Seriously, man, this game just keeps on giving every time I come back to it. And, I even found two new secrets I'd never found before - a cool crystal-y underground area, and speed shoes on top of a mountain that I needed to jump to from a ramp at the end of a very tricky corkscrew loop. If this is the level of the competition, then Utopia absolutely deserves to be the one that gets singled out as an example to follow, even more than I thought it did.ĭOUBLE EDIT: These games started to seriously make me doubt my memories, so I went back and played through Utopia again just to confirm it was as good as I remembered. I guess a roll button can't save everything on its own after all.īasically, playing these two fangames just reinforced in my mind how well-put-together Utopia is. Sonic Utopia is an experiment that not only tries to expand on Sonic gameplay in an intuitive way in 3D, but also aims to capture the best of Sonics style and tie it together in a cohesive experience Knuckles is at his Island, protecting the Master Emerald when suddenly Eggman came up and stole it Sonic Robo Blast is the new adventures of. The level designs, too, somehow fell under what I thought was a very low standard. Everything from the camera to the turning, the acceleration to the momentum, it all feels horribly wrong. With even the bare minimum middling-to-poor level design, running around with a roll button (and physics that use it well) is already satisfying all on its own.ĮDIT: Holy moly did I underestimate what a big qualifier "and physics that use it well" was! These two games are both severely unpleasant to play. It seems like you're implying that these fangames are hugely / critically flawed, and they probably are, but I'm still interested anyway, because a roll button is just that awesome to play with. Lastly, this study extends existing discussions within sound studies to consider the cultural implications of music technology, noise politics, electronic timbre, multitrack audio, digital analytical techniques and online communities built through social media.I haven't played either of these, but from a quick skim of the videos you posted they both seem to have roll buttons, so I'm immediately interested. The following three chapters provide case studies of individual popular artists' use of electronic music technology to express societal and political discontent: 1) Jimi Hendrix's application of distortion and stereo effects to narrate an Afrofuturist consciousness in the 1960s 2) Trent Reznor's aggressive industrial rejection of Conservatism in the 1980s and 3) Deadmau5's mediation of online life through computer-based production and performance in the 2000s. Chapter Two traces the emergence of the electronic synthesizer as a new sound that facilitated the transition of a technological postwar American culture into the politicized counterculture of the 1960s. I examine how electronic music technology introduces new sounds concurrent with generational shifts, projects imagined utopian and dystopian futures, and engages the tension between automated modern life and emotionally validating musical communities in real and virtual spaces.Ĭhapter One synthesizes this interdisciplinary American studies project with the growing scholarship of sound studies in order to construct theoretical models for popular music analysis drawn from the fields of musicology, history, and science and technology studies. I further argue that the use of electronics in popular music signifies a technologically-obsessed postwar American culture moving rapidly towards an online digital revolution. This study demonstrates how electronic noise, as an extra-musical element, creates modern soundscapes that require a new mapping of musical form and social intent. Grounded in Jacques Attali's critical theories about the political economy of music, this dissertation investigates how the subversive noise of electronic sound challenges a controlling order and predicts broad cultural realignment. Interdisciplinary methodological practices address these limitations and can help broaden the analytical scope of popular idioms. Traditional musical analysis, placing primacy on notated music, generally focuses on harmony, melody, and form, with issues of timbre and postproduction effects remaining largely unstudied. Twentieth-century popular music is fundamentally associated with electronics in its creation and recording, consumption, modes of dissemination, and playback.
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