genoboost's blog

Does this blog look sufficiently geno-ish? Particularly mario rpgenergized? Well anyway, with all the updates with the main website going on, I figured I should recreate the personal blog so that I can fully leave blogspot behind and continue working on this here blog.

I am also hoping that moving the blog over to wordpress will reinvigorate me to start writing here again some more. That is all I got for now, but rest assured there is a ton of big things happening soon!

Stores have begun their Halloween sales, kids are back in school, and the end of summer has truly passed. Chiptunes mourn the passing season with a nostalgia driven compilation known as Summertunes.

Chiptune netlabel ubiktune (ubiktune.org) celebrates both their tenth release as well as the end of summer with their new compilation Summertunes (download free at ubiktune.org/release/010/). The album is a collection of amazing chiptune artists paying tribute to lost summers with some incredible renditions of upbeat and nostalgia infused songs. We have the somber opening of Marine, which leads into a jazzy upbeat look back on summers past. The fast paced Malmen in Space by Xaimus, which creates a lot of child like fun and action. Shnabubala also brings a more intimidating feel with Pastorale Scenes, a track that straddles back and forth between simple nostalgia and uncomfortable memories. Quite possibly my favorite track on the album though, is Coda’s Beach in the Sky which is equal parts relaxing beach town and bright sidescrolling adventure. Of course this is just a small sample of the variety of music on here. There plenty of other amazing tracks all with their own tones, qualities, and summery feel to them.

For those who enjoyed spending summer vacations outside playing in the sun and water just as much as spending entire summer days inside trying to reach the end of Chrono Trigger or Sonic the Hedgehog, this album is definitely for you.

Full tracklisting is as follows.
01. C-jeff & Random – Marine (5:17)
02. Vincenzo – Summer Thing (2:43)
03. Xaimus – Malmen in Space (2:52)
04. Temp Sound Solutions – Ocean City Arcades (3:15)
05. Coda – Beach in The Sky (2:32)
06. Shnabubula – Pastorale Scenes (2:10)
07. Yerzmyey – AY is Not A Doorbell (2:48)
08. Blitz Lunar – Super Soaker (2:07)
09. Malmen – Unbelievable Lips (2:30)
10. MmcM – Summer is Always With Me (4:17)
11. Rico Zerone – Empty Beach (1:57)

Tonight I have been browsing back and forth between the amazingly awesome things written and stated by one Michael Swaim, as well as those by the awesome Steven Novella MD. I have also finished Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, and during the credits I searched this here internet for the soundtrack, so that I can play this song on repeat.

Just enjoy that bit of awesomeness while I finish this blog. I have been waiting quite some time for Professor Layton too, along with many other folks I know, and I was definitely not disappointed in the story or the puzzles. The ending was totally spectacular as well. I am still waiting for some awesome folks to go ahead and remix some songs from the series! Get on that!

Nothing really to report over at GM4A currently. LVN is currently on hiatus still as well. The Start Screen though seems to be quite productive as of late! Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the forums and community in general. Now that the site is redesigned, soon I hope we can begin a larger push to get a community under our stead. there are only a handful of posts and threads as of this post. And even fewer comments on articles. It is sad to look at the main page and see that the majority of articles, no matter what their subject have no comments, and when they do, it is usually just one. I will try to remedy it by leaving some comments on some of the other folks posts more often. I have noticed that once one person has left a comment, it tends to get other people to add their two cents as well, and I think it is a good small strategy to start with. Hopefully I won’t lazy about and get to it.

One more thing, I know it is over now, but HAPPY DREAMCAST DAY PEOPLE! GO PLAY/LEARN ABOUT THEN BUY THEN PLAY PROJECT JUSTICE!

Besides that I got some more articles written out today, and hope to get a lot more sorted out tomorrow as well. For now though it is time for ever more Layton. I need to find me those last couple puzzles!

They said it would never happen. Said it couldn’t be done. They set the title in front of me. Said it couldn’t be won. They told me I wouldn’t make it. Now my moment has come. The superheroes are clashing, and the remainder is one.

So I just purchased Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box this past weekend, and needless to say IT RULES! I would actually be playing right now but I am once again stuck on an annoyingly difficult puzzle. So instead, here I am blogging out. Also adding some more new tracks to my iTunes library, tracks that will be included on our next compilation effort. Certainly exciting times! Sadly thanks to Prof. Layton as well as the new Metroid Prime Trilogy release I have not gotten too much work done on my site lately, but hope to get more done starting this Thursday when I have some days off and some free time to myself. With that free time I hope to start several articles, hopefully finish at least one, and keep things moving along for our upcoming compilations.

Besides that I have noticed tons of Drama in one of the boards I frequent (cough *RT* cough). So I am not too enamored with the place currently, I have no idea when it will die down either so I have not been focusing on it much at all lately. The drama isn’t really the problem though, never has been.

There just seems to be a general lack of input or output on the boards lately, which is quite the opposite on the VG rock and chiptune side of things. With stuff like Kind of Bloop, C-Jeff, Armcannon, Metroid Metal and so much more, there is just waves and waves of things happening. Over in the nerdcore trenches, not much at all. Perhaps that is just my perspective though, I certainly hope so, because that means there are some awesome albums in RT that are about to bubble to the surface. One can hope.

One thing I am having a problem with is that the most vocal and active folks in the community seem to be the folks with the least output. Not just that but also the community is so insular. Far and away there seems to be no active promotion by anyone about anything. It’s incredible the lack of promotion these people give others, but especially themselves. It’s times like that where I feel “Why am I promoting these people that couldn’t care less to help anyone else, including me?”

This is not to say that their music is bad, or anything about their music really. It’s just, when I am going around writing, promoting, and telling everyone about these folks music, I would hope that I would get some support in someway.

Basically what all this rambling basically adds up to is that, for how active I am in the nerdcore community, for how hard I work to help them, support them, and just generally be their friends. NO ONE IN NERDCORE READS MY DAMN WEBSITE! Most of them barely know it exists it seems like. To have to remind people of my site’s URL and that I even have a site is definitely exasperating to my spirit as a person who supports this “nerdcore” thing wholeheartedly.

I am worn out though, I am not really going to go into it much more right now. Needless to say that there is a lot to be done in the realm of nerdcore. We will see how things go. For now I sleep! And by that I mean play two more hours of Layton!

I’m sorry to say that I am just a ghost. I’m no super powered human capable of fixing every single problem that could possibly arise.

So I have been moving foward with getting the next compilations under way and I am very excited! That plus F-Zero plus Iwadon plus some other projects make for so much awesome. Also back to work on one West Coast Wig Out, think I’ll have to buy the domain name for that one too, we’ll see. Oh yes, I also have a new post over at the start screen about C-jeff. I think the next article I will be writing will be about Kenley and his Into The Score Podcast.

Having just finished Earthbound at the request of my friend, I went back and listened to his podcast about the soundtrack, and it provided a ton of extra tidbits that helped me enjoy the game even further after the fact. Earthbound was such an amazing game in so many ways, I am incredibly glad to have played it from start to finish. It was definitely worth it and now I understand the attachment so many people have had to it over all these years. The game and the music are both incredible, and tough to get out of my head.

I just went and did a huge review for the one and only Armcannon, sadly I don’t think anyone read it (YOU CAN READ IT RIGHT NOW THOUGH!). I will bug Danimal about posting about it when he gets back from rocking the shit out of PAX with Metroid Metal. Too bad I sadly had to miss out. I hope some good fortune lets me head out to MAGFest though, as Metroid Metal was announced as a performer just recently for that!

I have a bunch of other stuff to review too, so hopefully I can work that out tomorrow and not slack of as is normal for a loser like me. So with that I get some sleep!

OH FUCK, I also forgot, my awesome pal Marcos Was kind enough to interview me! Check it out for a cool interview where I ramble on too much and plug everyone I can!

The battle is ending, true war is just beginning. I’ll learn from this disaster, I’ll build eight robot masters.

Fine readers of The Start Screen might recall that I wrote about Pause a bit back. Well I bring them up once again because the Pause Netlabel (iimusic.net) has given me my first introduction to the amazing C-Jeff (c-jeff.untergrund.net), a chiptune artist from Russia. He has just released a three song EP that spans a globe trotting 30 minutes entitled Electric (which you can download free at iimusic.net/catalog/2009/08/c-jeff-electric). In only three songs this album seems to span an endlessly changing sea of genres, styles, emotions, and ideas. From soaring jazz compositions to cavernous crunching riffs, all the tunes have so much emphasis as if pain staking thought went into each note written in every track. This might be because of the inspiration of this album, which may just put the music into a little more perspective. This is C-jeff’s own small explanation about what the album is about.

The plot of Electric is the life of one man – from his naïve childhood, through happiness and darkness to the final light of heaven. This album is dedicated to memory of my father, Oleg Zhemkov, the great rock-musician whom I lost in spring of 2008. I miss you.

With that in mind, it’s very easy to see this album as a sort of biography for a lost loved one. Each piece of work can conjure up a specific mood, and even specific feelings and memories.

The EP is broken down into three parts by track. Electric Part 1 is a jazzy opening number. It kicks off with an ominous low key feel, but the pace picks up and spirals out into the atmosphere, finally landing with a lot of  crunch This leads right into Part 2, which has a faster pace. The song wears itself down into an industrious and upbeat vibe until it gets caught in a wave of tense deep tones.  The air is tense and quick in the final build up of the song. This leads to a dark siren like ending to the track.

Finally we end up at the final piece of this amazing album, the epic rock composition Part 3. The track starts off dark, as if in a dank sewer, but quickly shifts gear once the guitar work comes in. This sets up the track to create incredible mountains and valleys in the arrangement.  The album closes with a simple fade out, which leaves the final riff repeating in your head even after the track ends.

Brilliant chiptunes meld with incredible guitar work to create an aural treat over these three tracks, and will definitely leave no one disappointed. The album creates upbeat catchy highs as well as depressing somber lows in the arrangements. This album, along with the recently released Kind of Bloop (which you should check out, but I will write about soon hopefully) continue to forge a path that shows that chiptunes are far from simple blips and chirps, but instead are diverse, emotional, and versatile. Be sure to download this album from Pause and experience the incredible compositions that this album has in store!