Sunday, June 19, 2005

The game that ruined my life.

Hacking. Some lunatic is hacking at another man's throat with a hatchet. Strangely, the victim doesn't make a sound. There's only one sound - chopping. Chop, chop, chop. A neanderthal chopping sound. They are deep inside what looks like a jungle. No jungle noises, though. No crickets, no wolves, no cracking of twigs, not even the sound of the raining blood. Another chop. It was then that I finally agreed I had watched Sin City too many times and woke up from my slumber.

But the chopping didn't stop. I realized it wasn't chopping. The sound was coming from the computer. It was from the game that ruined my life. My mother was playing it. "Squarez" by Eric Burgess. Ever since it was installed, my holidays (Yeah, holidays... Haven't you been reading College Life?) haven't been too much fun. All you have to do in the game is identify square patterns in a two dimensional array of balls of assorted colours. For reasons I don't understand, my mom finds this game addictive. My daily mission is this: To beat my mother to the computer. If I fail in this mission, I have to suffer for hours without my computer, for my mom's exceptionally good at the game. The pain...

To allay my pain, I started to fiddle around with my semi-destroyed keyboard, trying to make music of some kind. A friend of mine, who is quite an extraordinary guitarist/singer/harmonica player (known as Entropy, Max in the blogosphere) once played this song called "House of the Rising Sun". I'd never heard the song before, but I found that I liked it almost immediately. The original song was by The Animals, which I still haven't heard. Coming to the point, the weird noises I was making with my keyboard started sounding less weird and more like the song aforementioned.

Of course, since I've never heard the original, I didn't know how the whole song went. I remembered only the initial part of what he played. Also, he had excellent strumming skills, which I, being no guitarist (or musician, for that matter) had no chance of recreating. So I kinda modified the half-song here and there, replaced the vocals with my keyboard and recorded the cacophony. For your listening pleasure (Displeasure might be more appropriate), here's a low quality version of the song. I didn't have the patience to upload the high quality(but still horrible sounding) version.

To stream(i.e, play the song without downloading the entire file in advance)the song, click here. (Note: Winamp required, Windows Media Player doesn't seem to work)

To download the song, click here. (If clicking doesn't work, right-click and select "Save Link As"/"Save Target As". Any mp3 playing software will do. File Size:570 KB)