Mangchi The HammerBoy (PC) Audio Rip

Since times have still been a bit slow and light in productivity for my liking lately and I've just begun to warm back up into doing bigger projects, how about another soundtrack rip to pass the time? This one came by rather sudden, as it's a very obscure little gem that even I, someone who knows way too much about obscure games, completely passed on back then until a streamer I started following since last year did a surprise longplay of it live on their Twitch channel back in March.

That's right, we're traveling to Korea to experience the one and only Mangchi the HammerBoy.

Released in the year 2004 as a loose adaptation/licensed title for the similarly-titled "Hammerboy" anime film based on the manhwa of the same name, Mangchi the HammerBoy is a simple 3D platformer exclusive to Windows PC. Owing to its obscurity, it has very little documentation online, and what documentation exists in English is extremely brief. What's most notable from this research is Mangchi's complete redesign into something closer to Kingdome Hearts' Sora, including changing the weapon from a real-life hammer with a rope on it to a giant cartoon mallet. All the characters from the original story that do appear were able to keep their names at the least, including the game's central villain and final boss Moonk. The game is also pretty short, having only 5 stages total, but I will admit that the first level, an abandoned and flooded city, is not a common trope for the setting of a 3D platformer.

The game's audio comes entirely in the form of wav files, which made assembling the soundtrack as easy as "convert to mp3 and tag the files appropriately". I also included the theme used in the opening FMV sequence but, for understandable reasons, didn't do the same with the rest of the in-game cutscenes that are full of sound effects and voice lines. If there is interest in listening to those as well, I will gladly convert those and bundle them with the full rip as extras since I would also like to update the track of Stage 4's boss with the boss' actual name if I ever come across it in the future.

With that all covered, here's the audio rip for your listening pleasure.

Conventions of 2024: A Mission's Briefing

 

It's nearing the end of March and with that, local pop culture conventions are once again getting on my mind as I prep for another year of attending big events in person and bribing the artists in Artist's Alley to draw my immense and ever-growing selection of OC's as I tend to do.

...Okay that's not all there is to these events, but considering all the commission dumps I post on my other blog, I wouldn't be surprised if "commissions" were engraved into my brain whenever I attend an anime or comic convention. I suppose that happens when you have a giant roster of original characters and want to see them drawn in the art style of other artists. Anyways, it's March, and with this being the time I post my big lineup of conventions I'll be attending throughout the year, I had to get it done before April rolled around and I start attending events live once again. This time I abolished the Major/Minor event format of last year since it didn't feel fair, deciding the best way to portray the events was to do so on all equal footing.

The presence of conventions I'm attending for the first time, as well as events that I have not gone to in more than a year was a part of that reasoning for every event falling under the same amount of attention. A good friend of mine in the convention scene motivated me to grab tickets to Brooklyn Comic Con after the cancelation of what would have been AnimeNext 2024. Meanwhile, AnimeNYC's move to August has allowed me to fill the rest of Fall with two events. DepycCon and AnimeNJ++. The former I only attended once in 2016 until I was forced to shelf attending further years of the event as it occurred in too close of a proximity to AnimeNYC. The latter will be having its second year and since now there's no other events in the area competing with its timeslot I can easily attend it and see how it works as an anime convention. Based on what I heard so far, both events look good as wind-down events as the winter season approaches, and if everything goes as planned, the Festival of Games will return once more after skipping 2023 to cap off the year.

I'll hold off until the end of the year before I talk about plans for 2025 and beyond, as it's still far too early to discuss potential schedule changes just incase another event pops up that I can attend or if AnimeNext resurrects itself. For now, expect the usual from these events: lots of photos, lots of cosplays, and lots of commissions.

The Tale of a Graffiti Artist Sticker

Since I haven't given myself the chance to talk about my personal life outside of content creation and convention trips in a long while, I thought I'd expand out a bit and try writing about something that I found in a town that's just south of my home, and well, something that spans several years of mystery.

Years ago, along a road close to my home in the middle of a big expansion, there was an old, condemned building with white paint that was a popular target for graffiti artists to express themselves. At one point, a particular piece of graffiti would decorate the front of this small building: a bust of cartoon character in a flashy suit with large eyes and an afro. It would be soon painted over and before you know it, the building would be demolished. Even with the building gone, I would proceed to see the graffiti one, maybe two other time(s) in the local area, all before it would seemingly vanish from my eyes for the next few years.

That was, until that same graffiti popped up once more, this time as a two-tone black and yellow sticker on the back of a sign on the sidewalk. The graffiti I had seen all these years ago was now joined by a figure in a suit of some kind, sporting a smooth, clean-cut black afro reclining on a chair with a yellow suit of sorts. Unable to resist the urge, I snapped the sticker with a camera to replicate the exact definitions of the original image, though as someone that prefers to keep something of a low profile when it comes to public sightings and occurrences like these, I do not wish to post the sticker on this blog nor investigate it (and the graffiti itself) further, especially in the chance the image spreads out even further than the scopes of this blog.

So with that said, you may be wondering, what drove me to make this blog post in the first place? Well, as an artist, I've always had some form of appreciation towards graffiti, even if I would never stoop to doing it as a form of vandalization. Plus, I've always been pretty big into Jet Set Radio (along with its spiritual successor Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, despite not having purchased it yet as of this writing) for its artstyle, attitude, and the creative gameplay and spectacle featured within, and similarly latched onto The World Ends with You dualogy, which also heavily freatures graffiti. It's just, no other piece of graffiti has ever captured my attention to such an extent by featuring an recurring character of sorts, and then attaching said character to an otherwise unknown person. It's something I'd love to research and find more detail on, but again, I want to keep myself and everyone else safe, especially as someone that enjoys graffiti as an art form and a sign of expressing one's creativity, but not as an act of vandalism.

And that 's all I got for now, I wanted to get this out before the month ends as it's the first time this blog has received an article on Leap Day... To think these only happen every four years, and I'll admit, I was caught off guard earlier this morning when the day first came to be. As for what will be next for the blog, things should slowly begin to get more productive around here, now that March is here and I spent too much time this Winter R&R'ing instead of furthering my own projects. Who knows, maybe I'll follow my own promises and goals from last year and go create something?

Naughty Ones (Commodore Amiga) Soundtrack

Well I couldn't figure out something to post last month so to kick off February I'm posting another game soundtrack that, to my knowledge, has not received a modern rip: A little-known Commodore Amiga game that goes by the name "Naughty Ones".

Released on both the Amiga and it's console counterpart, the Amiga CD32, Naughty Ones is what happens when a group of people decide to make an elimination platformer that bucks some of the trends of the subgenre birthed by the runaway success of Taito's Bubble Bobble. You move John (and Jim in two player mode) from room to room, chucking destructive rubber balls at whatever enemies came up in the minds of the developers in order to escape the surreal reality the heroes have been trapped in.

(...Can conform, rubber balls are really destructive)

You all probably recognize the game from the Angry Video Game Nerd's episode on the Amiga CD32, which was how I myself came across the title years ago. It drove me to break out the Amiga emulator and try the game for myself. It manages to dodge the "europlatformer" trope common in Amiga games where they pad out the gameplay with collectathon elements since the worst it gets is having to find a single key to reach the end instead of dropping you inside a huge maze and tasking you with grabbing every single last thing in the level.

While based on existing soundtrack rips, said rips either combine all the songs into one video (i.e. Youtube uploads) or are simply the raw audio files extracted from the game, including the level intros in the same audio files as their parent level. This rip takes the audio files, separates the intros into their own audio tracks, and converts everything into more universal mp3 files. For the audio tracks that were already separate, they were simply copied over and converted with no further alterations. Thus, I cannot claim full credit for this rip, just the part of making it easier to listen to individual tracks in the soundtrack. 

You can download the full set of songs here. I am uncertain on if and when I'll decide to create another soundtrack rip, but the next one that gets posted here will (hopefully) have more effort put behind it on my part aside from just "throw into foobar2000 and press convert". As for what else is in store, that is on my terms to figure out.