NARRATIVE TEXT:

Name: Jason Stiles

Age: 16

Weapon: Cricket Bat, Miracle Magic

Series: From Dreams to Nightmares

“Oh, no, I don't believe in violence- except in self defence, of course!”


Character Bio:

When one is asked to describe Jason Stiles, a few words come to mind: “Eccentric”, “Scatterbrained”, “Loud”, and “Almost Unpredictable”. Full of boundless energy and a near impenetrable sense of optimism, Jason is a peculiar individual- he is a prodigy with the Hurdy Gurdy and a skilled Bobsleigher, for just two examples- but his heart is bigger then most teens his age and he the only thing he's more interested in then having as adventurous a life as possible is being as kind to others as possible. During the summer break following his Secondary School graduation, the island he calls his home- Santa Hertford- is thrown into chaos as a number of truly bizarre, incomprehensible, and sometimes downright frightening events all begin to happen simultaneously- one of which happened to be his family's car suddenly springing to life and trying to ram them over. Never one to back down from a challenge, Jason- and his twin brother Simon- defeated the mechanical menace, setting off on a surreal adventure that would see them make new lifelong friends and overcome many terrors- none more fearsome and horrifying then a being born of all mankind's negative emotions and impulses, known only as Pied.



Level: Vinyl's End Promenade

Vinyl's end is the crown jewel of Santa Hertford's entertainment empire; a wide-stretching city nestled in the highest hills at the heart of the isle's palm forest where every building is decked out in bright and vibrant neon signs, and the sound of music glides through the very air itself. Almost all of the isle's talents pass through one of the cities numerous recording studios, TV studios, film sets, or theatres, and you're not thought of as having “made it” until you do. Since the strange circumstances began happening however, the doors of the building at the cities heart- the decrepit and abandoned manor that once belonged to the cities original figurehead, media mogul Maxwell Mellberry- have swung open, and now beings made of static and wires, the twisted forms of disused movie props, and the now animate forms of many of the neon signs and mascot statues have stormed the streets, plunging the city into chaos.



Boss: Maxwell Mellberry

Many moons ago, Vinyl's End was a humble town populated by folks just going through their day to day, with nothing much to offer in the way of the extraordinary or the astounding. That all changed when a young man from old money, Maxwell Mellberry, became interested in the then-emerging world of Television and Film, foreseeing many great advances in entertainment if one were brave- and rich- enough to dive right in. And if you want a job done right, who better to do it then yourself? Over many decades, and with his fingers in many pies, Maxwell built a media empire out of the little town settled in the hills that gave him and the corporation that bared his name untold influence over Santa Hertford. It's tough to say if Maxwell's intentions were ever altruistic, but it is safe to say that he became consumed by the power and the potential for influence this position offered him, as he gradually became wrapped up in the island's politics and intermingling with its seedy underbelly. This would eventually catch up to him, however, and he was found murdered in his stately home at the ripe old age of 80. Ambition, however, rarely lets a little thing like Death get in the way... Warped by death into a malevolent force, Maxwell is able to influence the reality of the arena you fight him in into twisted and nightmarish “sets” that, though they may look tacky, effect you as though they were real (for example, flimsy looking stage knives will pierce your flesh if they make contact).

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IN-CHARACTER TRACK COMMENTARY FROM GONKAKA:

Fumie Saso: Speaking of stress; I began work on this around about the time we had that hard drive crash, as I remember?

Denji Koshiro: Yeah; I think you might've started work on the song hours before that happened.

Fumie Saso: In the long term, we lost access to a large portion of our sample collection that we would have to rebuild from the ground up- something that had to wait until the soundtrack was done. In the short term, I lost access to almost all the original drum patterns for this song- which were sampled breakbeats. I was so disheartened, I nearly quit on the spot!

Shinji Namiki: I don't believe anyone as stubborn as you understands the meaning of the word “quit”, Fumie.

Fumie Saso: (Laughs) You may be right; I was back in the next day, working with the samples and assets from a couple of our mainstay pieces of software- something we all did for much of the project going ahead- determined to make this as good as I possibly could. I felt a similar inclination towards Jazz that Shinji did for 20mm, given the levels Hollywood-meets-Las Vegas design ethic, and really leaned into it. Whilst unintended, I like that the song wound up having a very “radio friendly” verse-chorus-verse structure; perhaps I should work on a vocal version someday!

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DECON'S TRACK COMMENTARY:

I sincerely apologise for the incredibly long gap between this and the last song; even outside of the Personal Thing™ mentioned in the last post, a lot of stuff kept cropping up and delaying work on the song (not all of it necessarily bad either), but it's squared away now and that's what matters.

That all said, though, I did manage to work on the song intermittently with a fair amount of consistency amongst everything else; lot's of short sessions chipping away at it bit by bit, slowly putting it together. In total contrast to the previous track, ideas for this one came on quick and were very strong even at the conceptual stage, so it's not for lack of ideas that I was so delayed. I ran into a bit of a headache on the tech front- initially the song used far more external samples (namely drum loops) that I lost to a crash- which demoralised my work ethic some initially- and would then run into more stuttering/lagging/disc-spindle-not-turning issues with the new SCPH-1001 Playstation model that hampered things further. It was actually finalised and recorded on a PS2 unit I have set up primarily to use the software I have for that format- stuff like MUSIC™ 3000, MTV Music Generator 2, etc.- which would be the ideal way to run M2K, were it not for the fact that copy protection on the PS2 is a lot tighter; it straight up will not read CD-R's at all without first being chipped or modded, so I can't use my external sample library.

Silver lining, though; much as I wish I could've progressed with the initial version that used the drumloops over the custom lines (which took a lot of sample switching/tweaking to get where I wanted them to be), I really like the end result here. It's extremely jazzy and has that slightly bittersweet, sleazy tone to it- totally capturing the "Las Vegas meets Hollywood" vibe of the level it's assigned to- and the fact that melody/chord/bassline etc. ideas came to me so strongly and quickly really comes across in the end result. I played around with the Note Repeat function in the riff editor on the piano line in the second section more brazenly as well, really experimenting with that lackadaisical, lilting sort of "rhythm" so associated with the genre. I had a few recorded scraps of samples from that first take I could still use, as a nice bonus.

The vocal sample over the intro comes from L.A. Noire; I've got a few odds and ends from the in-game radio station, KTI Radio, that I'm aiming to employ in tracks of mine over the next however long.