Unsent letters

- You've grown into a skilled writer, but your taste in games is holding you back. I don't mean just that you end up playing mostly bad games - by that metric, I have bad taste in games, and, goodness gracious, we all know that's not true - I mean that you need to expand your horizons a bit further beyond superhero licenses and movie tie-ins. I don't know if this would help in your bid to get a writing job in the industry, as those are usually landed through friend-of-a-friend connections rather than blogger-off-the-street discoveries, but a little more intellectual curiosity would reward you in ways beyond immediate employment prospects.

- I don't think you understand how creepy your new writing project makes you look. You've alluded to it jokingly, but seriously: if a kid ever goes missing while you're in town, you are going to be, not entirely unreasonably, suspect #1. Your lifestyle's prohibitively expensive now, and you're not accomplishing your goal of gathering new material on which to write, because you're largely visiting only places within your hobby-related comfort zones. You're not meeting new people; you're meeting the same people in new places. This is not a recipe for growth.

- If you lived by the rule of publish or perish, you would have been dead and buried several years ago. You cannot finish a project to save your life, which not only communicates to potential coworkers that you're irresponsible and unreliable but disappoints a lot of good people in the process.

None of these are in remote danger of being read by their intended recipients except the one meant for me.

31 Days of Game Music: Phantasy Star IV

Phantasy Star IV is kind of overpraised these days, but it's easy to be impressed by it. The title's a CD game on cart, one that uses its limitations to its advantage. Motion storytelling takes a certain skillset the game industry painfully lacked at the onset of CD tech - but many of its artists had a wealth of experience in panel-based storytelling, and PSIV was a bit unique in how it fully embraced its manga roots instead of trying to hobble them.

As with the game itself, showing is better than telling:

The artists turn the limitations of the restricted Mega Drive palette and resolution on their head with a focus on bright, vivid colors and clean lines that suits the franchise. But they take the plus sides of presenting a comic in this medium into account as well, with careful consideration to the placement of the panels (often overlapping, something that's not possible on paper) and the timing with which they unfold across the screen. Note how the game presents a mosaic of everyday actions relatively slowly, drawn at a variety of distances, when showcasing the characters calmly unwinding after a big job, then communicates crisis with a thin, screen-wide close-up pan cutting across the action.

That brings us to PSIV's opening title theme, which, while short (I'm looking at the stretch from :00 to about :48 here), integrates many of the strengths that bolster its visual presentation. While it's essentially an accompaniment to a text scroll, it marries mood with timing; a tight skein of shimmering synth, closely timed to the words on screen, hisses onto the soundtrack as the opening scroll fades in and out, then explodes into a freer, more up-tempo and dynamic composition as the frame draws back to reveal the main title. Like the game's storytelling, the composition is fleet of foot and polished; while its initial high, slow, thin notes of synth, like the ancient tale onscreen, seem to reach back to long ago in memory, it's always underscored by an aggressive techy beat that marks the setting as futuristic Algol.

It's interesting to contrast this introduction with that of Secret of Mana, which is also cinematic, but in an entirely different milieu; SoM takes a slow, contemplative approach to its program music, while PSIV here is slick, quick, and high-tech. Both are heavily modern in their marriage of sound to visuals.
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