Modders vs Puritans

[Lizzieborden]

Hey Dead reckoner
How bout this for a blood track?
(NSFW)
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne5P0J- ... ciscoLopez[/youtube]

[Dead Reckoner]

Hey Dead reckoner
How bout this for a blood track?
(NSFW)
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne5P0J- ... ciscoLopez[/youtube]

I think it would fit perfectly without the vocals. Interesting to see Eyes Wide Shut mentioned in the same thread as PSX Doom. I noticed a resemblance before between the PSX Entryway track and the one you posted.

Wow that IS creepy and more blood-like for sure.
The organs at the beginning freak me out (Catholic convictions will do that to ya)
And the lamenting bell with drums, ..this reminds me of spaghetti westerns (good bad and ugly/ once upon a time in the west, etc) which would be Caleb territory : Pure evil, revenge, with inconsolable sadness as undertone

Thx for sharing this !!

When I listen to it, I picture a lone, haunted castle like the one in this Blood alpha texture:

tiles007_254.png (18.96 KiB) Viewed 4005 times

Btw, have you played "Blasphemous"? It's a metroidvania with the entire theme being Catholic nightmares.

[Lizzieborden]

Hi Dead Reckoner
Never tried Blasphemous. I'm easy to freak out when it comes to the satanic, so maybe I should avoid this. Don't feel like doing a buncha Hail Mary's to calm down!!
About PSX doom: I use a gzdoom port to play it (mouse and KB gal here...) instead of the original doom. The darker atmosphere with Hodge's music is entrancing. Now that you bring it up , yes, I now see the similarity with the PSX entryway piece and the eyes wide shut (minus vocals)

[Daedalus]

Both the CD and midi tracks are very dear to me, but they show flaws when one spills Blood for so many years.

CD soundtrack has too few tracks for Blood's large and diverse set of maps, and the steep tempo changes don't correspond with the pace of the gameplay. One potential solution may be an adaptive music system like in Blood 2 that shuffles between the fast and slow portions of the track depending on whether the player is roaming or in combat. But on their own, each track is a masterpiece and I also enjoy listening to them standalone.

When playing, I usually stick with the midis, but some of them can get repetitive and annoying in longer maps, and especially in bloodbath, where I just turned the music off. That's where I would have liked a fresh injection of music the most.

Blood's CD music is an interesting thing. The tracks do a brilliant job of capturing the feel of Blood's world. Who can deny that Father Time exemplifies the cold emptiness of the Haunting, or that the overall creepiness of Double, Double, Toil and Trouble wouldn't fit right at home in the dark corners of Blood's universe? They are the perfect audio tapestry to complement the shadowed world of Blood.

The problem? Blood's gameplay is at least three times faster than those tracks! The only exception might be Dark Carnival at its crescendo. For me, there is simply too much of a mismatch between Blood's at times frenetic gameplay and the slow, atmospheric build-up presented by the glorious CD music.

I would love to hear about the inspirations and such which led to the creation of the CD music.

Blood's midi tracks tend to do a better job of matching the gameplay pace, but of course midi can't reasonably compare to CD quality. A lot of the midi tracks are fantastic and I wish more of them had "CD music translations".

Regardless, personally, I don't play with any music at all, since Blood's raw atmosphere is magnificent even without it, and on Extra Crispy one needs to hear even the slightest squeak of a rat at distance...

[Lizzieborden]

Hey Daedalus
Good point about Blood and the CD tracks not being well synched. But this would apply especially to extra cripsy, which I dare not even try anymore. Last time I did, I broke a nail while frantically spamming my strafe keys. It hurt like a...well it hurt. A lot. On easier skill levels, the atmosphere is easier to soak in and the tracks more in synch. For example, the track on the Overlooked Motel is so spot on , its melancholy punctuated by screams of the undead as you blast away with the double barrel. Gives me goosebumps all over. Brrrrrr...!!!

I guess it comes down to the player's style.

By the way: a customer tonight, about 45 -50, from Turkey , in hesitant English , said I looked like Alice in Wonderland. So of course I had to say that I hoped it was American Mcgee's Alice and not Disneys. He was surprised that I knew about such an old game. I tell him the retro gaming scene is one I'm into, to which he asks (before mentioning other classic games, e.g., doom quake, duke) whether I played blood.
He was even more astounded. Got a huuuuge tip !!
Yes !
Blood for fun and profit.

[Daedalus]

That's the first instance I've heard of in which mentioning Blood in real life brought about some financial gain. Good stuff!

[Lizzieborden]

Hey, you are up late , no ?

[Dead Reckoner]

Hi Dead Reckoner
Never tried Blasphemous. I'm easy to freak out when it comes to the satanic, so maybe I should avoid this. Don't feel like doing a buncha Hail Mary's to calm down!!
About PSX doom: I use a gzdoom port to play it (mouse and KB gal here...) instead of the original doom. The darker atmosphere with Hodge's music is entrancing. Now that you bring it up , yes, I now see the similarity with the PSX entryway piece and the eyes wide shut (minus vocals)

I like the existential calmness many of the PSX Doom tracks bring. A few of those + Parallel Dimensions from Quake would be on my chillout playlist. I have PSX Doom on disc, but prefer to run that gzdoom port. While the addition of the dark soundtrack and moody, colored lighting are a nice touch, the problem with PSX Doom is that many of the maps are watered-down in texture variety and structure. Knee Deep in the Dead is so good that it's still very serviceable, but not so much the rest of Doom.

I don't remember anything satanic in Blasphemous. It was a dark fantasy setting with its own deities but it had loads of church bells, zombie nuns, etc.

[Lizzieborden]

the problem with PSX Doom is that many of the maps are watered-down in texture variety and structure.

Agreed. But to compensate, I use PSX Doom CE (not sure what the CE means). Great port that allows a wide rage of options from near vanilla to MAJOR aesthetic enhancment.

[Status Cruo]

I'd say I fall on the "puritan" side of things. To me a perfect Blood experience involves *at least* the following:

. A 320x200 output picture integer-upscaled to the largest dimensions the monitor can handle.
. No 4:3 aspect-ratio correction because Blood's artwork (a good portion of it anyways), appears to have been created for square-pixel resolutions, though I didn't really notice this till relatively recently when I started using a flat panel, and that only out of necessity.
. 60hz display mode.
. Enough horsepower to sustain 60+ fps.
. 9300K-9500K color temperature to keep those reds and ochres in check just as they'd have been back in CRT times.

Now, I'm talking a relatively modern PC here, the i5-2500 I received as part of a payment a good 8 years ago (not my main rig, the venerable 3.8ghz P4), which can run DosBox Staging flawlessly, so I FINALLY get to force that non-standard 320x200@60hz modeline for a beautifully crisp picture (60 fps + 70hz = massive ghosting plus stuttering if vsync enabled), which prior to this one particular development I was only able to get going on very specific period hardware I haven't had access to in over 2 decades.

DosBox Staging can provide all this with the right config, and even though the aforementioned PC is fully air-gapped because of a variety of vulnerabilities common to post-P4 hardware, I'm glad I tried something different and it worked out just fine.

Now throw in a decent oled and we're in business!

[Daedalus]

Playing on 320x200, that puts even my purity leaning to shame.

[Status Cruo]

Well, you could say it's more of an acquired taste in the sense that I'd play DOS games like that just for the speed boost. Guess I'm far more inconvenienced by uneven frame rates and scaling error as opposed to low resolutions and incorrect aspect ratios, so was my brain rewired not to notice the "purity" of 13h. Also my sight is not what it used to be, so for me there's little point in going over 640x480 at the most.