The mysterious island.

The game, if you could call it that, is primarily walking around a mysterious island.  When you first arrive, the narrator begins as if he were reading a letter to Esther (hence the name).  As you find other audio cues he might explain something about your surroundings, or it could be unrelated whatsoever.  It was designed to cause a sense of confusion until later, so be aware.  Part of the enjoyment comes from sorting out what the narrator is talking about, while the other part is exploring the setting and realizing the brilliantly constructed atmosphere.

The game is what one could consider “artsy” and for some, that might be a turn off.  If you’re not into that, don’t worry, don’t play it.  For those who might give it a chance, it’s only about an hour long and quite an interesting ride.  I recommend a download.  There are even 2 download links, you have no excuse now.

(Please note that I may be essentially advertising these guys, but this advertisement isn’t a joke. I honestly think and endorse the following message.)

Imagine this: Somehow you’ve managed to get a date with the most wonderful woman in the world. You both get in your fancy clothes and you’re about to take her out on one of the most romantic nights of her life. You drive to the restaurant and walk her in. You see the candle-lit tables all around and you are guided to a table. You look dreamingly into her eyes and are about to say something romantic when all of a sudden you think of the catchiest riff you’ve thought of in a long time. If you don’t write it down, there’s a good chance you’ll forget it. Luckily, you just pull out your iPhone really quickly and use this:

FL Studio Mobile

Now you can write down the tune really quickly and you can work on it at home later. Now you’re free to charm this beautiful woman for a second date!

Thanks Image-Line!

Check it out!

Zircon – “Just Hold On” Demo song for FL studio 9.  Make stuff like this in FL Studio 10!

Digital Rights Management.  It’s one of the worst systems the video game market has come up with.  Please note that most of this only applies to PC gaming, and not consoles.  Let’s begin at the beginning…

Back in the day when computers were just coming out, there were companies that realized they could make some money off of making computer games.  So they took a risk, spent a few months eating nothing but ramen, poured their soul into this game, and finally released it to the public.  They sold the game (let’s call it “Joe Blasts off!”) for a reasonable price and people would buy their game.  The developers get paid for their hard work and effort, and the consumers have their game that they can play at any time and relax.

This system worked for a little while until some particularly intelligent consumers found out methods on how to make a digital copy of the game for free.  That way, in their group of friends, only one person would have to buy “Joe Blasts off!” and after a few copies are made, all of them can play it.  The knowledge of making copies spread, and soon, quite a few people were pirating these games.

Unfortunately this meant that in the group of friends, only one sale was actually made.  Out of a group of five friends only one copy of “Joe Blasts off!” was sold, and the other four who might have bought it, didn’t.  So the company is now getting 1/5th of the possible revenue.  Back in that time period, game companies were small.  They were barely getting by as it was, and piracy certainly wasn’t helping.  So they started thinking creatively to circumvent piracy and to discourage it.

At first, and you’ll find this with a lot of early 90′s era games, they would create a puzzle in the game, or ask a trivia question, and have the answer in the manual that game with the game box.  For instance, in “Joe Blasts off!” the objective is to find all the parts to a spaceship.  While Joe is collecting parts for his space shuttle, one of the parts is in a padlock safe to which the combination is written in the manual, so to get the part, you have to shuffle through the little booklet until you find the combination.  That way, if someone was to pirate it, they couldn’t play it or rather, progress any further unless they had a copy of the manual where the answers were.  Remember, this was before the internet so the only way to find out stuff like that was to ask friends or look in the manual.  Looking up the answers was only a minor inconvenience and the most hassle you would have is looking up the answer every time you want to play the game again.  Of course, if you lost your manual, you were screwed unless you bought another game or memorized/wrote down the answer before you lost it.  Other than that, this was an effective DRM-strategy for a while, but then CDs and the Internet showed up.

The internet showed up and since anybody could post anything, it was found that if you don’t have an answer, just go to this website and it’ll tell you it without even having to own the manual.  So that system didn’t last long and it went back to DRM-free for a bit.  CDs started to roll around and with CDs came CD burners.  Pirates would sometimes just copy the already installed files onto their computers, so to combat this Developers implemented a CD check.  Essentially, when the game was started it would check to see “Hey! Is the right CD in here?”  So in order to play the game, you’d have to find the CD and plop it in, much like consoles.  This wasn’t all that big of a deal, it just meant you had to be more careful.  Then pirates got smart and decided they would take the CD and then make a digital copy.  They created a program called a Virtual Drive which took this digital copies of a CD and made the computer think they were physical copies.  Now all you had to do was to take a CD and make a digital copy on your computer.  These digital copies are called .ISOs.  I use ISOs for my own digital collection as back up copies, but sometimes people will leak their own copies out on the internet.

After CD checks became practically useless, companies made CD keys.  The keys were seemingly random numbers/letters that would be entered when the game was installing.  Now for the CD keys to work, their had to be an algorithm to determine which “random” combination of numbers worked and which combination didn’t (They weren’t random, they just looked that way).  Pirates would find this challenge rather fun and they’d either 1, find the algorithm and make a program that would generate valid keys, or 2, crack the program to not even need the key.

So, the companies decided hey, we’re still losing money from this, so they implemented a system called SecureROM.  What this did was it planted itself into your Operating System.  It gave itself the highest privellages in your computer (making it a big security risk) in order to see if your disk was physical or a digital ISO.  At this point DRM was getting a bit ridiculous.  Legally you are allowed to make one back-up copy and this system made any digital back-up copies useless (of course, until the pirates make a crack for it.  Which they will.).  Plus, since SecureROM planted itself into your OS, it was hard to get rid of and made it a bit easier for viruses to exploit vulnerabilities.

At this point, the internet had presented itself as a definite influence in the world.  There were groups that formed to combat these DRM measures for the sheer fun of it.  It was exciting to break the system, and it felt liberating to give free copies of a game to others.  As the internet grew, so did the pirate groups.  When people started getting high speed internet, a new method of piracy was born.  Before, in order to make a copy, you had to have the original disk first.  With the internet, only one person on the entirety of the internet had to buy the copy.  Now, because of the wonders of digital copies, and the mass distribution the internet could provide, the sales declined further (well… to be honest, the market was always growing, the ratio of sales to piracy was what was looking bleak).

Now these piracy groups were competitive.  They’ve evolved to (and they’re still like this) see who can crack the game the fastest.  Some have made it even before the game was released and those piracy groups gain lots of respect from the pirate community.  Through this, a sense of “Us vs. The evil coporations”, and other reasons, the pirate community flourished.  Now instead of a question of “How can we kill piracy?” it was “How the heck can we slow them down, even a bit?”

Along with the internet came a new method of downloading.  Before, piracy wasn’t all that widespread because you’d have to find a website that was sufficiently powerful enough to host huge files such as games.  Then of course, the method of downloading was almost always trackable.  After a while the torrent system was developed.  The idea of a torrent is instead of a single server hosting this huge file, the torrent would download the data from everyone else connected to the torrent network.

Torrents work like this.  A guy uploads a .torrent file onto the internet.  Using a specialized program that handles .torrent files, he transmits the file data to whoever is trying to download the file through their .torrent program.  Now there are two people who have the file downloaded.  Now the original guy AND the second guy are transmitting the file through the network.  A third guy starts to download the stuff and now he’s downloading half of the data from the first guy, and the other half from the second.  After he’s downloaded the file, he transmits his data.  Now you’ve got three people transmitting data, you get the idea. (…I hope)

This method makes torrents much harder to track.  Instead of connecting to a central server that gives you the file, you’re collecting a bunch of little parts from people all over the world.  This means that pirates are free to reign and play their cracked game all they want.

Now at this point large corporations are the ones publishing these games.  In order to combat this immense loss in sales, they decided, “You know what? In order to play your game, you have to activate it with our servers first.”  EA games was the first company to do this with their game Spore back in 2007.  Once you have a game, your CD key has 5 chances to activate online.  After your key has passed that limit, it’s useless and you can’t install your game again.  There are so many things wrong with this system.

Sometimes computers crash.  Sometimes they crash a lot.  Sometimes when these computers crash it requires that you wipe your hard drive and re-install.  Let’s say I already had a copy of Spore already installed on my PC and a system crash required I wipe the drive.  That’s an install I’ve wasted.  Now I can only install on 4 more systems.  Clearly I can’t keep this game forever, at some point I will run out of installs.  Of course, then there’s the issue of servers.  Servers are expensive to maintain.  Companies will not want to maintain an “activation server” on a game that’s 10 years old.  What happens then?  Can I even install my game anymore?  Even if I had installs left, would it matter?  The game is coded to only play when activated, and if there’s no way to activate, what the heck am I supposed to do? This brings in some injustice to the consumer who paid actual cash-money to play this game.  They paid the money to support their game and they have to jump through all these hoops to play by the rules and in turn support the developer so they can make more awesome stuff.  Now when we buy an expensive game, we’re taking a risk that we might not ever be able to play this game in 10-20 years.  Then we look over at the pirates and see they don’t have ANY of these problems.  Their cracked copy has gotten rid of all this ridiculous limitations on the game.  So why should I pay good money for something I don’t really “own” when the pirates have it forever?

Now it gets even more ridiculous.  Ubisoft developed a system for one of their more popular games.  In order to play it, you must, at all times, be connected to their game server.  It’s a single player game with no real advantages to be connected to the internet except to appease Ubisoft and play by their rules.  If you lost connection during a mission, it’d immediately kick you out and force you to restart the game.  This means if all you had was say, a gaming laptop, you’d have to stay by the wi-fi spot.  You couldn’t play it on a road trip or anything.  On top of that, wi-fi can sometimes give you shaky connections.  So, you could be going along on your mission, and a slight hiccup in the network could make you lose all of your progress.  Plus, these are even more expensive to maintain than the activation servers and the company had no visible intent to support it otherwise.  You’d be restricted to play whenever *their* servers are up.  If they have to go down for maintenence, you couldn’t play. This. Caused. Outrage.

People were working extra-hard to pirate this game and made the pirates feel even more like “heroes” because of this ridiculous scheme.  They made it extremely inconvenient for the customers and it was only a month after launch the whole system was cracked.  This DRM was pointless, treated the customer like crap, is extremely expensive to maintain, isolates people who don’t have high-speed internet or a reliable connection, and did absolutely nothing positive.

Ubisoft has since realized their mistake at the outrage gamers had and have since fixed it (…sort of.  They switched it to an online activation rather than constant internet).

This sort of DRM is ridiculous.  A good number of pirates pirate because of DRM and companies make DRM to stop pirates.  It’s a matter of principle that’s a hard battle to fight. Both sides are being childish, and the only thing you can really do to fight DRM is to vote with your money.  Don’t buy the game AND don’t pirate it.  That’s hard to convince people to do.

Now there is DRM that does things right.  Steam.  IF there was a DRM system I’d place my faith in it’s steam.  The reason being is while it requires you to connect to the internet via your steam account at least once, and then you can play your games, but it gives you encouragement to actually be connected to the internet.  For instance, it has a friends list system.  Your friends can IM you in game and it tells your friends when your playing so they know when to talk to you/what you’re doing.  The in-game steam program even has an in-game web browser for when you need to look something up quickly.  And the most exciting thing about steam is it’s steam sales.  Steam will put games up on sale for dirt cheap.  If you visit the store on the weekend there will usually be a big sale where it’s a modern-ish game that’s about 50-75% off.  This makes me happy, and it’s really good business for everyone really.

Even then, I’m not too comfortable with steam controlling my access to my games, but they have so many features that make it worth it.

Was that long enough of a rant for you?

I could go on…

The menu music is first and then the other 2 are level songs.

I will post when it actually comes out so you can naturally go out and get the game immediately.  After playing said game, you will most definitely contact every single person that you know and just marvel at how the music is expertly constructed.  Then you’ll send it to a professional in the field to which they will be so impressed, they will most certainly offer me a job…  Alright, alright, but a guy can dream right?

This is a constant battle to keep getting better, and this was a good start.  At least I have something to show off now, and I learned a Metric-Crapton from doing it.  Next major project: OC ReMix

OC ReMix is a wonderful little website where I found my inspiration.  The website is filled with re-imaginings of video game music.  They make the background music into actual music, and do it well!  On top of that, all the music hosted there is free to download (which made it quite a large chunk of my collection).  There are some really talented artists who dedicate their precious time to pay tribute to these games we’ve all loved.

The site has a large amount of variety, from Metal to Solo Piano (which I might add are absolutely beautiful pieces of work). Euro Techno to Hip-Hop.  Electronica to plain Rock ‘n Roll.  Orchestral to Big Band.  OC ReMix exposes those talented artists who just love music and video games.

Someday I’ll be joining the OC ReMix artists but you don’t have to wait for me to check ‘em out.

Oh, and I’ll probably be doing electronica with lots of piano.  It just seems to work for me.

The 4th dimension is hard to grasp, and it hurts your brain to try.  It sure is interesting though!

Future plans:

-Commentary and subtle hints on songs that I’m currently working on.  I don’t know how long this will last, but I’m going to try it out.

-Possible Free MP3s of my songs just to be nice.

-Blogging about my music in general

-Blogging about things I care about I suppose.

Well, it’s probably going to end up as a journal, but we’ll see how it goes.