Midweek Music Box: Top 5 Pause Sound Effects

Time for a break from the normal routine.  A brief "pause" if you will.  Normally I like talking straight up music.  I love all aspects of video game music both retro and new.  From the oddly modulated bass of Super Nintendo games to the occasionally tinny music of the Sega Genesis to more modern full-bodied orchestral soundtracks you get from games like Skyrim and Super Mario Galaxy; nearly all of them have something great to offer. 

But what happens when you have to stop playing for a bit and don't want to turn the game off?  Or more likely, if you were playing back in the day and couldn't turn the game off because you'd lose all of your progress?  Enter the pause button.  Usually you would trigger it by hitting the start button and a little sound effect would issue forth to let you know that yes, you could safely leave Mario sitting there when you ran off to have dinner while the Goombas were frozen in place.  Or maybe Dr. Wiley's Castle was proving just a little too taxing and you needed to stop and do homework.  Whatever your reason for stopping, sometimes it had to happen.  While these may not be musical notes, they were welcomed sounds by gamers everywhere when it came time to run to the bathroom.  Here are my Top 5 Favorite Pause Sound Effects.

#5:  Mega Man

It's not a "pause trick!"  I'm just...uh, clever, yeah.

Whether battling a robot master or trying to exploit the infamous "pause trick," I must have heard Mega Man's pause sound over a thousand times--no joke.  Between the constant weapon switching and using energy tanks in later sequels, I think I easily spent half the time I played any given entry in the franchise hitting the start button and fiddling around on the menu while the game was paused.  Funny enough though, it never felt like the game-flow was too interrupted by this constant jamming on the start button.  Changing from the regular pea-shooter to something like the near unbeatable saw blades from Metal Man was a quick and user friendly experience.  I think the only real problem came when I would pause a Mega Man game for dinner and come back a few hours later only to have forgotten what weapon I should be equipping.

#4: Sonic the Hedgehog

What? Why would you pause a runner?

Sometimes you gotta go fast! ...And other times you gotta go slow.  Like so slow that you have to out and out stop going so darned fast!  Stopping for any reason though while playing a Sonic game probably seems like heresy.  Despite the speedy nature of the game, sometimes you'd have to bring things to a halt.  It was hard enough pulling away from a Sonic game thanks to the feeling it gave you of being constantly in motion.  But knowing that you had to make the world's fastest hedgehog come to a complete standstill felt like I was doing something boarding on criminal.  Still, hearing those familiar chimes let me know that even if I felt a little dirty for freezing the little blue fuzz ball he'd be waiting to zip away as soon as I got back.

#3: Battletoads

Never beat the game.  Never got past the Turbo Tunnel.  Never stopped renting it.  Why?  Well, even though I was fairly certain that all of my attempts to get anywhere in this infamously hard TMNT knockoff would end in failure I could be sure of one thing:  The Pause music was awesome.  In fact, I think Battletoads is a classic example of what I call the "War Games" syndrome.  The only way to win is not to play the game.  But dang, that was some awesome pause music...

Yes, that's a 10 hour loop of the music that I linked to above.  Yes, I know that rather than a chime or ding sound like several of the other sounds on this list this is straight up music; but for me this was a new thing.  I was so used to a click, a bleep, a bloop, or some other sound effect that let me know the game I was playing was paused.  Not so with Battletoads.  You hit start on the controller and instantly cue the boom box and scratches and clap effects.  There was no wonderig or worrying that you might not have hit the pause button.  So long as the "hip beats" were flowing, you knew that your game was safely stopped until you came back to it so you could lose as quickly as possible at your own convenience.

#2: Super Mario Bros.

"Pause Sound"

Too many times, my runs on the later levels of the original Super Mario Bros. would look like this:

This probably won't end well...

Confession time.  I would leave my Nintendo on overnight at times.  I hated getting all the way to World 8-4 and then have to call it a night.  I would sometimes hide the little red power button with a piece of paper or something so my folks wouldn't' see that I had left the Nintendo on.  After all, getting all the way to Bowser--the real Bowser--was ridiculously hard.  What am I saying "was" for?  It's still ridiculously hard getting to the real Bowser!  

Not only was I constantly pausing the original Super Mario Bros. for bathroom breaks, meal breaks, and homework breaks; I was pausing it for, "Holy cow, I need to beat this game but am too tired to finish this tonight and need to come back to it tomorrow" breaks.  

But then there were those other times I paused the game...

Those times of denial.

I don't know if there's a way to flood your whole body more quickly with unfiltered rage-quit feelings than missing a platform jump or slamming into a fire rope in Super Mario Bros.  Often times I would pause the game, searching the screen to see where I went wrong,  or what cheap thing had killed me.  Other times I would pause it just to see if Mario didn't really just die.  I was in utter denial of the fact that I had just lost a life.  Somehow pausing the game was my one last desperate act of hope, hope that I hadn't just screwed up and would now need to start all the way back at World 8-1.

No such luck ever happened.

#1:  The Konami Pause

THE pause sound

You know the sound.  You've heard it before.  In everything from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Blades of Steel and seemingly countless others.  This was one of the first sounds that I ever recognized as having been used in multiple games.  I remember listening for it when I was a kid and feeling a bit of goofy delight in knowing that I had heard the same sound in not just one other game, but in multiple games spanning totally different genres.  Even as a kid I recognized it as a hallmark of quality.  As if simply by virtue of the fact that team at Konami were using familiar sounds they had a mythical leg up on the competition.  It didn't make a lick of sense back then and it doesn't now.  Why should a recycled sound show anything other than a company that was too cheap to make something new for each game?

Because for me it was like the Nintendo Seal of Quality.  I took it as branding that knew it kicked all sorts of butt. Like saying, "Yeah, we put that sound in there because we knew you'd want to hear it!  That's right!  We're Konami!  We're kick butt!  We made Contra!  That sound is our little love letter to you.  Like it?  Just hit start and you can relive the magic!"  Back in 80's Konami was a game-making juggernaut that knew how to churn out beloved hits that would stand the test of time.  Not only was the gameplay tight, the controls intuitive, and music great, but Konami did a great job using old assets in a way that didn't feel forced, but rather welcoming. 

Man I miss old school Konami.

Friday Night Rentals: Adventure Island

Skateboards and Jungles?  Sure!

I loved renting games that were just basic platformers.  Sure they all seemed the same after a while, and some were better than others, but there was something satisfying about being able to pop in a game and know that all I have to do is keep going right to win.  When I rented this for the weekend, my mom and I enjoyed playing Adventure Island in turns.  One of us would beat a level then hand it off, or sometimes we'd hand off after losing a life or felt unable to do the level.  It was great fun trying to get as far as we could in the game even though we never beat the game.  I can't tell you how many times we just missed an egg that was barely off screen and inaccessible, or how we ran out of health right before the goal.  It was just a pleasant little game all around and a solid go-to for a fun Friday night rental.  However...even back then though the game seemed fun, it was not quite as fun as that other game... you know the one....

Yeah, that's him officer. He's the one who beat the competition.

Mario was always the side scrolling platformer that all the other kids on the proverbial video game block had wanted to be.  He could run and jump and grow super huge and rescue princesses--provided they weren't in another castle.  I still give Hudson Soft points for trying though, they were one of the better ones.  Hudson Soft's Adventure Island, a port of the Sega arcade game Wonder Boy, seemed like one of those blatant attempts to copy the formula that made Super Mario Bros such a huge success.  I must have rented Adventure Island half a dozen times before finally buying it used years after the Super Nintendo had come on to the market.  It was like seeing an old friend again.   Did it still hold that pleasantness?  Did I still want to find hidden eggs and ride a skateboard across an island?

Well...let's break it down, shall we?

Music and Sound 

Endless music loops of the same stuff. Hooray for Mario clones.

"Lookie!  We even knocked off the way the music fits in the game tonally," probably pops up in the owners manual somewhere if I had to guess. Okay, let me say I do enjoy the music from Adventure Island.  It's pleasant and upbeat during the island segments and gets dark and ominous in the caves leading up to the boss fight.  And boy howdy does it make it ever apparent that they are knocking off Super Mario Bros.  Let's face it though, Nintendo got it right and did it right with Mario--why not mimic success?  The music works well enough, and it is memorable, its just nothing that will stick with you for a long period of time unless you put it on your iPod or similar listening device.  Let me say though, for me the music gets old fast in a way the Super Mario theme never did.

In so far as sounds go, they aren't really anything you'll write home about.  I like Hudson Soft well enough and all, just there isn't much to be said here.  The sounds work for what they are.  I think that it's a shame they are merely functional rather than showing a bit of creativity.  It would have been nice if the fire bolas you toss had a different sound than the basic ax or if the enemies would have had some sounds beyond the noise they make when you hit them.  

Graphics and Style

Attack the villainous...snail?

You are a cartoon man running along a cartoon landscape chucking cartoon axes and fire bolas at giant snails, bats, birds, pigs (yes, pigs) and an Evil Witch Doctor with interchangeable heads!  Just another day at the office really...

In all seriousness though, the graphics are cutesy and pleasant, the monsters aren't really scary in any sense of the word (unless you have a crippling fear of escargot), and even the Evil Witch Doctor looks a bit silly.  There isn't much in the way of sprite animation aside from the goofy expressions Master Higgins makes when jumping or tripping over something.  It was fine back in the day, I didn't really notice that the graphics weren't on par with other games at the time.  But now that I've got a library of games to pull from that I didn't have as a kid the game really seems outclassed by other games.

Gameplay

Just keep running.

That's what you have to tell yourself, and that's what I did tell myself back when I was renting this game every now and then from the video store.  No stopping to stomp the Goombas--I mean snails-- in this Mario clone, just keep moving or poor Master Higgins dies!  Why did he keep dying?  Because apparently he was hypoglycemic or diabetic or something!  Whatever the case was, you have to keep feeding the poor leaf wearing-wearing sap or he'll kick the bucket.  Thankfully each game area has fruit just about everywhere, but you'll find yourself constantly trying to balance racing towards the end of the stage while grabbing said fruit with making sure you don't rush headlong into an enemy and die.  Not that the game lacks on fun, but it certainly has its fair share of frustrations.  I can't tell you how many times I would grab a skateboard power up only to lose it a second later by slamming into a gigantic snail or trip over a rock, then face-plant-dying into a snail.  You pick up an ax or fire bola thing that you can chuck at enemies as you go, but really the enemies are bland and act more like obstacles than actual things trying to kill you. Not that this poses a problem or makes the game less challenging, just that it makes them feel generic--like blobs or blocks could have taken their place and you wouldn't have noticed.

Final Thoughts

Yeah, I know it was just a Nintendo game, but there were other games out there that seemed to have a little more effort put into them and for a game that was pretty much knocking off the Super Mario Bros. formula, this one, coming back to it years later, feels like it did the bear minimum in terms of creative difference from Mario.  You can't go back from where you came, you have a repeating end boss with the same dark music over and over, and you are even saving what amounts to a princess.  So basically it feels like a rip off.  Funny thing is though...

It was still kinda fun.  The Nintendo has a library of games second to none with most being fairly awesome even though they are only 8 bit.  Some games tried harder than others to mimic the formula of other, more successful games and ended up giving us what amounts to shovelware years later.  However, even as copycat-ish as Adventure Island is, the controls are solid, the music enjoyable, and the game just a pleasant little experience all around.  Did it do anything new?  Not really.  But what it did do it did well.  There were several sequels to Adventure Island and it even hopped platforms.  Hudson Soft was snatched up by Konami several years ago, and since they are currently in the process of mismanaging their own brand, they haven't had time go and screw up the Hudson Soft label, so it's doubtful we'll see another sequel anytime soon, which is a shame.

If you don't already own this gem then think about making some space in your collection for Master Higgins.