Feeling chipper?

Well, at least 1UP still has the venerable Jeremy Parish whose Retro Gaming Blog is buried somewhere on that site. If (like me) you grew up with an NES, then his three-part series of posts on Hidenori Maezawa will be of interest to you. Maezawa worked at Konami in the 8-bit days and composed the excellent Castlevania III soundtrack. Check out this video on the differences between the American and Japanese soundtrack:

To hear the reasons why these games sounded so different, read the accompanying blog. I don't know about you, but it makes me want to compose some chip tunes.

Right now I am a little mad that there are two good games coming out in February that I want. I have to decide between getting Star Ocean: The Last Hope or Street Fighter IV for my birthday (with Chrono Trigger being a shoe-in). Space it out a little, please! Decisions like these are tough. Hopefully I can somehow manage both...

I did buy Crayon Physics Deluxe for the iPhone/iPod touch this morning (there has got to be a more concise way to say that). It features some nice, soothing music and some neat additions that have been made since the demo from a while ago. It is a bit choppy though. Some of my old tricks from the PC version don't work so well and now it seems a little more linear, but it's still very interesting. For $5, it's nice.