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sage-nebula · 2 years

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STH - Finalizing the Pre-Departure Checklist

Notes: I actually have another fic that I've been intending to have finished today, but partway through writing the conclusion of that fic I got distracted by the idea for this one, so here is this for now. I will clean it up later. Spoilers for the ending of Sonic Frontiers, as well as for the Sonic 1 ending cutscene from Sonic Origins.

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Filled water canteens, check. Canned food and energy bar provisions, check. Instant coffee canister, check. Miles Electric, check. Wooden comb, check. Dry shampoo, check. Blankets, check. Magnet gun, flash bombs, emergency grenades—check, check, check. Everything he needed for at least a few days of travel was ready and accounted for, packed in a backpack. After looking through the bag for a third time, just to make sure he was absolutely ready, Tails tossed it into the cockpit of the Cyclone. He had her parked outside for once, behind his Mystic Ruins workshop, ready for takeoff. It had been so long since he’d flown her; she was a solo-craft, not suited for multiple passengers, and so she saw much less use than the Tornado did. But this was a solo trip, and the Cyclone provided him with land travel as much as she did air. She was much better suited for this journey. With one last look at the back door to his workshop to make sure he’d locked it, Tails spun his tails so he could jump into the cockpit—

“Don’t tell me you’re gonna leave without saying goodbye.”

His concentration broken, the rhythm of his tails halted just enough for Tails to land back on the ground with a stumble. Sonic’s hand caught his arm before he had a chance to topple over, and Tails turned stunned eyes on his big brother’s teasing smile as Sonic eased him back onto his feet.

“I left a note,” Tails said, his mind still catching up with the fact that he’d been alone behind the workshop not a second ago. Trust Sonic’s speed to—

“A note? All these years, and that’s all I get? A note?” Sonic put a hand over his heart. “That hurts me, Tails. Right here.”

Tails rolled his eyes. He knew played up theatrics when he saw them. “You already knew I was leaving. We saw each other a day ago. And you hate goodbyes anyway, so—”

“You’re right. I do. And I’ll probably leave this one before it’s over, but . . .” Sonic shrugged. “I still want to see you off. Make sure you’ve got everything you need.”

Sonic cared. Of course he did. And Tails understood, because he cared about Sonic, too. How many times had he made sure that Sonic had all the tech he could possibly need before a dangerous mission? How many times had he used a drone to deliver a forgotten canteen or extra aqua bubble powerup just in case something went wrong? This is what they did—they looked out for each other. That’s all Sonic was doing now, and Tails knew that.

But he was supposed to be proving his independence, proving that he could stand on his own. And that meant not needing someone to look through his provisions like he was a kid going on a field trip. Tails ran his tongue along his teeth and looked away, turning his eyes up to the sky. Cirrus clouds—a good sign. Just what he needed for an easy flight. “No worries. I’ve got everything covered.”

“Good.” Sonic leaned against the Cyclone, and after a moment, tapped her side with his knuckles. “Not taking the Tornado, huh?”

Tails blinked, caught off-guard by the sudden topic change, and looked back over. “No, she’s yours.”

“Pft. I’ve been meaning to give her to you for ages now. Should’ve done it a long time ago.” Sonic crossed his arms loosely over his stomach, an easy smile on his face, but there was something different about it Tails couldn’t quite parse. “You can take her if you want. You should take her.”

As—touching? weird? confusing?—as it was that Sonic was suddenly handing over ownership of the Tornado, Tails couldn’t let it distract him. He shook his head. “Even if you want to give her to me, that doesn’t change the fact that you can fly her, and you might need her. Besides, she’s got a double cockpit now, and I’m flying solo. It’s better for her to be here in case you go on a trip where you need to take someone with you. Amy, or Knuckles, or someone.”

“. . . Yeah. You’re probably right.” Like with his smile, there was something off about Sonic’s tone. And Tails couldn’t identify exactly what it was that he was hearing, but whatever it was, it told him that Sonic probably wasn’t going to be taking the Tornado out of the hangar any time soon. “So. You’re all set to take off, then?”

“Yep.” Tails patted the Cyclone’s side, ran his hand over her freshly dried coat of paint.

“Got a destination in mind?”

“Nope. I’m just gonna go wherever feels right. See where the wind takes me, you know.” Not unlike what Sonic himself always did, meaning that Tails was following in his example yet again, but he was going to try very hard not to think about that.

“Sounds like my kind of adventure. And everything’s in working order—GPS, comms . . . ?”

Tails felt the fur along his back stand on end, and when he turned to look at Sonic, his agitation must’ve shown in his face, for Sonic held his hands up in a placating gesture.

“Hey, I know you can take care of yourself,” Sonic said, and for what it was worth, he did sound sincere. “I just want to make sure—”

“I know,” Tails said, and honest to Chaos he didn’t mean to sound so terse. “I can handle it. I’ll be fine.”

“I know,” Sonic said. “But you know, if something came up—there’s nothing wrong with calling in a little backup. Heck, if it wasn’t for you, Knuckles, and Amy, I’d still be a cyber-zombie back on the Starfall Islands. We all need a little help sometimes.”

“If it wasn’t for us, you wouldn’t have been corrupted in the first place,” Tails muttered.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.” Tails forced a smile as he met Sonic’s eyes again. “Look, I know this is a bit . . . different. And I know you’re just trying to look out for me, and I appreciate it, I really do. But I’ll be fine. That’s what this whole journey is about, right? Proving that I can make it on my own? It’d be disappointing if it turned out I couldn’t, so—”

“Nothing you do could ever be disappointing,” Sonic said, and something uncomfortable wormed in Tails’ gut at the look on Sonic’s face. He turned away again, his tails swishing around him. “But that’s not . . . having your own adventure doesn’t have to mean cutting yourself off from everyone, you know. So you don’t need to call for backup. So what? Doesn’t mean you can’t call just to say hey.”

Tails frowned. “I never said I couldn’t.”

“Great.” There was a smug grin in Sonic’s voice—one Tails had heard so many times over the years, usually right after one of Eggman’s plans had just been ruined. “Then I look forward to hearing from you at least once a week.”

“What?” Tails looked over, aghast, and was met with the exact smile he knew he was going to see. “You can’t be ser—”

Sonic held up his hand. “Doesn’t have to be a phone call. You know I hate talking on the phone. And it definitely doesn’t have to be every day, because we both know I suck at keeping track of what day it is. But just, you know. An email. Once a week. Doesn’t have to be long. Just a couple lines to say hey, let me know how you’re doing, if you’ve seen anything cool in your travels. Just enough so it’s not like you disappeared off the face of the earth.”

It was— Tails wanted to scream, just a little. Because it wasn’t an unreasonable request. It wasn’t like his plan was to disappear off the face of the earth. It’s not like he was trying to cut himself off from his friends. But that also—it wasn’t the point. He wanted to be independent, wanted to prove that he was more than the burdensome little brother that Sonic always had to look after, and if Sonic was still looking after him via weekly check-in emails, then didn’t that defeat the point?

“You never sent weekly check-in emails when you were traveling,” Tails muttered, and he hated how petulant he sounded.

“Yeah, well. That’s big brother privilege,” Sonic said, and perhaps sensing the argument even before Tails opened his mouth, added, “And not the best example set, fair enough. That’s my bad. But I’ll send emails too, in response to yours. We’ll keep in better contact this time. Deal?”

It wasn’t what Tails had had in mind, when he’d decided to go off on his own. But it wasn’t an unreasonable request. Sonic was actually admitting that something he did in the past maybe wasn’t the greatest idea in the world. And from the look on his face, Tails could tell that this really mattered to him.

And for some reason, that made Tails’ throat feel a little choked. He nodded, in lieu of being able to say anything, and Sonic’s posture finally relaxed.

“Okay. Good. Glad we got that sorted.” Sonic stood up straight, free of the Cyclone. He considered Tails for a moment before a half-smile curled his muzzle. “And—one more thing.”

Tails tilted his head, his throat still a little too thick for him to trust his voice. Luckily, Sonic took his head tilt for the cue to continue that it was.

“I don’t think I ever told you this, but—you remember how we met on West Side Island, right?”

Tails nodded. He didn’t know how he could forget.

“Well . . . did I ever tell you why I was on West Side Island?”

Tails blinked, the confusion he felt enough to finally unstick his throat. “No. But it was because Eggman was there, right? He was harvesting animals to use as batteries for his badniks, and so he could build the Death Egg.”

“Well, yeah. But also no.” Before Tails could question what that was supposed to mean, Sonic continued. “Eggman was on South Island before he went to West Side. It just so happens that I was also on South Island, and so I freed the animals there and chased him off.”

“Yeah, I kn—”

“I chased him off as Super Sonic. With the Chaos Emeralds. And before the Chaos Emeralds scattered, they showed me something.” Sonic grinned, his eyes bright. “Wanna know what they showed me?”

“I . . . guess?”

“You. Well,” Sonic waved a hand through the air, “not you exactly, but they showed me West Side Island, so that’s how I knew to go there. And that’s where I met you.” Sonic grinned, and lightly poked Tails on his forehead. “So what I’m trying to say here is, even if you decide to skip out on your weekly email, you can rest assured that the Chaos Emeralds won’t.”

Tails stared at Sonic for a second as he put the pieces together, and then blurted the first thing that came to mind. “Are you saying the Chaos Emeralds are going to snitch on me?”

Sonic laughed, and ruffled the fur atop Tails’ head, heedless of Tails’ attempts to swat his hand away. “Bro, you have no idea how fast they’ll snitch on you. They were snitching on you before we even met. So if I were you, I wouldn’t give ‘em a reason to do it again.”

The fur atop his head now thoroughly ruffled, Tails blew his bangs in a vain attempt to get them back out of his eyes. “The only thing I’m thinking about giving them a reason to do is mind their own business. Do they seriously have nothing better to do than spy on people?”

“Who can say? The Chaos Emeralds work in mysterious ways.” Sonic shrugged, but his expression softened. “But that’s just a backup plan. Just in case . . .”

“I know. And they won’t be needed. I’ll be fine,” Tails said, and added, because he knew Sonic needed to hear him say it, “and I’ll email. Once a week.”

Sonic smiled. And before Tails could say anything else, or could think to turn to the Cyclone, Sonic darted forward and pulled him into a hug. For a split second, Tails wasn’t sure how to respond; one arm thrown around his shoulders was one thing, and not too uncommon a thing at that, but a full-on hug was a different story altogether. Those were so much rarer. But Sonic’s hug was secure and warm, and knowing that it would be the last time for a long time that he’d have the chance to hug his brother, Tails hugged him back just as tightly.

But the hug was over as quickly as it happened. Sonic stepped back, his hands on Tails’ shoulders. He was still smiling, but—Tails was sure he was imagining it, but it looked like it was wavering a little.

“Take care of yourself, partner,” Sonic said. His voice sounded a little tight. “I’ll . . . see you later.”

Tails nodded. “You too, Sonic. I’ll be in touch.”

Sonic nodded, and gave Tails’ shoulders one last, bracing squeeze. In the next second he was gone, and Tails was once again standing alone beside the Cyclone.

#miles tails prower #sonic the hedgehog #unbreakable bond #fic fix #sonic frontiers spoilers #title not final but good enough for now #also one of Sonic's idle lines in Frontiers is him commenting on how he should've given the Tornado to Tails a long time ago #so i didn't just pull that out of nowhere lol #he literally says it in game #sth

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toonfan91 · 3 months

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Moveset and Minigames for my Amy Rose game idea

Wow, I did not expect you all to like my Amy idea as much as you have. Some of you even made concept art. Thanks so much. So, while I'm at it, here are my minigame and moveset ideas for Amy Fortunes of Rose: A Sonic Story.

Amy's Basic Moveset:

Hammer Spin - When moving on the ground, pressing the attack button will make her spin around with her hammer out. (Think like Crash or Jak's spin attacks)

Hammer Slam - When standing still, Amy can raise her hammer over her head and then slam it down to the ground, this is useful for slamming down pegs or sturdier breakables.

Jump and Hammer Flip - This is Amy's bogstandard jump from Sonic Adventure and Sonic Advance, Amy will jump into the air, but not spin into a ball, and when you tap attack she curl up, spinning her hammer around as she lands. Allowing her to attack enemies like Sonic, Tails and Knuckles can by jumping.

Hammer Glide - Similar to the card glide in Frontiers or her gliding skill in Heroes, holding the jump button when in midair will start a glide, this will let Amy get over certain pits. You gain a better distance doing the glide at the very peak of the jump.

Amy's Unlockable Moves:

These next few moves are abilities you can unlock as you progress through the game, which will help with enemy management, or getting everything in previous levels with areas you couldn't access prior.

Hammer Dash - Basically Amy's drop dash equivalent from Origins and Superstars, crouching and then tapping the action button will begin a hammer dash, and letting go of crouch unleashes it, causing Amy to go on a speedy smashing spree

Death Hammer Spin - Upgrade to Hammer Spin - Now when Amy spins, you can tap the attack button repeatedly, to have Amy keep spinning, in a rosy tornado of doom

High Jump/Super Slam - Upgrade to Amy's Hammer Slam - Now Amy is capable of charging up her hammer for a super slam, her hammer will ignite fire once fully charged, and when the attack button is release, she slam her hammer down and be sent flying into the air, as a shockwave obliterates surrounding enemies. Depending on how long you held attack, the jump height can be used for easier gliding, or to reach high up areas.

Boomerang Hammer - This allows you to either throw your hammer either standing still or in motion at enemies and breakables, or if you hold the button for it, go into a zoomed in mode to better aim at long away enemies or targets.

Minigames:

Chao Race - Accessed through Cream - Play as Cheese or Chocola, and race to the finish line and see if you get first place

Baking with Vanilla - Accessed through Vanilla - Amy and Vanilla are spending some girl time in the kitchen, time your button presses right and bake some sweets, the better the timing, the better your sweets turn out.

A Friendly Spar - Accessed through Blaze - Take on Blaze in a friendly sparing session, dodge carefully and keep your guard, Blaze doesn't hold back and you know it. You'll unlock higher levels of difficulty each round you beat.

Spring Cleaner - Accessed through Sticks - Sticks needs help cleaning badnik scrap out her backyard, use your hammer to bat away badnik pieces or even bombs, why does Sticks have bombs in her backyard anyway?

Getting high enough scores in these minigames will award you costumes, such as Amy's classic era outfit and hairdo, her Riders outfit, her goth outfit, or her Sonic and the Black Knight outfit

Collectables:

Rings - Each level has a certain amount of rings you can collect, and much like tradition, if you get hit, they scatter, however if you don't recollect your scattered rings in time, you'll have to recollect them again when you return to the level. Much like in Forces, your ring count doesn't automatically go back to zero when hit.

Red Star Rings - There's five red star rings hidden in each level, some will be easy to get, others will need you to get certain abilities then return to that level later with them. Collecting red star rings will grant you unlockable concept art of Amy throughout the years, from Sonic CD, all the way up to the comics and recent games.

Fortune Cards - These are pivotal, and can be collected by completing certain tasks in levels. As you progress you'll be needing certain amounts of rings and cards to unlock levels, like the power orbs from Spyro 2. However these aren't all the cards can do, as every 5 cards, it'll give a little extra power to Amy's attacks, and you can see them flutter around Amy when she attacks (this can be a toggleable option too). You will also be able to view the art of each card in a extras menu, with paragraphs of what the card means and references hidden in the art.

Chao - The chao sanctuary has been put into ruins, with chao now being used in a lot of new badniks, you know what you gotta do, use that hammer and get to work!

Chaos Emeralds - It wouldn't be a Sonic game without the chaos emeralds. These are unlocked by 100 percenting all levels in a zone. Doing that will make a big ring appear, jump into it and enter the special zone, thrusting you into a 2.5D recreation of a area Amy's been in from her past (Sonic CD, Adventure, Heroes, 06). Get to the chaos emerald at the end without dying. These special zones act like traditional classic Sonic levels, tailored to Amy. You'll also get at least one chaos emerald from the boss of the zones leading up to the final zone. And getting all the chaos emeralds gives you a good ending.

And that about covers it, hope you guys enjoy these details, and thanks to those of you who gave me ideas and made concept art based on my game idea. You all rock

(Logo made by me)

#sonic #sonic the hedgehog #sega #game ideas #ideas #amy rose #amy #amy rose sth

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sapphire-mage · 6 months

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It's funny to see this 'Sonic Cinematic Universe' they're considering, cause I don't know exactly how that is going to work. Like, I know some people are being like, "Who is gonna play Eggman once Jim calls it quits?" Either find a new actor or let Agent Stone take the name after they're married. That's not my issue.

But what stories would this CU tackle?

-Metal Sonic (maybe two movies if they incorporate Sonic Heroes)

-Sonic Adventure 1

-Shadow the Hedgehog

-06?

-Frontiers?

I'm immensely curious, concerned, and confused. They could tap into the comics, Surge could be cool.

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wereh0gz · 2 years

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An idea just popped into my head that could either be a frontiers creepypasta or a cool way for Sonic Team to tease the story dlc coming soon

Ok so y'know how they added the jukebox like just today (or yesterday for some people)

Closer to the release of the story dlc, Sonic Team quietly adds a new music memory you can find somewhere hidden deep in Ouranos that only appears after you beat the game. The game updates but there's no pop-up when you boot it up like with the first wave of dlc, it just kind of... appears out of nowhere. It could also be hidden from the map too, but I think then it'd be too hard to find idk

Anyways. It's a track with a weird name, or maybe no name at all, and when you play it, the music goes quiet. After a bit you slowly begin to hear this sort of droning, static-y sound, with barely audible whispers.

Sonic himself reacts to the track being played, becoming confused and uncomfortable once the silence is broken. Looking around, fidgeting, tapping his foot.

The volume of the track slowly increases, and Sonic gets visibly anxious and maybe even comments on it. The screen gains a slight red tint as the whispers become audible enough for you to hear The End speaking. Not enough to make out what it's saying, though, but it sounds angry. It kinda sounds like it's reversed or corrupted in some way. There'd either be no subtitles at all or very glitchy ones that don't make what is being said any clearer.

And then it ends. The default music begins to play again, Sonic shakes off the lingering anxiety after asking himself what that was, and the track disappears from the jukebox menu. You can't play it again unless you start a new save.

That would leave the fandom speculating for a while

#ramblings #just a dumb concept that came to me after i got out of the shower #i love creepy and cryptic shit i wish the sonic series would delve into it's horrors more #i think if the track were to have a name it'd be memento mori #or something like that #tho that might be too on the nose

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benis-chillin · 28 days

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Backlog Reviews 2024: Metroid Prime Hunters

Platform: DS

June 19th, 2024-August 10th, 2024(didn't finish)

(Note: The only Metroid Prime game I have previously played is Prime 1. Review can be found in THIS post)

(Also, here's the previous backlog entry. I'm adding hyperlinks to all of the posts like, the night before this goes out)

So…This is awkward.

As I've stated before, Metroid is the series that resonates with me just as much as Sonic does. I love the lore, the(2D)gameplay, Samus as a character, it all just clicks with me.

And the PREMISE of this game is absolutely baller! Samus vs a bunch of other, considerably less scrupulous bounty hunters in a cosmic battle royale for an ancient treasure? Sign me up!

But the actual execution? Eh…

Now, I am not entirely unfamiliar with DS FPS'. I still love the DS version of Bionicle Heroes(which the Prime series definitely had an influence on, especially in terms of its BALLER soundtrack which is good for listening to while you read this review)to this very day, and I thought this was gonna be more like that. Hell, I even got the mod that lets me utilize the C-nub and the gyro on my modded 2DS XL, which made aiming in this version a lot of fun…For a few sessions.

youtube

But then I ran into the major problem with this game: Nothing really HAPPENS.

(not my screenshot, obviously)

Like, in most Metroid games, stuff is constantly happening. New upgrades and paths are being thrown at you every which way, it's bananas. But here? You've GOT most of your arsenal from the start, and paths rarely lead to anything but yet another artifact, or an attack by a mob of flying enemies that are hard to engage due to the lack of a lock-on feature.

And if you could just hold down the fire button for these sections, it would be fine! But due to the charge beam, which REALLY could've stood to be cut for this entry, you need to constantly tap the fire button to keep on shooting, which was absolute HELL on my carpal tunnel!

Oh yeah, and the mod maps jumping to either the D-Pad or the touch screen, so you can either not move while jumping, or not do anything else while jumping.

So basically…

In addition, the levels are VERY aimless and meandering, not helped by your ship being your only way to save, teleport points to bring you back for a save being VERY scarce, and overall, what little puzzle solving exists in this game is WAY below par.

All of this is piled on top of the game using the same map system as Prime 1, when the touch screen is RIGHT THERE for a real-time map! Why would you make a Metroid game with two screens, and NOT use a real-time map!? And you can only manipulate it via the touch screen, even though the map is on the TOP screen, so my swipes just get massively misinterpreted!

The story…Somehow exists less than the ORIGINAL Prime's narrative did. Like, I barely even register it outside of the, again, baller premise. Prime at least tried to compensate its weak narrative with more scanning stuff, but what I could play of this game showed very little scanning potential. I keep on being told that Prime is peak Metroid, but two games in a row, I have not yet been impressed.

(I'm still gonna give them all a shake, though. Because Metroid)

So yeah, that's my short and sweet review of yet another game I did not finish this year. Well, Fallout New Vegas was more like I lost interest in the path I was currently taking after completing the personal goal I set out for my character, but you get what I mean.

(probably gonna do another New Vegas playthrough eventually. replaying older games between your new games is healthy for the soul, I think)

At least my non-enjoyment of this game got me trying out Super Metroid Redux. I'll give my thoughts on that in the year end post.

3/10

And next up? Well, I'm gonna complete Super Metroid Redux, and my current recording of a Sonic Frontiers let's play first to see if the weather will cool down first(house air conditioning is still out, and the window unit we bought for the kitchen doesn't extend to my gaming area), but by mid-September, I plan on playing Resident Evil 2(original via Gamecube), for at LEAST Leon's story. See ya then!

#gaming backlog #metroid #metroid prime #metroid prime hunters #Youtube

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marioharasealmama · 1 month

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Unknown 🦭🤝🦔

Where 2 give: https://azarashiseal.kawaiishop.jp

🦭💡 full images can be found on Twitter at @seal_mama along with all rescue updates and news and easier to find content i upload ❤️💋🦭

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Protect the seals in Norway 🙏 Please sign, share, and spread Awareness to protect them.

Petition here 👉 https://shorturl.at/inptM (working link in bio)

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Please click the link below to write to Prime Minister Trudeau and other Canadian officials and demand that the seal “hunt” be called off and that they ban sealing once and for all.

https://harpseals.org/help/letters_and_emails/canada_pols_cop_15_email.php

Please spread the word, and if you can make a donation, please do so from this link.

https://harpseals.org/help/donate/index.php

(IMPORTANT) Harp Seal Petition: https://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/594/901/362/?TAP=1732

Save Harp Seals Link 2: https://action.hsi.org/page/144926/action/1?ea.tracking.id=website

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Please check out and spread awareness 4 Hout Bay Seal Rescue Centre ❤️

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Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/HoutBaySealRescue/?mibextid=LQQJ4d

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💎SEGA Hype Energy Boost 💎

Jesus Christ is real and saves us all.

Vote President Donald Trump 2024 #MAGA

Cherish each day ❤️

Sonic Rumble

Sonic SEGA Jakks Pacific toys

Spark the electric jester

Siivagunner

Yohane

Phineas and Ferb

Hideki Naganuma

Sonic Dream Team

Sonic Heroes Remake

Sonic Momentum

Sonic Forces PvP Racing Battle

Puyo Puyo Puzzle Pop

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk

Jet Set Radio

Like A Dragon Infinite Wealth

Crazy Taxi

Sonic Movie 3

Sonic Superstars

Sonic Origins Plus

Sonic Frontiers

Sonic Frontiers Final Horizon

Sonic Prime

Sambe De Amigo Party Central

Sonic P06

Sonic Forces Overclocked

Sonic Runners Revival

Sonic Runners Reloaded

Sega vs Capcom

Sonic x Shadow Generations

Knuckles The Echidna Paramount+

Persona 3 Reload

Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble

Sonic Robo Blast 2

Jet Set Radio Live Hype!

https://jetsetradio.live + Genesis 1:3 Hype

#marineconservation #sealrescue #comics #design #handmade #illustration #art

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glassmarcus · 8 months

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Sonic Frontiers is an errand running power fantasy

*Played in November 2022, Written in December 2022

If you know anything about the development details of Sonic Riders, you know that its prototype was supposed to be more of a Tony Hawk like game instead of a standard racing game. That may be disappointing to hear considering this sounds like a pretty rad idea. Well I have good news. Sonic Frontiers is pretty much a Tony Hawk game. I’ve heard a lot of comparisons to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and other open world/zone games and while those parallels are somewhat valid, they don't really get to the heart of what this game is. Sonic Frontiers is simply a game where you go around and perform sick tricks to get collectibles, and it's always fun because you just happen to be doing it as Sonic the Hedgehog.

Once you got really good at them, the beauty of the old Tony Hawk Pro Skater games was seeing how many task you could complete in a run. It was usually feasible to get 1 or 2 task out of the way within the 2 minute limit, but when you could knock out half of the objectives, you felt like a well oiled board sliding machine. Sonic Frontiers replicates the soul of this. It doesn't have a time limit, but it does have a ton of task to complete. Task which flow into each other seamlessly within it's giant skate parks masquerading as overworlds. It might seem weird for these environments to have grind rails and ramps plastered over the landscape, but it's only weird if you view this as a real place and not the skate park editor level that it is. I mean that more literally than you might think, as you actively build rails and springs as you progress through the island and these act as a sort of fast travel. It taps into the integral joy of seeing how fast you can get from point A to point B and how cool you can look while doing it.

None of the activities you do in Sonic Frontiers are all that interesting individually. Killing enemies is fun, but it's not the peak of stylish action by any means. Grabbing memory tokens are usually enjoyable obstacles, but they lack meaningful challenge usually. The puzzles are baby tier and don't take much thought. Cyber Space Stages are a good change of pace, but lack personality. None of these are anything special and I do wish there was more variety in each category, but doing so many of them, so fast makes it feel like you are getting a lot of shit done. The game can easily flow from puzzle to token to token to mini boss to stage within a few moments if you know what you're doing. And if you don't, then it takes longer, but it's still pretty quick. Sonic Frontiers is bursting with activities that feel like chores, but gives you the speed and tools to knock out those task in moments. It's what it feels like to truly speed run the mundanity of life. I don't know if I'm making this sound appealing by comparing it to doing chores, but I assure you I enjoyed pretty much the entire game. Even the rough parts.

And there are a lot of rough parts. Rough Parts such as: The animations being bare bones; The cutscene budget likely not existing; The physics not quite making sense; The UI feeling like a place holder that accidentally got fully produced; The Hellish pop-in diminishing the routes you can plan for on the fly; The dearth of new enemies pretty early in the game; The combat not knowing the meaning of the word ‘balanced’; Experience capping mid way through the game; The offensive amount of unskippable prompts and repeating cutscenes; The entire 3rd Island thinking it’s Sonic Colors; The 5th Island pretending it isn’t the other half of the 1st Island; Big the Cat trivializing the entire gameloop; The exiguous amount of Cyber Space level motifs; The final boss being hidden and optional; The resurrection of Pin-ball, the most egregious sin of them all. This game is not finished cooking and makes some pretty weird decisions.

I could probably keep going. But the point is, none of this shit matters too much because I get to be Sonic going fast on a big map. And that's all anyone really wants. Since Sonic Adventure, people have tricked themselves into thinking hub worlds were good because they gave you a little playground to run in. Heck, that's basically why Sonic Jam is still cooler than every other Sonic Game Compilation. Sonic is about freedom, and giving a nonlinear open level is about as free as it gets. Sure, physics are wonky, but they are fun to tame and use to your advantage. Upgrading speed takes forever, upgrading ring capacity is stupid, and collectibles could have more meat to them, but simply having a goal that requires Sonic to use his unique mechanics is enough. Cyber Space levels are soulless and I don't remember any of them. But getting an S rank on a few was exhilarating and they actually allow you to skip sections and platform yourself. Combat lacks depth and challenge. But it's still fun to make quick work out of enemies once you learn their behavior. There are flaws that stunt its potential, but never invalidate its value. Frontiers is fundamentally good. What I got out of playing it is about equal to what I got out of Mario Odyssey, but in a 1/3rd of the time. The game is at worst, fine. But it does plenty to elevate itself above that.

Sure going fast and homing attacking stuff is fun, but there are little flourishes that give it that extra oomfp. They did not need to include the Drop Dash in this game, but they did and I love it. Instead of being a way to maintain momentum, it sort of acts as a Spin Dash replacement. It’s not really much better than the boost overall when on a flat surface, but if you are on a hill you can really rack up speed. Using the Drop Dash in optimal locales feels like you are playing the opening cutscene of Sonic CD at times. And I did not expect the game to achieve this in any capacity. There's also the trick system which acts as sort of a small reward for taking big jumps and using certain springs and ramps. Because it's not something you can do whenever you want, it feels nice to just hit as many tricks as possible while it last and gain as much XP as you can. The game is perfectly fine without it, but the occasional bell and whistle to movement is appreciated and makes every bit of over world exploration more enjoyable.

I want to separate the Cyloop from the other new mechanics because I think it's more than just a bell or whistle. It's surprisingly integral to how this game works. It has its uses in combat as sort of a guard break, launcher, and heal. But its main importance comes in the islands themselves. The Cyloop is an alternate interact button. There are so many boring things you could theoretically do with the actual interact button. Blow out torches? just press X. Activate this switch? Just press X. Reset this puzzle piece? Just press X. Frontiers could have done all of these things, but uses its actual interact button as little as possible. Most miscellaneous actions that aren't talking, are performed by cylooping. And it sounds kinda brain dead, but quickly running in a circle is far more interesting then just pressing a context sensitive button. It creates its own intuitive design dialect that applies to many situations. And while all this dialect amounts to is: ‘If all else fails, Cyloop’, That's a much more interesting action than ‘press X when prompted’. It's a very sonicy way to go about making a generic action. Because you aren't required to stop moving in order to do it. Running around in a circle is simple fun that doesn't really get boring. Nights into Dream knew exactly what was up 25 years ago and I'm glad Sonic Team returned to the concept.

I liked combat far more than I thought I would. Enemies in the beginning could take a bit to defeat and really slowed down the flow of the game. The special attacks make quick work out of some, but those have some pretty lengthy animations. Luckily they provided the one thing flashy, substance light combat needs to be good: Animation cancels. Because you can cancel all but 2 animations, you are: A) not forced to wait at all during combat and not have to deal with ending lag, and B) a walking combo video. Outside of the horrid mini bosses you are forced to deal with or the actually good mini bosses you are forced to deal with, enemies are practically soft combo labs. Whenever you see a standard enemy and have the thought "oh lemme see if I can get 3 hits off, do a saw blade, cancel out and finish with a loop kick" you have full reign to execute on that or just run past them. Like I said, the mini bosses are hit and miss and mostly act as platforming challenges rather than combat exercises. The true test of your combat abilities come in the boss fights. Not that they are harder or anything. They are the same as a regular enemy once you get up close. They are all trivialized by the parry, and specials melt the health bar. But you look and feel cooler than ever before doing what you normally do to basic enemies to these walking angelic nightmares. These fights have all the spectacle and hype you’d expect from a Sonic Final Boss, but it's for every boss. They are the least polarizing thing in the game. Most people love them as far as I can tell and have the least amount of caveats attached to them

These bosses act as the perfect punctuation to the individual stories of each island. The story by the way, is adequate this time around. I say adequate as a positive, as the last decade of Sonic stories have been gutter trash. I don't think Sonic Frontiers has a better story than say Sonic Adventure 2 or Sonic and the Black Knight just due to how passive and routine it ends up being. It also does help that the plot is a reskin of Shadow of the Collossus. So it's still good, but kind of played at this point. What really drives it though, are the character interactions courtesy of the king himself, Ian Flynn.

This is where I have to release my Sonic fan limiters and go off a bit. When I picked up that issue of Archie Sonic in the middle of 3rd Eye Comics when I was 11 years old and saw how fucking rad those stories were, I never would have dreamed that the same guy working on them would be a writer on a Sonic game. Sure, he's only really in charge of dialogue, but this is only the first step. Ian Flynn cannot be stopped and will soon hold all the stones. He has proven himself many times over in the past 16 years and even more so in this game. The characters finally act like themselves. Sonic only cracks jokes when appropriate and they are actually funny when he does. He's cool for the first time in 13 years. A character built to be cool is finally cool. That's so cathartic, and honestly that's the easiest thing this game achieves writing wise. Amy is not annoying and veers into positive female role model territory; Knuckles is not a joke and his life situation is treated with respect; Tails' decade long character assassination is addressed and is rolled back in a fitting way; Eggman is no longer a cartoon, but a true villain with actual depth and is effortlessly humorous. They all have their own character arcs that, and while are bit undercooked due to the game being undercooked, are delivered in a believable way. It makes me excited to see what's in store for them. I'm excited for the future of Sonic stories in general.

I'm used to only getting my fix through the comics, but now I'm pretty certain that Flynn is going to have a bigger role in story structure next time. All the ingredients are here. The comics are canonized in this game pretty much. Comic characters already appear in Sonic Runners. We're so close to having NEW cast members in a Sonic game. I know Sage is a new character, and she's great and all, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about anthropomorphic [insert name here] the [insert animal species here] who is a major facet of the roster and a main stay of the franchise. Ever since Sonic 06, Sonic Team has been scared shit-less of these types of characters. The last one that stuck was Silver. Since then, the total cast has been underrepresented and the returning cast is just in the background while Sonic does all the work. It seems like they aren't confident introducing new characters. That's where the comics come in. We already know people love Tangle; We already know people love Whisper; We already know people love Surge. The data is there and has been since 2018. Testing is complete. They just need to be put in a game. This is such easy money that I don’t even think Sega will mess it up.

I know I have no right having optimism after the past 2 decades of Sonic Team shitting the bed, but fuck it. Keeping your expectations in check is not what this franchise is about. Since Sonic Colors we've been playing it safe. And that was when I truly started getting bored with these games. Now I want them to try new and old things. And I want to be excited about it. So I will be. It really feels like they're going for it this time around. They're putting more trust in the community than critics, making sure they're catering to people who actually like the games rather than trying to win over those who don't. It’s what Sonic Forces felt like it might have done if it wasn't based on surface perceptions of what people want. Frontiers is the genuine article. It's rough, and had more issues than I can list, but I'd be lying if I said it's not basically what I've been asking for.

Also the music is good. Undefeatable is a top 5 Sonic vocal track easily and Vandalize isn’t far behind. The Cyber Space music saves them from vanishing in my mind. Fishing Vibes makes me want to go back and get my masters so I can listen to it while I study. It lies on the side of Sonic soundtracks labeled “Not Sonic Chronicles” so it’s extremely good, go figure. This last paragraph is a formality.

#sonic frontiers

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curetapwater · 1 year

Text

I can't play the Frontiers update immediately so I'm blocking the tags "sonic frontiers spoilers" "sonic frontiers dlc" and "sonic frontiers update" until I'm able to finish it for myself. If I could politely request that those who play the update tag their posts about it for those of us who can't play it that soon, I'd really appreciate.

#i got school 😭#sonic frontiers #tap plays sonic frontiers

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latin-dr-robotnik · 3 years

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Context: I wrote the following months ago, thinking about a new game concept, and left the draft sitting for some reason. Now, with Frontiers being a thing... well... I don’t think it’s gonna be this exact idea, but there are bits that sorta scared me, like opening with Sonic suffering amnesia or a digital world with usual Sonic level tropes. Anyway, I’ll let you be the judge :P

Original post goes like:

Y’know what? I’d like to see a Sonic game that follows some of the ideas Forces and IDW Sonic sort of explored. Think about this:

Sonic wakes up in a seemingly normal Green Hill type of place. He doesn’t seem to remember why he’s there or what happened before, so decides to take a run. After running into the first boss of the game, the world surrounding him starts to collapse in digital glitches and the like. This isn’t Sonic’s world.

Sonic runs into Tails and later the rest of his friends, and together start to piece together the vague memories of the night before waking up in this digital world. Turns out Eggman ambushed everyone and, managed to put them in a simulation running on Chaos Emerald energy, a digital test run for a bigger plan to conquer the world. The whole game revolves around saving Sonic’s friends, gathering all of them together in a sort of meta-hub world, gathering the 7 Digital Emeralds and allowing Tails enough time and resources to hack into the simulation and try to tap into the real world Chaos energy power to reverse the process and get them all back in one piece.

Eggman, master of the simulation, isn’t happy about this new plan the heroes came up with, so he sets up constant roadblocks and bosses, and copies Metal Sonic into the simulation to act as the guardian of the Egg Palace, a new Eggmanland-like place where the heart of the simulation is located, and the ultimate goal for the heroes. Throughout the game Eggman can be heard complaining and/or teasing the heroes from outside the simulation, not unlike his PA clips in Colors.

The entire simulation is made up of regular Sonic zone tropes, like the tropical zone, city zone, jungle zone, water zone, ruins, etc. The final assault on the Palace is set up in multiple phases: Sonic and his friends need to get in and create a distraction for Tails to reach the core, the engine of the simulation and hack it, so it can play out in multiple ways. Think Cannon’s Core or Wii Eggmanland having different acts.

In the climax of the game, Sonic and their friends face off against Metal Sonic, and then a big Eggman mech. Thinking they’ve won, the heroes celebrate, only to be interrupted by the real Eggman jumping into the simulation, setting himself up like a colossal galactic overlord, tired of watching the gang tear up his simulation and mess with his plans. Tails manages to hack the simulation in a way that allows the real world Chaos Emerald energy to be routed into the Digital Emeralds, and so Sonic can go super. Eggman won’t play fair though, since he’s still got absolute control on the simulation and has Orbot and Cubot monitoring the situation back in the real world, so he will try to stack the odds in his favor, using his Admin privileges.

In the end Eggman is defeated, albeit just barely. Super Sonic holds him off while Tails finishes sending everyone back to the real world. Tails and Sonic are the last two to return, almost missing out the escape window. The Chaos Emeralds break off their links to the simulation machine and disappear due to the sheer amount of stress put into them between the final fight and getting all the digital versions of the characters back to the world. As such, Eggman is stuck inside the simulation, yelling at Orbot and Cubot on the other side of the screen, ordering them to get him out of the simulation ASAP. Credits roll.

#sonic the hedgehog #i'm still shocked i wrote this in the first place #i was searching through my drafts because i'm working on a different ask #and found this gem just sitting there lol

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gamelooplive-blog · 4 years

Text

The Mobile Game Trend

Lately, mobile gambling has become a fairly large share concerning earnings. Gambling consoles/platforms and internet gaming giants have mastered the sports industry for the past decades, but with the tremendous mobile gambling insurgents, the shift is coming, and the shift is welcome, particularly for enthusiastic players and fans.

Mobile games revenue prediction is predicted to grow around $45 billion in 2018. Asia has become the pioneer in the market as 2013 and can be called to control the business by around 50% overall earnings. Business Analyst Vincent van Deelen said, "That is not really the situation. We're also highlighting that the current outcomes of human high profile companies, including Rovio, King, DeNA, and also GREE, aren't always indicative of the condition of the cell marketplace as a whole. It's not in our attention to split market amounts. However, the hard truth is forced us to adjust our estimates up. We've preserved our year-on-year expansion speeds toward 2017, finally resulting in a 40Bn+ market share."

In this aspect, cellular game players have gained substantial share in the marketplace, just like a most gaming console and online gaming businesses. Really, this can be fantastic news for sport development companies and their investors to place more attention and focus on this developing trend. Android games will also be anticipated to be higher in the next several years. Though, it's still an established actuality that iOS rakes in more revenue than Google Play even though the latter using enormous download for freemium version kind of matches that can be downloaded free from https://gameloop.live/. However, from a worldwide standpoint, Chinese program shops and android game downloads and earnings far exceeded iOS past 2014. North America, Europe, and other Asian nations, for example, Japan and South Korea, also have ventured into the worldwide trend. Reports reveal that cellular games currently account for almost 40 percent of the nation's total digital games earnings. With greater competition, smaller businesses are also becoming creative with the debut of e-sports, multi-screen gambling, and HTML5 mobile gambling, and also, the last trend is the increasing prevalence of downloading Android games to TV-based gambling. The top 7 companies in the mobile gaming sector compete for the launch of game titles to control further and not have left in the spectacle. These are a few of the most downloaded sports programs:

1. aa

2. Agar.io

3. Angry Birds

4. Angry Birds Rio

5. Angry Birds Seasons

6. Angry Birds Space

7. Angry Birds Star Wars

8. Angry Birds Star Wars two

9. Angry Birds Movie!

10. Angry Birds 2

11. Ant Smasher: Greatest Free Game

12. Archery Master 3D

13. Asphalt 8: Airborne

14. Poor Piggies

15. Poor Piggies HD

16. Banana Kong

17. Basketball Stars

18. Blossom Blast Saga

19. Boom Beach

20. Brave Frontier

21. Bubble Witch Saga

22. Bubble Witch Two Saga

23. Candy Crush Saga

24. Chocolate Crush Soda Saga

25. Automobiles: Fast as Lightning

26. Castle Clash: Age of Legends

27. Clash of all Clans

28. Clash of Kings

29. Clash Royale

30. Color Alter

31. Criminal Case

32. Crossy Road

33. CSR Racing

34. Deer Hunter

35. Despicable Me

36. Diamond Dash

37. Diamond Digger Saga

38. Don't Harness The White Tile

39. Dragon City

40. Drag Racing Classic

41. Fantasy League

42. Dumb Ways to Die

43. Dumb Ways To Die 2: The Games

44. Intense Car Driving Simulator

45. Fast Racing 3D

46. Frozen Freefall

47. Geometry Dash

48. Geometry Dash Lite

49. Farm Heroes Saga

50. FIFA 15 Ultimate

51. Flow Free

52. Fruit Ninja Free

53. Glow Hockey

54. Hay Day

55. Hearthstone Heroes of Warcraft

56. Hill Climb Racing

57. Hungry Shark

58. Jetpack Joyride

59. Jewels Saga

60. Magic Hurry: Heroes

61. Minecraft: Pocket Edition

62. MORTAL KOMBAT X

63. My Discussing Angela

64. My Discussing Tom

65. Pou

66. 8 Ball Pool

67. Pet Rescue Saga

68. Piano Tiles two (Do not Tap...two )

69. Plants Zombies

70. Plants Zombies two

71. Real Racing 3

72. Score! Hero

73. Shadow Fight 2

74. SimCity BuildIt

75. Skater Boy

76. Slither.io

77. Smash Hit

78. Smurfs' Village

79. Solitaire

80. Sonic Dash

81. Spider-man Unlimited

82. Stack

83. Star Girl

84. Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes

85. Subway Surfers

86. Summoners War

87. Discussing Tom Bubble Shooter

88. Temple Run

89. Temple Run two

90. Texas Holdem Poker Deluxe

91. The Simpsons: Tapped Out

92. Throne Hurry

93. Traffic Racer

94. Traffic Rider

95. Trivia Crack

96. Vector

97. Zombie Tsunami

98. Z War

99. 2048

100. 2048 Number

That is a very clear sign that the mobile gambling market share is anticipated to rise in the next several years.

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anotherdyingartform · 4 years

Audio

Best Albums of the 2010s: #4

Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest (2010)

Also released in the 2010s: Monomania (2013), Fading Frontier (2015), Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (2019)

Listening to Deerhunter's discography in chronological order is like watching the growth of a child with each album representing a milestone in maturity and development. Debut LP Turn It Up Faggot is a bloody, raging birth that has no other directive than demanding to be heard. Cryptograms plays like a raw toddler that in it's best moments can surprise with each word it properly articulates and each confident step it takes toward getting someplace meaningful. The 2008 output of Microcastle & Weird Era Cont. are the achievements of a strong willed child beginning to form its own ideas, thoughts, and emotions, gaining poise with each small achievement and vote of encouragement. In 2010, following an EP release of unofficial studio exercises (as well as LP Logos from Bradford Cox's solo project Atlas Sound), Deerhunter offered the public Halcyon Digest. How will this fit into the developmental timeline? Will it be a restless, temperamental juvenile full of exploratory "experimentation"? A lovelorn, pubescent teenager unleashing aching, penciled poetry from a spiral notebook? Those may have been possible results if this emboldened band had not been so heartened to "grow up" and attempt something of relative maturity and accomplishment.

This newly calculated approach on Halcyon Digest begins with the opening track. "Earthquake" sounds like anything but a Earth-shaking event; rather it is a removed observation of a planet-splitting event taking place in distant outer space. The track is intense and emotion-filled, building to a meaningful studio-modified crescendo while decidedly restrained, opting for beauty over dissonance. This commitment to loveliness is strung throughout the album connected by the best examples in the two early releases. From the mandolin plucks on "Revival" to the harpsichord plinks on "Helicopter", the painstaking attention to the instrumentation delivers these melodies in just the right manner that ties the whole album together. It is on "Helicopter" where Cox delivers his strongest vocal performance to date, a longing perspective on drugs and their eventual diminishment. His voice is moving, hitting each tender note as the warmth rolls through, giving an emotive lift to the listener while each member of Deerhunter is dialed in for the song's performance.

Another noteworthy contrast on Halcyon Digest is the interspersed quiet moments spread throughout the album. A song about loneliness, "Sailing" drifts along on scarce production featuring barely more than guitar and vocals over a subtle rhythm. The machine-like trickle of ambiance underneath is what makes the moment transcendent. Toward the end, when Cox bays for no one to hear, it is that sound of nothing that makes the track so powerful. "Basement Scene" is creepily inviting for a song about being stuck between the frivolity of youth and the perils of aging. Sounding like the darkest corner of an Everly Brothers classic, the track creaks along on a hazy hum and a ticking drumstick tap.

Deerhunter stretched influences are more apparent on Halcyon as they reach into welcomed, unexplored arenas. This is most notable on the Lockett Pundt-fronted tracks where the annals of alternative rock are in full regalia. One might have to check their Jesus and Mary Chain collection to make sure that "Fountain Stairs" is not a cover song. "Desire Lines" has the insistent energy of a shoegazer classic that stretches over six minutes, finishing like a Pixies song with an interlocked riff and rhythm so good that there is no other choice but to keep it going as long as possible. Finishing of the album is "He Would Have Laughed" with a quirky beat and sunny synths feeling like an early Caribou track. Beginning hopeful and resonant, an acoustic guitar moves to the front of the mix as the sonic environment goes sideways until the eerily abrupt ending.

If we are still accepting the developmental signpost theory, Halcyon Digest seems to have skipped over its awkward teenage years, revealing a full-fledged graduate with honors. Often when a band takes such a bold step forward into a more mature sound there is an eventual backlash and longing for more songs "like the old stuff". There are no regrets here, only the joy of watching a band crawl, walk, run and hit the air soaring. Halcyon Digest is simply their most assured album and a testament to Deerhunter's dogged pursuit of exploration, details, clarity and perfection in their music.

Read the original 2010 ADA piece on Halcyon Digest

Spotify | YouTube | Buy Halcyon Digest on 4AD Records

youtube

#best albums of the decade #best albums of the 2010s #best of the decade #best of the 2010s #best of 2010s #deerhunter

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studiobowesart · 7 years

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Music, Time and Long-Term Thinking: Brian Eno Expands the Vocabulary of Human Feeling

Brian Eno’s creative activities defy categorization. Widely known as a musician and producer, Eno has expanded the frontiers of audio and visual art for decades, and posited new ways of approaching creativity in general. He is a thinker and speaker, activist and eccentric. He formulated the idea of the Big Here and Long Now—a central conceptual underpinning of The Long Now Foundation, which he helped found with Stewart Brand and Danny Hillis in 01996. Eno’s artistic career has often dealt closely with concepts of time, scale, and, as he puts it in the liner notes to Apollo“expanding the vocabulary of human feeling.”

Ambient and Generative Art

Brian Eno coined the term ‘ambient music’ to describe a kind of music meant to influence an ambience without necessarily demanding the listener’s full attention. The notes accompanying his 01978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports differentiate it from the commercial music produced specifically for background listening by companies such as Muzak, Inc. in the mid-01900s. Eno explains that ambient music should enhance — not blanket — an environment’s acoustic and atmospheric characteristics, to calming and thought-inducing effect. It has to accommodate various levels of listening engagement, and therefore “must be as ignorable as it is interesting” (Eno 296).

Ambient music can have a timeless quality to it. The absence of a traditional structure of musical development withholds a clear beginning or end or middle, tapping into a sense of deeper, slower processes. It lets you “settle into time a little bit,” as Eno said in the first of Long Now’s SALT talks. As TimeMagazine writes, “the theme of time, foreshortened or elongated, is a defining feature of Eno’s musical and visual adventures. But it takes a long lens, pointing back, to bring into focus the ways in which his influence has seeped into the mainstream.”

Eno’s use of the term ‘ambient’ was, however, a product of a long process of musical development. He had been thinking specifically about this kind of music for several years already, and the influence of minimalist artists such as Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass had long shaped his musical ideas and techniques. He also drew on many other genres, including Krautrockbands such as Tangerine Dream and Can, whose music was contemporaneous and influential in Eno’s early collaborations with Robert Fripp, e.g. (No Pussyfooting). While their music might not necessarily fall into the genre ‘ambient,’ David Sheppard notes that “Eno and Fripp’s lengthy essays shared with Krautrock a disavowal of verse/chorus orthodoxy and instead relied on an essentially static musical core with only gradual internal harmonic developments” (142). In his autobiography, Eno also points to developments in audio technology as key in the development of the genre, as well as one particularly insightful experience he had while bedridden after an accident:

New sound-shaping and space-making devices appeared on the market weekly (and still do), synthesizers made their clumsy but crucial debut, and people like me just sat at home night after night fiddling around with all this stuff, amazed at what was now possible, immersed in the new sonic worlds we could create.

And immersion was really the point: we were making music to swim in, to float in, to get lost inside.

This became clear to me when I was confined to bed, immobilized by an accident in early 01975. My friend Judy Nylon had visited, and brought with her a record of 17th-century harp music. I asked her to put it on as she left, which she did, but it wasn’t until she’d gone that I realized that the hi-fi was much too quiet and one of the speakers had given up anyway. It was raining hard outside, and I could hardly hear the music above the rain — just the loudest notes, like little crystals, sonic icebergs rising out of the storm. I couldn’t get up and change it, so I just lay there waiting for my next visitor to come and sort it out, and gradually I was seduced by this listening experience. I realized that this was what I wanted music to be — a place, a feeling, an all-around tint to my sonic environment.

It was not long after this realization that Eno released the album Discreet Music, which he considers to be an ambient work, mentioning a conceptual likeness to Erik Satie’s Furniture Music. One of the premises behind its creation was that it would be background for Robert Fripp to play over in concerts, and the title track is about half an hour long — as much time as was available to Eno on one side of a record.

It is also an early example in his discography of what later became another genre closely associated with Eno and with ambient: generative music. In the liner notes — which include the story of the broken speaker epiphany — he writes:

Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part.

That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results.

This notion of creating a system that generates an output is an idea that artists had considered previously. In fact, in the 18th century even Mozart and others experimented with a ‘musical dice game’ in which the numerical results of rolling dice ‘generated’ a song. More relevant to Brian Eno’s use of generative systems, however, was the influence of 20th century composers such as John Cage. David Sheppard’s biography of Brian Eno describes how Tom Phillips — a teacher at Ipswich School of Art where Eno studied painting in the mid 01960s — introduced him to the musical avant garde scene with the works of Cage, Cornelius Cardew, and the previously mentioned minimalists Reich, Glass and Riley (Sheppard 35–41). These and other artists exposed Eno to ideas such as aleatory and minimalist music, tape experimentation, and performance or process-based musical concepts.

Eno notes Steve Reich’s influence on his generative music, acknowledging that “indeed a lot of my interest was directly inspired by Steve Reich’s sixties tape pieces such as Come Out) and It’s Gonna Rain” (Eno 332). And looking back on a 01970 performance by the Philip Glass Ensemble at the Royal College of Art, Brian Eno highlights its impact on him:

This was one of the most extraordinary musical experiences of my life — sound made completely physical and as dense as concrete by sheer volume and repetition. For me it was like a viscous bath of pure, thick energy. Though he was at that time described as a minimalist, this was actually one of the most detailed musics I’d ever heard. It was all intricacy and exotic harmonics. (Sheppard 63–64)

The relationship between minimalism and intricacy, in a sense, is what underlies the concept of generative music. The artist designs a system with inputs which, when compared to the plethora of outputs, appear quite simple. Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain is, in fact, simply a single 1.8 second recording of a preacher shouting “It’s gonna rain!” played simultaneously on two tape recorders. Due to the inconsistencies in the two devices’ hardware, however, the recordings play at slightly different speeds, producing over 17 minutes of phasing in which the relationship between the two recordings constantly changes.

Brian Eno has taken this capacity for generative music to create complexity out of simplicity much further. Discreet Music (01975) used a similar approach, but started with recordings of different lengths, used an echo system, and altered timbre over time. The sonic possibilities opened by adding just a few more variables are vast.

This experimental approach to creativity is just one of many that Eno explored, including some non-musical means of prompting unexpected outputs. The same year that Discreet Music was released, he collaborated with painter Peter Schmidt to produce Oblique Strategies: Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas.

The work is a set of cards, each one with an aphorism designed to help people think differently or to approach a problem from a different angle. These include phrases such as “Honour thy error as a hidden intention,” “Work at a different speed,” and “Use an old idea.” Schmidt had created something a few years earlier along the same lines that he called ‘Thoughts Behind the Thoughts.’ There was also inspiration to be drawn from John Cage’s use of the I Ching to direct his musical compositions and George Brecht’s 01963 Water Yam Box. Like a generative system, the Oblique Strategies provides a guiding rule or principle that is specific enough to focus creativity but general enough to yield an unknown outcome, dependent on a multitude of variables interacting within the framework of the strategy.

Three decades later, generative systems remained a central inspiration for Eno and a source of interesting cross-disciplinary collaboration. In 02006, he discussed them with Will Wright, creator of popular video game series The Sims, at a Long Now SALT talk:

Wright observed that science is all about compressing reality to minimal rule sets, but generative creation goes the opposite direction. You look for a combination of the fewest rules that can generate a whole complex world that will always surprise you, yet within a framework that stays recognizable. “It’s not engineering and design,” he said, “so much as it is gardening. You plant seeds. Richard Dawkins says that a willow seed has only about 800K of data in it.” — Stewart Brand

Brian Eno has always been interested in this explosion of possibilities, and has in recent years created generative art that incorporates both audio and visuals. He notes that his work 77 Million Paintings would take about 10,000 years to run through all of its possibilities — at its slowest setting. Long Now produced the North American premiere of 77 Million Paintings at Yerba Buena center for the Arts in 02007, and members were treated to a surprise visit from Mr. Eno who spoke about his work and Long Now.

Eno also designed an art installation for The Interval, Long Now’s cafe-bar-museum venue in San Francisco. “Ambient Painting #1” is the only example of Brian’s generative light work in America, and the only ambient painting of his that is currently on permanent public display anywhere.

Ambient Painting #1, by Brian Eno. Photo by Gary Wilson.

Another generative work called Bloom, created with Peter Chilvers, is available as an app.

Part instrument, part composition and part artwork, Bloom’s innovative controls allow anyone to create elaborate patterns and unique melodies by simply tapping the screen. A generative music player takes over when Bloom is left idle, creating an infinite selection of compositions and their accompanying visualisations. — Generativemusic.com

Eno’s interest in time and scale (among other things) was shared by Long Now co-founder Stewart Brand, and they were in close correspondence in the years leading up to the creation of The Long Now Foundation. Eno’s 01995 diary, published in part in his autobiography, describes that correspondence in its introduction:

My conversation with Stewart Brand is primarily a written one — in the form of e-mail that I routinely save, and which in 1995 alone came to about 100,000 words. Often I discuss things with him in much greater detail than I would write about them for my own benefit in the diary, and occasionally I’ve excerpted from that correspondence. — Eno, ix

Out of Eno’s involvement with the establishment of The Long Now Foundation emerged in his essay “The Big Here and Long Now”, which describes his experiences with small-scale perspectives and the need for larger ones, as well as the artist’s role in social change.

This imaginative process can be seeded and nurtured by artists and designers, for, since the beginning of the 20th century, artists have been moving away from an idea of art as something finished, perfect, definitive and unchanging towards a view of artworks as processes or the seeds for processes — things that exist and change in time, things that are never finished. Sometimes this is quite explicit — as in Walter de Maria’s “Lightning Field,” a huge grid of metal poles designed to attract lightning. Many musical compositions don’t have one form, but change unrepeatingly over time — many of my own pieces and Jem Finer’s Artangel installation “LongPlayer” are like this. Artworks in general are increasingly regarded as seeds — seeds for processes that need a viewer’s (or a whole culture’s) active mind in which to develop. Increasingly working with time, culture-makers see themselves as people who start things, not finish them.

And what is possible in art becomes thinkable in life. We become our new selves first in simulacrum, through style and fashion and art, our deliberate immersions in virtual worlds. Through them we sense what it would be like to be another kind of person with other kinds of values. We rehearse new feelings and sensitivities. We imagine other ways of thinking about our world and its future.

[…] In this, the 21st century, we may need icons more than ever before. Our conversation about time and the future must necessarily be global, so it needs to be inspired and consolidated by images that can transcend language and geography. As artists and culture-makers begin making time, change and continuity their subject-matter, they will legitimise and make emotionally attractive a new and important conversation.

The Chime Generator and January 07003

Brian Eno’s involvement with Long Now began through his discussions with Stewart Brand about time and long-term thinking, and the need for a carefully crafted sonic experience to help The Clock evoke deep time for its visitors posed a challenge Eno was uniquely suited to take on.

From its earliest conception, the imagined visit to the 10,000-Year Clock has had aural experience at its core. One of Danny Hillis’ earliest refrains about The Clock evokes this:

It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium. —Danny Hillis

In the years of brainstorming and design that have molded this vision into a tangible object, a much more detailed and complicated picture has come into focus, but sound has remained central; one of the largest components of the 10,000-Year Clock will be its Chime Generator.

Rather than a bong per century, visitors to the Clock will have the opportunity to hear it chime 10 bells in a unique sequence each day at noon. The story of how this came to be is told by Mr. Eno himself in the liner notes of January 07003: Bell Studies for The Clock of the Long Now, a collection of musical experiments he synthesized and recorded in 02003:

When we started thinking about The Clock of the Long Now, we naturally wondered what kind of sound it could make to announce the passage of time. Bells have stood the test of time in their relationship to clocks, and the technology of making them is highly evolved and still evolving. I began reading about bells, discovering the physics of their sounds, and became interested in thinking about what other sorts of bells might exist. My speculations quickly took me out of the bounds of current physical and material possibilities, but I considered some license allowable since the project was conceived in a time scale of thousands of years, and I might therefore imagine bells with quite different physical properties from those we now know (Eno 3).

Bells have a long history of marking time, so their inclusion in The Clock is a natural fit. Throughout this long history, they’ve also commonly been used in churches, meditation halls and yoga studios to offer a resonant ambiance in which to contemplate a connection to something bigger, much as The Clock’s vibrations will help inspire an awareness of one’s place in deep time. Furthermore, bells were central to some early forms of generative music. While learning about their history, Eno found a vast literature on the ways bells had been used in Britain to explore the combinatorial possibilities afforded by following a few simple rules:

Stated briefly, change-ringing is the art (or, to many practitioners, the science) of ringing a given number of bells such that all possible sequences are used without any being repeated. The mathematics of this idea are fairly simple: n bells will yield n! sequences or changes. The ! is not an expression of surprise but the sign for a factorial: a direction to multiply the number by all those lower than it. So 3 bells will yield 3 x 2 x 1 = 6 changes, while 4 bells will yield 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24 changes. The ! process does become rather surprising as you continue it for higher values of n: 5! = 120, and 6! = 720 — and you watch the number of changes increasing dramatically with the number of bells. — Eno 4

Eno noticed that 10 bells in this context will provide 3,628,800 sequences. Ring one of those each day and you’ll be occupied for almost exactly 10,000 years, the proposed lifespan of The Clock.

Following this line of thinking, he imagined using the patterns played by the bells as a method of encoding the amount of time that had elapsed since The Clock had started ringing them. Writing in 02003, he says:

I wanted to hear the bells of the month of January, 07003 — approximately halfway through the life of the Clock.

I had no idea how to generate this series, but I had a good idea who would.

I wrote to Danny Hillis asking whether he could come up with an algorithm for the job. Yes, he wrote back, and in fact he could come up with an algorithm for generating all the possible algorithms for that job. Not having the storage space for a lot of extra algorithms in my studio, I decided to settle for just the one. — Eno 6

And so, the pattern The Clock’s bells will ring was set. Using a start point (02003 in this case), one can extrapolate the order in which the Bells will ring for a given day in the future. The title track of the album features the synthesized bells played in each of the 31 sequences for the month of January in the year 07003. Other tracks on the album use different algorithms or different bells to explore alternative possibilities; taken together, the album is distinctly “ambient” in Eno’s tradition, but also unique within his work for its minimalism and procedurality.

The procedures guiding the composition are strict enough that they can be written in computer code. A Long Now Member named Sean Burke was kind enough to create a webpage that illustrates how this works. The site allows visitors to enter a future date and receive a MIDI file of the chimes from that day. You can also download the algorithm itself in the form of a Perl script or just grab the MIDI data for all 10,000 years and synthesize your own bells.

If the bell ringing algorithm is a seed, in what soil can it be planted and expected to live its full life? Compact disks, Perl scripts and MIDI files have their uses, of course, but The Clock has to really last in a physical, functional sense for many thousands of years. To serve this purpose, the Chime Generator manifests the algorithm in stainless steel Geneva wheels rotating on bearings of silicon nitride.

Eno’s Chime Generator prototype. Photo by Because We Can

One of the first prototypes for this mechanism resides at The Interval. In its operation, one can see that the Geneva wheels rotate at different intervals because of their varying numbers of slots. Together, the Geneva wheels represent the ringing algorithm and sequentially engage the hammers in all 3.6 million permutations. For this prototype, the hammers strike Tibetan Bowl Gongs to sound the notes, but any type of bell can be used.

The full scale Chime Generator will be vertically suspended in the Clock shaft within the mountain. The Geneva wheels will be about 8 feet in diameter, with the full mechanism standing over seventy feet in height.

The bells for the full scale Chime Generator won’t be Tibetan Bowl Gongs like in the smaller prototype above. Though testing has been done within the Clock chamber to find its resonant frequency, the exact tuning and design of the Clock’s bells will be left until the chamber is finished and most of the Clock is installed in order to maximize their ability to resonate within the space.

Like much of Brian Eno’s work, the chimes in the 10,000-Year Clock draw together far-flung traditions, high and low tech, and science and art to create a meditative experience, unique in a given moment, but expansive in scale and scope. They encourage the listener to live and to be present in the moment, the “now,” but to feel that moment expanding forward and backward through time, literally to experience the “Long Now.”

Written by Austin Brown and Alex Mensing. Edited and updated by Ahmed Kabil.

Works Cited & Where to Learn More

Autobiography

Eno, Brian. A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary.London: Faber and Faber, 01996.

Biography

Sheppard, David. On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno.London: Orion Books, 02008.

Talks

Talk on Generative Music for In Motion Magazine. June 01996.

“The Long Now,” Long Now SALT talk, November 02003.

“Playing With Time,” Long Now SALT talk with Will Wright, June 02006.

Brian Eno speaks in Moscow, 02011. via Austin Kleon.

“The Long Now, Now”, Long Now SALT talk, January 02014.

Articles

“The Big Here and Long Now” by Brian Eno for The Long Now Foundation. 01996.

“Light Years into the Future” by Michael Brunton for Time Magazine. November 02006.

“New Eno Music Gets ‘Generative’” by Noah Shachtman for Wired. October 02001.

New Yorker article on Long Now board member David Eagleman, including an experiment with Brian Eno on time & rhythm perception

01979 interview with Brian Eno by Lester Bangs

History and description of generative music, excerpted from dissertation by Norbert Herber.

“Brian Eno designs Sound and Light Art for The Interval at Long Now” by mikl em for Long Now blog. July 16, 02013.

This is the first of a series of articles, “Music, Time and Long-Term Thinking,” in which we will discuss music and musicians who have engaged various aspects of long-term thinking, both historically and in the contemporary scene.

from The Long Now Blog http://ift.tt/2ikIAgZ

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Watch Moritz Simon Geist's Sonic Robots Play Thumping Techno Music in His Video for 'Entropy'

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Watch Moritz Simon Geist's Sonic Robots Play Thumping Techno Music in His Video for 'Entropy'

When he plays a techno show, Moritz Simon Geist doesn’t reach for a laptop. Instead, he calls on his army of sonic robots—a collection of small, motorized creations that click, clank, and whirr in an intricate mechanical symphony.

Geist composes robotic electronic music, a burgeoning genre of electro jams that relies on hardware, not software, to engineer electronic sounds and beats. His forthcoming EP, The Material Turn, debuts in October with four tracks made entirely from self-fashioned instruments—futuristic robo-kalimbas, a droning guitar, and salvaged hard drives turned into percussive beat machines.

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Watching Geist play music is a little like watching a mad scientist in a lab. Trained as an electrical engineer, he is a man of materials, constantly tinkering with the instruments as they ping and plonk in front of him. Geist grew up playing the clarinet, piano, and guitar, so when he first started making electronic music in the 1990s, he found it strange that the music was all contained within a software interface on a screen. “I wanted something I could touch,” he says. “So I built my own instruments.”

Each of Geist’s “instruments” is custom-made in his workshop in Dresden, Germany. Some are engineered to produce a specific sound, like his take on a kalimba, made from metal pieces and 3-D printed parts. Other instruments come by way of discovery, like finding that tapping a screwdriver against a metal lid makes a pleasant tinging noise.

The result isn’t just a dynamic, throbbing album full of electrifying techno. For Geist, it’s a way to push the frontiers of electronic musicmaking.

Mr. Robot

Mechanized instruments have been a curiosity for as long as music-makers could rig together parts. Take the first self-playing piano, the Forneaux Pianista, invented in the mid-19th century. It used air valves to inflate a bellows and mechanically thump on the keys, creating an effect of the piano playing itself. Vaucanson’s mechanical flute player and Phonoliszt’s self-playing Violina would follow, and autonomous instruments remained a fascination throughout the 20th century.

“We have a museum full of self-playing instruments,” says Marian van Dijk, the director of the the Museum Speelklok in the Netherlands, which has an exhibit about robots and music on view this month. “People in the 19th century were looking forward to these inventions, and we are in a similar period now—looking forward to all the possibilities.”

As the field of robotics has become more sophisticated, engineers and musicians have developed new ways to incorporate machinery into music-making. Shimon, a robotic marimba-playing robot built at Georgia Tech, relies on artificial intelligence to “improvise” like a jazz musician. In a jam session, it can rhythmically bob its robotic “head” and listen to other human musicians, then tap out a tune of its own. “It’s a combination of old instruments and new robotics,” says van Dijk.

Geist had seen plenty of robotic music—bands like Compressorhead, a Berlin-based group that uses a series of humanoid robots to play traditional instruments—but he’d never seen robots in techno. The combination seemed obvious.

“Robots and techno—I mean, come on,” he says. “It’s machine music.”

His first instrument, the MR-808, recreated the sound of a Roland TR-808 drum machine in an enormous, room-sized box filled with traditional drums and robotic parts. It took him three years to build. When he debuted the instrument in an interactive exhibit, Geist realized he’d struck upon something interesting. He quit his job at a research lab, dropped out of his PhD program, and devoted his time to making musical robots.

Geist followed the MR-808 with a selection of new and futuristic inventions: The Glitch Robot combined 3D-printed parts with relays, tongues, solenoids, and motors to create glitchy, metallic noises. The Tripods One, which Geist calls a “sonic installation,” is a percussive instrument built from hard drive actuators arms and motors that mechanically ping metal pieces and springs.

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His latest single, “Entropy,” features a new suite of instruments. A “futuristic kalimba” riffs on the African instrument, made with a circuit board, five metal tongs, and a piezo contact microphone controlled with a Midi keyboard. A “pneumatic hi-hat” blows air into cylinders filled with small styrofoam balls to create a soft percussive noise. Rescued hard drives make a clicking sound, similar to a snare. There’s also a “drone guitar,” built by attaching a motor to an electric guitar, and an instrument Geist describes as “crazy psychedelic glasses,” which uses a motorized arm to clink on beer glasses filled with different amounts of water so they’re tuned to various pitches.

For Geist, the instruments represent not just a new way to make music, but a new way to experience it. The instruments each have a visual component, which makes it possible to watch the sounds as Geist creates them. “A lot of electronic laptop compositions, they don’t have a body,” he says. “I’m trying to give this body back to electronic music.”

Watching him play “Entropy,” you see styrofoam balls float up on puffs of air, while LED lights blink on the futuristic kalimba. The motor fingers the guitar strings like a disembodied hand. Sure, the requisite electro-techno strobe lights and bass-heavy beats feel familiar. But with his sonic robots, Geist manages to do something increasingly rare in electronic music. When he plays, he keeps all eyes locked on the stage.