nexxyz – Gameboy chiptunes and general weirdness

A fun, breakbeaty track…featuring my very own voice 😀

’nuff said.

Ah, the little brother of the Gray Gameboy Classic. Not as good in terms of sound, but with a crisper display and more fitting for an everyday pocket…hence the name 😉

The newest Marvel Comic movie on the market is Ghost Rider. I have to admit, that aside from one story in “Gespenster Geschichten” that I read about 15 years ago, I have never taken the time to really read any comics about this character, although I peeked into the early volumes at one point or another. I found it rather bland, except that no one can possibly deny that the main character has a pretty cool look.

The movie is easily understandable for a non-reader (as in “I didn’t read the comics” not as in “I’m an analphabet”), however I found the Nicholas Cage’s display of Johny blaze a little too…well…not depressing, he was probably supposed to feel detached, but instead felt a little….well I’m really struggling to find a word other than “retarded”, but that’s what I think the character feels like in the movie. The Rider himself feels very impersonal, and while I do not really know whether or not that is intentional, this feeling of artificiality is reflected in the animation. He feels stiff and boxy.

What I especially liked, as usual, were the evil guys. However they’re pretty clichee as well, as can be expected from comic villains. I just wish they had an little more original feel to it, nothing big, just a few specific quirks other than the over-used “fully evil son demon wants to dethrone half-evil demon father”. And the “guy misses date because of being a super-something” scene should have been banned from movies from being recorded on camera from the early Superman on.

Also, maybe it’s my age, but the “let the evil guy get what he wants so we can see him in his most powerful form and can utter a modified but easily recognizable quote and then let the hero destroy him shortly after with his unique abilities by exploiting a tactical mistake of the viallain in a final fight”-thing is getting really, really old. Although I must admit, for a comic or super-hero movie there’s not really an alternative. I’d like it if someone found one, though.

All in all, it’s a nice movie, but for me it was a standard comic movie. Nothing more, nothing less. To be honest, I was expecting a bit more, especially about the look of the Ghost Rider.

A great song originally by Kraftwerk, covered using a Gameboy, a C64 (both played Markus), a MC505 and a Virus B (played by me) as vocoder, with the lyrics performed by Markus who kept forgetting the words…;)

A lo-fi cover of a great old song.

One Must Fall 2097 was and still is a great game, with the community at www.omf.com being one of the greatest game community I know of…even though it is a quiet after the limited success of One Must Fall: Battlegrounds, which I consider to be a really good game that flopped due to a forced premature release and insufficient marketing.

The remix is actually a remix of the original OMF 2097 theme by Kenny Chou, I kind of hoped it would make it into the game at some point 😉 But being a beta tester was really fun!

Ahhh…my dear speakers. A little on the bassy side, but incredibly crisp sounding and (if you let them) LOUD! These for producing and getting the feel for a track, and just listening, and the HD515 for the details and fine-tuning. Yay!

(That in between is my Kyocera FS-920…a fine black/white laser printer with cheap toner.)

This is an original dance track that won me a compo in my times at Trax in Space. The site is no longer alive, but it has hosted my songs for a few years and had a nice community with lots of enthusiastic trackers and musicians. I miss it…

A downbeat track, with lots of harmonies and an erratic beat…written during troubled and melancholic times…a very prominent flute theme and moody strings.

This is my cheap yet very useful and complete MIDI control keyboard. I use it for experimenting an recording lines, but for experimenting my electronic piano is a little more intuitive.

It has 61 keys and 16 MIDI control knobs, and of course a pitch bend and a mod wheel.

Sufficient for now, but might be replaced in the future.

I like The Prodigy. I like them a lot. So much, I wrote a track, and then realized I had used the harmonies from “Breathe” subconsciously…I could not pretend I did not, so I decided to dedicate it to them. The recording got a bit long, but this is because it has got an atmosphere I could fall into really well, and that kept me in the mood for continuing for a long time…

A dirty, slow breakbeat Gameboy track.