Music In Disguise

[davidn]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ov5mt9BAvIg&hd=1

I had this game when I was young! It's a handheld by Tiger Electronics, branded as Sonic 2 but not actually resembling it in any form. In fact, looking at this video now I have no idea how I was able to tell what the cobblers was going on at any point - I remember having to wind up to the left to get around the suddenly appearing loops, and that jumping would cause a sequence of LCD panels to flip on and off representing going up to the right or the left, but I don't know what details (if any) constituted a game.

If you've watched the video, you'll know there's one detail that stands out in particular - the sound, a cacophony of rapid spasming notes that sound like someone just stabbed holes in a sound chip with a hole punch and called it a day. But on a whim, I recorded a bit of it and put it into Audacity to slow it down - and it got interesting!

It is, in fact, the 2-player Emerald Hill music!

Or a cruel parody of it, anyway. Between a set of bum notes and spread over an interpretation of the rhythm best described as 'creative', three measures of the tune are just about recognizable before it gives up and just goes back to the start again.

As it plays about three times too fast in the game and is not sanely describable as any form of music, it's odd that nobody thought fit to correct the error.

Comments

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

the music doesn't sound anything like the track it's based off of; even comparing the two side by side. It does sound a lot like the kind of sounds you'd hear from a Tiger electronic hand held device, so whomever tested it probably just thought this was how it's supposed to sound. Still, you've got to admit, the music is memorable!

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

It definitely sounds like they asked someone to transcribe the song onto graph paper, and then they just punched in whatever was written down without actually previewing the result for transcription errors, or..... indeed, to find out what the chip would consider the timing values to mean :S

I feel like there were a ton of Tiger games that happened to, but I'm actually having difficulty finding more of them on youtube… maybe this one just made such an impression on me as a kid that it's how I came to think of all Tiger games being! (Then again, the ones I found were playing at reasonable speeds, but the notes in question could still barely be considered 'songs'…)