive at this point, they added a new episode called Legacy of Rust.

Mild spoilers for Legacy of Rust within.

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