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Sunday, May 15, 2016

112 MSX Basic Games : KLEIDUIF.GAM (88)

I know KLEIDUIF a Dutch word, but I don't want to change the nice intro screen just for translation purposes.This is an almost perfect MSX Basic game, it has all the features that any commercial game could have. It look good, it plays very well and all I did was translate.
I think I like this game just as much as the clay pigeon shooting in that Konami sportsgame 
I forgot the name of. Lucky for me the name of the maker was in the intro screen. 

Hail to Carsten Ludemann !!!

Look at the right at the shadows of the trees ad flags, it look almost like 3D !
I am just speechless about this game, it's the best I could find until now.
So if you don't play it, YOU BE SORRY !!!

Not to forget the download links: Gavitex / Mediafire

I think I release the next issue of the 112 MSX Basic Games disk, when the counter is at 80.
Until then you have to download one by one.

112 MSX Basic games presents : KARATE.GAM (89)


The last Courbois Software game for now is a 2 player only game, called KARATE.

Yes ,you cannot play against your MSX  ( and I didn't want to program an IQ for it). 
I choose this game, cause the sprites are huge, comparing to most MSX Basic games. 

You can do a lot of moves, the intro and game over screen are simple, however it fits the 
black & white style of the game. 

Not much changes with the original game, just more controls and other intro / game over screens.  
It's not another International Karate, still it's very playable and that is al that matters. 

So drag your roommate to your MSX and battle !!
Gavitex / Mediafire are waiting for you.

And because it's the last Courbois game (I think) I search for traces of Courbois Software 
at Beuningen. 
It seems they were a bit famous on Commodore Amiga with hard- and software and they made
a lot of websites before they stopped in 2012
But I never found any evidence they made some software for MSX.

While I was browsing for Courbois Software I found an old MSX website with the game Karate to download, if you like to compare both versions...

112 MSX Basic games presents : THELIFT.GAM (90)

Yes, another piece of Courbois Software, called The Lift. 

You are in a sort of maze with lifts  to get to the vase (exit). But there are security webcams and when they spot you, you lose energy. Moving around costs energie too, so it's game over if you are out of it. I add more difficulties to the original game, cause for me it was even impossible to get to the 2nd level ! 
Also some kind of intro/introduction screen, more controls and some other things I forgot. 
I like the game, cause it's very original, looks nice and plays just right. I recommend, 
you try first the easy level to see how the game works. 

It seems that the best MSX Basic games were made in SCREEN 1, it has sprites and easy
 to change the characterset for fast screen layouts. SCREEN 2 has sprites too, but is slow 
in screen layouts. 

Download and play it Mediafire / Gavitex

Saturday, May 14, 2016

Bit Trip Complete (Mad Mix)

Finally the return of Mixmeister TnC. This time not another MSX Moonblaster Housemix, but a mix of music from the game Bit Trip Complete (Wii version). Or to be exact a mix made from the Bit Trip Soundtrack Sampler Audio CD that was included with the (2nd hand) Wii game. For those who don't  know Bit Trip Complete are a collection of 6 games you have to play following the rhythm of the music. The games itself are variations of classics like Pong, but there is also a nice platformer (Bit Trip Runner), dot eating game like agar.io (Bit Trip Void) and an oldschool rail shooter (Bit Trip Fate).

I played a free demo of Bit Trip Beat once via Wii Store Channel, but the game seems a little boring so I never bought the whole game. But recently I found the game and 5 others in a store Game Mania. It was called Bit Trip Complete and had also an Audio CD, so I bought it without any doubt .

After playing the games I listen to the Audio CD and was a bit disappointed by the music, yes, it was amazing sometimes and sometimes incredibly boring. I decided to put the best parts together in 1 mix so I didn't have to listen to the Audio CD again.

Why it's called Mad Mix ?
My son told me he played all his favorite music on YouTube at 1.25x speed even the newest ones from Monstercat. I thought it was a good idea so I speed up all Bit Trip tracks of the Audio CD to 1.25 and the results were better than I expected.
I didn't know the tracks that well and I decided to let Mixmeister mix on BPM, start slow, speed up the BPM to the max and cooling down to the end of the mix.
These are the 2 reasons I called this one Mad Mix.

I finished the mix in maybe 8 hours (including converting/cutting/speedup audio tracks and smoothing the mix output) and it was quite a long mix of more than 23 minutes.
I had some bad experiences with creating playlists on Mixcloud (it doesn't allow you to use more than 3 or 4 tracks of the same Artist) and this mix was Bit Trip material only !!!
I decided to upload it to YouTube instead, cause tracklist is not necessary and I couldn't find any good Bit Trip (re) mix.

Well I hate to watch more than 5 minutes of the same picture and 23 minutes of my mix should be a torture. I got the idea of creating a video with random clips of the games from Bit Trip Complete during the playing of the Mad Mix.

That was a real bad idea, after I recorded plenty of videos with gameplay I let the video editor split the videos into scenes and speed up every scene to 1.3, cause 1.25 was not available. It took an enormous amount of time to generate it. Then I tried to choose no duplicate scenes during the 23 min, tough job cause I had more Mad Mix than the total duration of all the used scenes. On top of that the video editor cutted  he music off when it was out of scenes. But it got worse when during producing the video the editor stopped working and when it was produced had the wrong video format to add the music to it.

I almost gave up the idea of putting it on YouTube, but after I moved my project to a bigger and faster computer I finally could save the whole thing and upload it.

There is another story to tell about how I recorded the gameplay videos, maybe another time. I can tell you one thing: Dolphin emulator, an Xbox controller and a screencapture running from a USB external harddisk is not the best way to create gameplay videos...

Here is the YouTube link for the Mad Mix

Monday, May 9, 2016

My Music Memories: Heroes of David Bowie

I am bit to late to post a David Bowie tribute, who died in January this year. But that was not why I made this post.

In the weekend I red a Dutch book called "Wie heeft dat gedaan?" ("Who did that ?") about all kinds of heroes, like super heroes, heroes from books, people like you and me who became heroes, heroes at war, gods and the grandmother of the 2 writers.

Today I looked at the cover and a song starts playing in my head; "Heroes" of David Bowie (boring clip) by the way...)
But is the song lyrics about heroes ? I checked and found out
it was about 2 lovers at the Berlin wall.
And there is more, the song is inspired by the song "Hero" of Neu!
If you listen very carefully you hear some similiarity, the lyrics are about something else.

I never knew David Bowie live performed with Queen "Heroes" and Peter Gabriel sang live an orchestral masterpiece of the song.

Final notes: I was a sort of Best Of David Bowie fan from the period until 1991, I bought his ChangesBowie only.

After Fame '90 I never hear him on the Dutch radio ever,
his fame went to other countries I guess...
He was a very busy man, check out the wiki page

He was an amazing talented man.

Three MSX playlists you don't wanna miss

Sometimes I'm just tired of creating, modifing things I want to do with my MSX stuff, on YouTube, this blog, Mixcloud and Soundcloud. And start browsing in my YouTube account, my Twitter and Google+ account. Amazing how many people still like to share some info about MSX games, some more than 30 years old. Here are 3 playlists I found about MSX games you don't wanna miss...


01) A-Z Of My MSX Collection from electricadventures

This guy has a complete room full of games for all sorts of computers and lucky for us
an MSX collection too. His list is not completed (the last video was for a game called Uridium) but a guy who choses F1-Spirit as favorite game instead of Flappy can't go wrong with his list of MSX games.
I had the same idea, but I think his videos are better than mine ever.

02) Especial MSX (the ones with "Ano" in the title) from Juanje Juega

It's in Spanish so I cannot understand a lot of the fun of each video, but it's a great idea to show a lot of MSX games that came out in (for example) 1985. A lot of these MSX games are completely in Spanish, maybe that's the reason most of these games were never available in the Netherlands. If all these Spanish MSX games were translated in English and sold elsewhere who knows what had happened.

03) MSX: The full Konami Collection from WikiMSX.org

I always wanted to know which games Konami made for the MSX system, before they moved on. This playlist shows all the games with year of release,  the mistakes Konami made (Green Beret, Wec Le Mans and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turles) and some games I never seen before. My favorite Konami games were mostly the sports- and racegames, like F1-Spirit, Golf, Tennis, Yie ar Kungfu, Antarctic Adventure, Hyper Olympics, Hyper Rally and Athletic Land, to name a few...


About Konami MSX games there lots and lots of YouTube videos to be found.
Like this very professional made video or this very basic one
Have a lot of fun browsing into the YouTube archives...