I take it back; the thing you have to do to trigger the quest that gets you the best ending is completely obscure– depending on what path you’ve taken to the point where it happens, it’s either easy but not something one would ever do naturally, or nearly impossible. It goes back to being fair after that, though. The rest of the game is so sharply designed that I assume this is intentional.

This amazing game has made the rounds in the gamer world, but not very extensively elsewhere. Cave Story is an action-adventure game in the mold of early classic Nintendo games like The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Kid Icarus, Castlevania. And it lasts about 5-10 hours the first time through, depending on your skill level, which I think is about the right length.

Cave Story has an advantage over its predecessors, though: game design really has advanced in the past 20 years. The secrets and hidden quests aren’t too obscure to be found without hints from a friend or tons of free time– they’re easy to see, and yet the main branch of the game flows so smoothly that you don’t sit around banging your head on an optional puzzle because you think you might need it to continue. The numbers that appear over your head when you take damage are invaluable; you don’t have to look up at your life bar during a fight to figure out which of the boss’s attacks you need to be scared of. The game also handles power-ups nicely by making damage to your weapon easy to incur (ouch) but almost as easy to fix. You can’t let your guard down just because you have the bestest weapon, but you also aren’t punished too viciously for slipping up.

Much as in some Ubisoft games, the mechanics are mostly taught by example; if you’re about to be in a life-or-death situation involving water, there will be a completely safe puddle beforehand to remind you how long you can stay underwater.

The one thing missing is a way to have multiple saved games at the same time; some decisions made in the game are irreversible, and apparently it has multiple endings (another modern thing, I think– I don’t remember seeing that in a platform game until around 1999). But the whole strength of the design is that you don’t have to care about any of this to enjoy it.

Here is an excellent English-language site for the game, with pointers to downloads for both the game and the translation patches that Aeon Genesis did from the original Japanese.

There’s a song by Dykehouse (apparently the singer’s real last name) called “Chain Smoking” that I played for everyone I saw during a few weeks last summer. At the time, I thought it sounded like the Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979″, but I’m always surprised when actual events corroborate my opinions, so a solo album by Billy Corgan that more or less sounds like that Dykehouse record is kind of a shock. I never listened to Smashing Pumpkins that much, though; maybe this is where they were headed.

I’d rather this had more hooks and oh, while I’m asking for things, having someone else sing would make me happy. So maybe I don’t like this record; I just like some alternate-world shadow of it that listening to it helps me imagine. I do that with a lot of records, though, and I still think this is fun, especially “Mina Loy (M.O.H.)” and “Walking Shade”. I hear they play that last one on the radio.

Regular Einstein - “Mom’s On The Roof” (mp3)

The song’s catchy, sure, but I’d listen to two-and-a-half minutes of ping-pong ball noises* if it began with a lyric as good as “I met your Chinese girlfriend / She doesn’t hold a candle up / To all the girls you left behind in Massapequa” delivered in Paula Carino’s biting drawl. I also love the J. Geils Band-style appearance of several motley backing vocalists for the final chorus.

Paula has a solo album out on 125 Records, and a mention on the website of collaborator John Sharples suggests she’s working on another one.

* But you’d listen to that anyway. Well, yes.

If pressed, I would still say 2001’s Mr. Fancypants is my favorite Ad Frank record, but this one has changed from a disappointment to a serious rival for the honor. It just took me a while. I love Ad’s voice enough that when it comes to his lyrics I am probably biased toward whichever ones I’ve heard most recently; that said, these have more layers than usual in addition to their cleverness.

Ad is the world’s best Ad Frank, which means that like Mark Eitzel he can sometimes boil down his emotional perspective so precisely that a song is missing the easy reference points a listener might expect. If you write a wistful song and it sounds wistful, you’re set. If it sounds ironically overwrought because it’s about wistfulness disguised as self-deprecation disguised as overreaction (”The Only One I Knew In Jamaica Plain”), it might take a few listens to get it. Actually, I hadn’t thought about just how much he has in common with Eitzel– both are bleak, sexually ambiguous barflies with similar senses of humor. You may find this an unimpressive bit of insight given that Ad name-dropped Mark Eitzel a few albums ago, but I think he’s grown into the resemblance, and it never struck me before.

The other thing which slowed down my appreciation of this record is its instrumentation, which happened to me last time too. I don’t know where the occasional impulses to be REO Speedwagon come from, but I wish the band would resist them.

Funkstorung - “Grammy Winners” (mp3)

Funkstorung merged electronic music with hip-hop relatively early– at least, the fusion still wasn’t that common when I heard this two years after its 2000 release. (The vocalist is a guest named Triple H, not a regular part of Funkstorung.) The duo also did a remix for the Wu-Tang Clan that was not actually much good but must have been a serious surprise for some listeners. Chris DeLuca, the half of Funkstorung that I think was more interested in beats and in chopping up rhymes, later did a whole solo album with German rapper Peabird.

Xiu Xiu - “I Luv The Valley OH!” (mp3)

Xiu Xiu’s better songs almost always seem like layers and layers of ornamentation and reinterpretation applied to a center that may or may not justify the effort on its own, like if the Waking Life animators had taken seven or eight passes at each scene instead of just one. I didn’t realize until last month that this song actually *is* a revision of an older one; Jamie Stewart first recorded it with his previous band, Ten In The Swear Jar, five or six years ago. The key is that “OH!” in the middle; even in the less intense original it’s a meaningless-seeming shriek, except that Stewart sings the line before it like it’s part of a sentence: “I love the valley–”

Three weeks ago, Swedish singer Jens Lekman requested on his blog that fans who were feeling sad go out, graffiti something, and send him a picture of it. And they did! The page is incredibly cute even when Jens isn’t commissioning vandalism; you can keep reading and see stories about running into a naked actor from an Aki Kaurismaki film, spreading bogus rumors that he was going to be performing with Snoop Dogg, accidentally plagiarizing the guy from the Silver Jews, getting gay-baited in Mississippi, etc.

(Free songs: “Black Cab”, “You Are The Light” and “Pocketful Of Money”. The latter two involve graffiti and plagiarism, respectively.)

Koenji-Hyakkei - “Grembo Zavia” (mp3)

Japanese prog/metal/artcore/whatever, a project of Ruins mastermind Tatsuya Yoshida. Every piece of writing I’ve seen about this band mentions that they sound like a 70s band called Magma, who I at first declined to follow up on because, I said to myself, the invented ‘language’ that Ruins and Koenji-Hyakkei use is a big part of the charm for me; I think the voices here, for example, would be offensively bombastic if the lyrics meant anything. But now I see that Magma performed in a fake language too. Well then!

The song gets very boring two-thirds of the way in (I hope *that* isn’t the part that sounds like Magma), but I didn’t have a good way to clip the mp3, so consider this a warning and apology. Koenji-Hyakkei records are very hard to find here, but Skin Graft Records is releasing the new one later this year, so that should help.

In July 1969, William Safire (then a presidential speechwriter) wrote a short speech for Nixon to give if the Apollo astronauts were unable to leave the moon:

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace…” (Read more.)

There must be countless other speeches like this, and now I want to read them.