Banjo-Kazooie (1998)

    Hello again and sorry for the delay.  I meant to make a post or two last week, but my birthday happened, so there was much partying and not much else was on my mind.  Whatever the case, I'm long overdue for a post.
    This time, we'll be looking at Banjo-Kazooie.

    Now here's a game definitely worthy of a musical analysis.  Banjo-Kazooie is without a doubt one of my favorite games ever made.  Not only is it a fine platform action-adventure, but it has an outstanding soundtrack courtesy of Grant Kirkhope.  Have a listen to Treasure Trove Cove or Bubblegloop Swamp to sample.  It's bright, bouncy, and a touch nutty.  It's often difficult to classify, but it variously touches upon polka, jazz, and over-the-top orchestral styles.  And despite the title of the game, the soundtrack is conspicuously lacking in banjo, only present in a few tracks; and the game has a lot of tracks.

     The way Banjo-Kazooie uses its music is relatively novel as well.  Each world its own unique theme music, and several variations on it which the game fades between seamlessly.  For instance, in the first world alone, Mumbo's Mountain, you have the main world theme, a tribal drum arrangement with a baritone sax that plays near Conga's tree, the main arrangement with military drumrolls and high-pitched "hut two three four!" chants added that plays near the giant termite mound, a panpipe arrangement with tribal chants that plays in the village surrounding Mumbo's hut, and a harp arrangement that plays when you dive into the lake.  That's five different arrangements total for one level!  Now, Banjo-Kazooie is definitely not the first game to do this (the developers were apparently inspired by Monkey Island II: LeChuck's Revenge), but it stands out in my mind as one of the more notable uses of this technique.

     On a more mundane note, Banjo-Kazooie's music is rather well allocated.  Unusually for a game of this sort (ie, not an RPG), Banjo-Kazooie's soundtrack incredibly extensive, having well over a hundred tracks if you count every piece of music and its variations.  Each world theme is about two minutes long, and most worlds have an additional theme that plays in a specific sub-area, such as Mumbo's Mountain's Ticker's Tower theme.  This adds up to quite a lot of music per world, and the transitions between musical themes in a single world are comfortable and well-placed.  You'll probably be spending an average of half an hour to an hour on each world, so each piece of music tends to get its fair share of playtime without overstaying its welcome.

    Of course, even a game with such a great soundtrack and musical usage as Banjo-Kazooie has its fair share of problems.  One, for a game that apes Super Mario 64 and its open-ended gameplay style so closely, Banjo-Kazooie has a relatively linear progression.  Much of its design encourages the player to fully explore and clear one world before moving on to the next, giving you little reason to return to previous worlds.  With unique music for each world, this gives little opportunity for music to reoccur outside of the game's main hub and power-up themes.

     In particular, I have to take issue with the flow of music in Gruntilda's Lair.  Each sub-section of the lair has its own set of variations, and moving between sub-sections causes the background music to reset!  I imagine this has something to do with the way the game handles MIDI channel fading, and that putting every single variation into a single music file would be too much for the music engine to handle, so it's understandable why they did what they did.  Still, if you're trying to get from one end of the lair to the other, it's pretty annoying to have the same music reset every 10 seconds as you move between rooms.

    Another problem is how certain pieces of music have an unfortunate tendency to not cancel each other out.  This very jarringly results in two wholly different pieces of music playing at once.  Even if these moments are few, far between, and usually short, they are definitely not pleasant.  Collecting a magic jigsaw piece, for instance, does not always mute the background music if it's something other than the usual "main area" theme.  Using the Wonderwing attack as well usually mutes the background music to play its theme music, but there are specific cases where it fails to.  This means that if you decide to take on the Golden Flibbits or Boss Boom Box mini-bosses with the Wonderwing, be prepared to have the two themes conflict.

    Even so, these problems are minor.  At the end of the day, once the big bad witch is whupped and the end credits have rolled, Banjo-Kazooie is a truly magical experience in not only gameplay, but musically as well.

Bubsy (1993)

    Hello and welcome to Soundtrack Abuse.  Since this is the first post, let me try to explain how this is going to work.  Each week or so, I'll look at a different video game and how it uses its music.  Why?  Well, I've had a long-standing fascination with not only video game music, but how it's used, and how it fits into the action of the game.  There aren't really any requirements for what I pick besides "it's a video game" and "it has music".  I'll mostly be looking at old games, though, as they tend to be what I know best.
     To start, I'll be looking at Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind.  That title hurts, doesn't it?

    Why Bubsy?  After all, there's nothing really special about how it uses its music.  It does, however, contain a couple of prime examples of poor music allocation.  (Not to mention poor game design, but that's not really what we're here to talk about.)  This is a shame, because Bubsy has some pretty damn good music.  Check it out!  (Links are to the SNES version of the game's soundtrack, which is far superior to the Sega Genesis version.)  Plus, it's on my mind right now for some reason, so let's dive in.
     The first problem is pretty minor, but it stands out to me.  Like a lot of games, Bubsy has but a single music track (well, two in the wild west world) for each world, a world being three levels long, and a level being about three minutes or longer.  This means that for each world you'll be listening to the same minute-or-so-long music track for about ten minutes each.  Probably longer, since the game is notoriously difficult and you'll likely die and have to replay each level quite a bit.
     That alone isn't too bad.  It's repetitious, sure, but it's tolerable.  Unfortunately, the music is interrupted constantly for one reason or another.  You beat a level, the music resets.  You die, the music resets.  You get an invincibility or invisiblity power-up, the music resets.  Those are all pretty common in games, but keep in mind each time the music resets, it's the same music track until you move on to a new world.

    The worst thing of all, however, is the water slides.  Dear god, the water slides.  They're everywhere in some levels, and every time you go down one, this irritating track plays.  And once it's done, guess what?  The usual background music starts over from the beginning once again.  Thankfully, they're absent in many levels, and in most other levels an effort can be made to avoid them.  In other words, you're mostly safe from their annoyance for the first three worlds, with a few exceptions in World 1.
    Then you get to the riverbank levels, and suddenly they're all over the place.  And the worst part is, they're often the least painful way of traversing the stage.  This means, if you're intent on using them, expect the bouncy bluegrass track playing in the background to be stopped and restarted constantly.  You may never even hear it as far as the part where the bass comes in.  Because why put a two-minute piece of background music in a game and actually let the player hear any more than thirty seconds of it, right?!
     Somewhat unusually for a platform game of this sort, the game has a different music track for each boss battle, of which there's one at the end of each world.  This seems like something of a waste of music to me, since you only hear each boss theme once (sometimes never, as the game has a bizarre tendency to glitch and just not even play the boss theme, instead continuing to play the usual level music) and the actual boss fights tend to be very short.  In a way this makes the bosses the complete opposite of the levels musically, but it's just as unfortunate a misuse of music.  Even more unusually, most of the boss themes don't even really sound like boss battle music.  Be honest with me, does this sound like a final battle theme to you?
     So that's Bubsy.  Average game, surprisingly good music, poor usage.  Join me next time and I'll look at something else.  Exactly what I haven't decided, but believe me, I have a lot of games I want to eventually cover.  Bye-bye for now!