(The Cartridge Lit blog.)
By imitating the Atari sound in its first two bars, then layering on bass harmony and finally adding percussion once its loop begins in earnest, “The Moon” captures in microcosm the Cambrian explosion in expressive potential between the second and third console generations.
The track, “[Desert] Storm [Bald] Eagle,” sounds almost comically American to me, as if the Japanese composer, Makoto Tomozawa, were parodying the music at an early ’90s American airshow. It sounds like Guns ’n’ Roses sounded in 1993, after grunge and hip-hop had absorbed heavy metal’s countercultural cachet.
The title is a lovely paradox; wind is a symbol for change, the only constant in life, but even the wind stops blowing sometimes. It may not be often (as “Can” suggests), but change does stop changing occasionally. In a present where every day seems to reveal some new, horrifying political development, the song’s statement is deeply intoxicating.
While the tone of both songs is mournful, the story of their unlikely marriage strikes me as comedy, not tragedy. Something about the combination of the raspy masculine wound-licking in “Hard Times” and the bright cartoonish snowboarding in the Ice Cap Zone stages is deeply funny and strangely satisfying.
Underground, of course, is a synonym for cool—out of the mainstream, not quite suitable for polite society. The worlds of video games are often underground, quite literally: Mario’s sewers and Link’s dungeons and Samus’s extraterrestrial underworlds. Playing video games in the real world may require a descent—into Mom’s basement, for instance.
We think video games are literature, and so why shouldn't there be literature about video games? That's the question we're hoping to answer here. Read more.
