VGM Vinyl - Some Serious Childhood Nostalgia
I am really excited about this one! This time we have a whole bunch of vinyls, and a couple of particular ones at the end really hit me with heavy nostalgia. Here’s more information on what’s here this time:
Art of Rally: This is one of the most minimal, purest racing experiences you will have. Here we have a typical rally game with one simple goal: to have the quickest time. You’ll be thinking that it’s not too hard, just take the best racing line and you’re golden. However, this game has much more realistic physics than you would expect, and you will find yourself wrestling with cars from the 60’s that let’s just say aren’t particularly suited to rally. It’s also difficult getting these to drift round corners, which needs to happen as the cars also have 60’s handling & acceleration and you will lose valuable time if you don’t. Cars progress through the years all the way until 1999. While you may think this gets easier to handle being that rally cars became better designed, the action only becomes more heart-in-mouth and you will find you need to take serious risks to keep up with the other competitors. But you must remember your goal to become a zen rally master, and the giant buddha statue that pops out of the ground at the start reminds you of this. If you like a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously, then this is a game for you. As another example, one of the car shapes is jokingly said to have come about because the owner of the company sat on a baguette! Alongside all of this is an airy, bright, almost 80’s inspired soundtrack that really lifts the gorgeous horizon as you race through locations such as the cherry blossoms of Japan, as well as others. The colours of these vinyls are appropriately named Sunrise Galaxy & Sunset Galaxy for this reason, a beautiful set & worthy of any collection.
Minecraft (Alpha): A game that needs no introduction. It helped greatly to pioneer procedurally-generated worlds essentially made of blocky Lego, bringing voxels (3D pixels) to the mainstream. It can be thought of as the ultimate, easy-to-access sandbox world that will hook you from the moment you punch through your first block of wood. It will keep you reeled in as you restart again, and again just to explore new worlds, find out new tricks, and build new things. It treads a well-balanced line between freedom and constraint, which can be further narrowed in scope by adjusting world generation settings, changing textures and character skins, adding beautiful graphical shaders for reflections & god-rays, and even access a horde of incredible mods such as Chunk Animator, which will animate new chunks of blocks in the distance into existence. You can choose to adventure through day and night battling monsters and upgrading your tools in Survival Mode, or become the ultimate master builder you want to be in Creative Mode. And you can easily do all this with friends too. The soundtrack is at this point legendary, created by C418 it is what you will hear underpinning your adventure with its beautifully ambient tones. And of course I just had to have it, having played Minecraft for too long now!
Minecraft (Beta): More Minecraft music you say? What a splendid idea! This is an extension of the Minecraft soundtrack, which is described by C418 as ‘bigger, more varied and sometimes even dark and introspective’. It also includes those music discs you find through fishing and dungeon-delving, which are complementary to your adventure as you return back home, set up your music box & listen to a disc while looking out at the landscape. I can’t help but wonder if this message somehow subliminally got me into VGM vinyl in the first place? We can only wonder! The vinyls themselves are gloriously firey and evoke the feeling of the Nether and End parallel worlds.
Sonic Adventure: I’m going to need to take a deep breath for this one. There is absolutely no game that defines nostalgia and that warm childhood feeling for me than this one. First some context, believe me it’s needed here. I grew up through what I see as a beautiful time period called the 90’s. I believe there was simply no better time to be part of games and technology (with the possible exception of the early to mid-late 00’s). Right at the beginning of the decade, I’d started playing this little game called Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Mega-Drive (or Genesis). It was a game that widened my eyes, that made me uncontrollably excited as I navigated this blue speeding blur of a hedgehog through loops, platforms and Badniks (the main robotic antagonists powered by animals captured within). This 2D vibrant world was like nothing I’d experienced, and I could only look over at my SNES counterparts in their Mario world and snigger at how un-rollercoastery it was alongside the dull colour pallete. Don’t get me wrong now Mario definitely has a lot of merits (as well as being one of the finest franchises to date), but there was seriously nothing like Sonic. Then the sequel came out, amping everything up to 11. So it continued through the 90’s. The first Sony PlayStation then came out in 1995 and blew everyone away by making 3D graphics mainstream with incredible CD-grade soundtracks (yes the Sega-CD and Saturn were both out, but I never knew anyone that owned either of these including me). But then, in 1998, the Sega Dreamcast was released. For the first time ever, incredible 128-bit arcade game conversions at perfect quality such as Crazy Taxi, Soul-Calibur & House of the Dead were available at home for anyone to play! However, I didn't play any of these games first. That title belongs to Sonic Adventure, and it absolutely blew me away. For the first time in a video game, my hero Sonic was truly 3D, he was now voice-acted and was unbelievably cool! The game was fast, very vibrant & varied featuring an incredible cast of 6(!) characters each with their own storylines revolving around the central antagonist, Dr Robotnik (named correctly in my opinion, fight me!). There was also an ever-evolving liquid-based monstrosity serving as the over-arching antagonist: Chaos. This became an ever-increasing threat and was more interesting with each absorbed Chaos Emerald. And the music……..was absolutely sensational. It engaged every adrenaline-based neuron in my body and got me seriously hyped up. If you want an idea of what this felt like, play Sonic & Knuckles then watch the intro for Sonic Adventure. And yes, this was the first intro ever to modern Sonic. It still gives me goosebumps every time & hopefully you can see how much it blew my mind! I played this game so much that when I received it on Christmas day, I checked my clock to see what the time was after a while: it was 8:00 in the morning on Boxing Day! The soundtrack is beyond legendary, and will be forever treasured in my collection. Probably helps that there is also a nice lyrics book included, as I’m still bad at remembering them!
Sonic Adventure 2: It’s safe to say I had an incredible time with Sonic Adventure, and felt every emotion from some of (in my strong manchild opinion) the greatest storytelling in any game. And then…..there was a sequel. Much to my excitement, it was every bit as good as first one and even added some fresh twists! The main one being that although there were again 6 playable characters and storylines, 3 of the characters were the bad guys, and ONE OF THEM WAS DR. ROBOTNIK. You could play as Dr. Robotnik! This blew my mind all over again and I couldn’t wait to get stuck into this campaign. But of course I had to start with Sonic being the fanboy that I am, and little did I know that right out of the gate I would be playing one of the most memorable levels in history: City Escape. A captured Sonic blasted out of a helicopter and boarded using the door down San-Fran style hillscapes. This to one of the coolest soundtracks with some very memorable lyrics, while blowing away all of the G.U.N robots trying to capture you, and ending with a gigantic truck trying to catch and run you over. It was pure game entertainment gold! Then you had the introduction of one of the coolest characters in any Sonic game: Shadow the Hedgehog - Sonic’s main rival. His amnesiac story arc was great and it was interesting to see how it turned out. A final notable change (though there are many) was how they perfected a cult-classic feature of the first game: the Chao Garden. For those who don’t know what this is, it was likely inspired by a certain craze in the 90’s called the Tamagotchi; a pocket-friendly, portable monochrome LCD device, where you take care of a digital pet. It was so popular it got banned in UK schools. Chaos are like little pets that you can breed and nurture and it was so effective that there are communities today that still play it. You could even play using the Virtual Memory Unit (an interactive memory card the Dreamcast is well known for pioneering)! Going back to the soundtrack, the musical themes in Sonic Adventure 2 are again very memorable & with a variety of genres (notably the hip-hop Knuckles theme Pumpkin Hill), and as with the previous collection, there is a very nice-looking book of lyrics included.
Whew, that definitely took something to write. If you do get the chance to play Sonic Adventure 1 & 2, give yourself a nostalgic treat and I’ll see you around for next time!
