WHAT'S YOUR WHITE WHALE?

E.V.O. The Search for Eden

Man, I want that game so bad. But I'd settle for it being on the Virtual Console.

Final Fantasy 3 (6j) cartridge for SNES.

I fought tooth and nail for a copy of Earthbound (unopened, in it's original box.) otherwise it would be that.

I know lots of people with FF3(6j) but none that want to part with it.

I've never understood collecting something for the sack of... never touching it. Why buy something shrink-wrapped when you're not going to rip it open?

the only reason i ever purchased a game is because i could not emulate it.

i think lunar 1 came with these pieces of cardboard with characters on them you can put places.

I guess it would be the album "Gang War" by Gene Maltais. He was (is??? i remember reading he's still alive somewhere. i wanted to send him a postcard telling him how much i loved his work) a fifties rockabilly musician who cut what is probably my favourite song ever, "The Raging Sea":



I think I first heard this when I was 16, looking it up on some old archive site after coming across it in a magazine article on the roots of american punk. The writer compared it to jack nicholson in 'the shining'' breaking down doors with an axe and he wasn't wrong. There's a frenzied hacking wildness to it that I love but more than that it's just an incredibly joyous song. There's a sense of openness to the sound and a joy to it that gets me every time. It still sounds fresh and startling to me: I've listened to a lot of rockabilly stuff and most of it is just boring trash, the sound of local good ole boys dutifully staying within the limits of a sound, but this isn't like that at all: it's like the sound of someone picking up a genre and trashing it completely, not from spite or carelessness so much as enthusiasm and awe at the sound they're making. It's almost like the musical equivalent of someone standing just that bit too close to you in that sense of a line of mutual detachment being crossed. Instead of sitting back and listening passively to something you get sucked into it, unable to tune it out, drawn in by the sense of something tired and predictable suddenly becoming exciting once again. I think this is what I love more than anything else about music: the way Johnny Rotten draws out sounds in 'Anarchy In the Uk' until it becomes this kind of gleeful steam-escaping-from-a-pipe hiss, the way The Slits throw you off with a sudden clattering change of rhythm and melody. Tension and glee. If I had to pick one song to pinpoint this sensation it would be "The Raging Sea".

Gene Maltais released a few other singles too and they're all good: "Crazy Baby" is just this wild-eyed deranged staggering thing with him shrieking WELL IIIIIIIII SAY GO!!! as he jerks violently into the chorus, "Gang War" has the same tense rhythm and momentum as the opening parts of "The Raging Sea". I tracked down a bunch more of his stuff like demos etc and in all of it there was the sense of slipping and sliding into raw excitement and openness.

I could never find any other real reference too him, which always kind of amazed me. Most of his songs were on compilations scraping the vaults of various old record labels. This was why it blew me away to find out there was actually a full album compiling all his stuff and that it was actually for sale on amazon. Unfortunately it was for some ridiculous price like $35 not including shipping etc and idk i could never really convince myself to splurge on that much for a cd. It's still on there, I think. I eventually found it online and downloaded and it was great but the physical cd still has a kind of weird totemic appeal to me.

I never understood the anti-emulation collector people out there, condemning you for playing games you wouldn't be able to get otherwise of publishers long dead in a distant time.

author=WolfCoder
I never understood the anti-emulation collector people out there, condemning you for playing games you wouldn't be able to get otherwise of publishers long dead in a distant time.

I think some people just like having the genuine thing. I do, too, when it's not too expensive. Sometimes it has to do with nostalgia. I don't know many people who condemn emulating out-of-print games, though.

I have both EVO and FF6(3).