The Pseudo-Beginning

It's time to boot this boulder down the hill and witness the ensuing chaos.

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Sorry, too dramatic. I'll start simple. My name's Mike, and this blog used to be called "Strange Bloodlines" after a music track from the game Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I made exactly zero posts due to laziness, and I thought the title was too creepy anyway. That was about three or four weeks ago, but not having anything better to do, I decided to give blogging another shot under the title "Compliant Confusion," a slightly modified title from yet another piece of video game music from the N64 title Tetrisphere.

Since I mentioned two games, I may as well elaborate upon them. Symphony of the Night is one of the better-recognized entries of the long-running Castlevania franchise, released in 1997 for the Sony Playstation as the first CV title to involve Koji Igarashi, the current series producer. Most CV installments up to SotN were linear action titles (the only exception being Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest for the Nintendo Entertainment System) starring several members of the Belmont clan, a legendary bloodline of vampire slayers. These games had Dracula as the main villain, not the exact same Dracula as Bram Stoker's eponymous character but most certainly inspired by the book and many classic horror films.

The old-school CV titles were simple yet challenging affairs (once again, Simon's Quest being the exception), but Symphony changed the style of the series by making it a non-linear action-adventure affair with elements commonly found in role-playing games. The protagonist is Alucard, the son of Dracula, who has free roam to explore Dracula's castle and use whatever weapons, armor, and items he can find hidden in the castle's many hallways and passages. The castle holds host to a wide variety of enemies ranging from cannon fodder like skeletons and fishmen, to serious threats like floating ghost swords and fire-imbued demons. The game's graphics are fantastic, with most characters and objects rendered in pixels instead of polygons as was the trend of most games released in the later nineties. The soundtrack, composed by veteran Konami music maestro Michiru Yamane, is diverse with genres such as orchestral, hard rock, techno, and so forth. There's so much more I could say about Symphony, and perhaps I will later, but it is most certainly one of my favorite all-time games, with its only major flaw being a rather low amount of challenge.

Also released in 1997 for the Nintendo 64, Tetrisphere is one of the more creative spins on Alexey Pajitnov's classic falling block puzzle game, Tetris. The action takes place on a three-dimensional globe instead of a flat chamber, and instead of attempting to fill rows of blocks, you simply have to drop a block onto at least two matching blocks touching each other. You can drag blocks to arrange them next to each other and earn more points by clearing multiple blocks in one drop. These matching blocks disappear and reveal a deeper layer of the Tetrisphere, and you have to keep clearing layers until you reach the core. Revealing enough of the core frees a trapped robot from imprisonment, thus clearing the level. Dropping a block onto an unmatching surface or taking too much time adds a miss, and you lose the game if you rack up three misses.

You rack up more points if you drop a block onto a matching crystal block, slowing down the action and enabling your to achieve larger combos by clearing more blocks while the chain reaction from the crystal block(s) continues. Achieving combos of twenty blocks or more or clearing small glowing squares gives you a weapon which you can use to clear great portions of the Tetrisphere at once. Your weapon starts our as a simple firecracker, but can be upgraded to stronger tools like a bundle of dynamite and a magnet if you rack up more combos or find more squares. It plays simpler than it sounds, and it offers multiple gameplay variations via its "hide-and-seek" mode as opposed to its standard "rescue" mode, as well as including a "puzzle" mode where you have to clear all blocks in a limited amount of moves. What really seals the deal is Neil Voss' fantastic techno soundtrack with such atmospheric and energetic tracks as "Martist," "Azule Lux," and this incipient blog's namesake, "Compliant Confuse."

So yeah. I love video games, but I will do my best to ensure that this blog is not exclusively about games. Though, being that games are my primary hobby, it may eventually turn out that way. And hey, this first post turned out to be about games. Whoops. Anyhoo, welcome to Compliant Confusion. Feel free to read and/or criticize whatever, and remember that there are no refunds.