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7grandmel · 27 days

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Todays rips: 31/03/2024

Your Best Nightmario and Bowser's Finale

Season 5 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume C

Ripped by Blookerstein

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Season 5 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume C

Ripped by Blookerstein, Sarvéproductions

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Requested by themessengervevo! (@themessengervevo)

You KNEW this day was coming. Surely, right? Its March 31st, a landmark day in gaming history. The day that Super Mario died. The day we lost him to time forever. And the day that spawned perhaps the greatest April Fools event on all of SiIvaGunner. For me, its no contest - Your Best Nightmario and Bowser's Finale, and the entire event they were part of, were the absolute highlight of Season 5.

The April Fools events held prior on the channel since their very beginnings with Grand Dad Metropolis had all been presented as complete surprises. That is perhaps a given - it is in the nature of a prank to be surprising - but it's also where the Season 5 event differs most even today, in that its theme was all but known to us well beforehand. Announced on September 3rd of 2020 as part of a bizarre marketing tactic to drive up demand, Nintendo had let us known that their newfangled Mario celebration releases in Super Mario 3D All-Stars and Super Mario Bros. 35, would both be delisted from sale after March 31st. Super Mario Bros. 35 stung in its own right - it is effectively lost media now as a digital-only, online-only game, but Super Mario 3D All-Stars contained three of Nintendo's most celebrated games, games that had no reason to stop being sold just for a cheap trick. Everyone rightfully denoted how scummy of a tactic this was to drive up sales, but more than that: the imagery of Nintendo celebrating Mario's birthday by killing his games - and by proxy, killing Mario himself - was a joke that online spaces just ran absolutely rampant with. And can you blame them? That IS funny as shit, and reframes Nintendo's slimy marketing into something that makes them look far worse. Because of the joke's sheer prevalence, I had the same thought as many others in the early days of 2021 - there was *no way* that the SiIvaGunner team were blind to the potential this gag had, and how well it lined up with their previous explosive festivities just a day after. By March 29th, they even teased the event's start with three daily rips of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, a game all about impending doom affecting the world in just three days, with each rip featuring the melody of one of the three 3D Mario games in the collection.

And sure enough, the day came. With March 31st, we saw a whole day of nothing but Mario rips and Mario-related jokes in other rips - a last hurrah for his life - all ending with Super 3D All-Stars Music S64 Game Over. Just like that, he was gone - faded from the video, faded from view. Yet few of us could've predicted just how dire things would get.

In SiIvaGunner lore, the term "Figment" refers to the personification a meme or joke on the channel takes, its characterized state - think Mr. Rental in Mr. Rental [B Side] ~ Out of Options or Inspector Gadget in Become as Gadget and throughout his two takeovers. When a figment based on a real human dies, it can easily be reborn - the human itself lives on in the real world, after all, and can recreate the essence of its Figment in a variety of ways. But when a purely fictional Figment dies...its erased from all history. As if it had never existed to begin with, all traces of it are wiped from memory, wiped from the very state of having ever existed. And under Nintendo's very own Gulliotine, this was the fate Super Mario himself succumbed to. As a result every single Super Mario-series rip uploaded in the channel's five-year run, be they Kart, Sports, Paper or just outright Super, was set to private on the SiIvaGunner channel. And as April 1st of 2021 went on, it seemed to be harder and harder to remember the name of that mustachioed man. Had someone like that...ever existed?

I'm certain a lot of what I'm writing here is familiar ground to many of you reading, but I really want to convey just how incredibly well-done this atmosphere was. Throughout April 1st, fifty-five rips were uploaded, many of which featuring games that seemed just...the slighest bit off. The opening to the classic Philips CD-i game "Hotel", where a lone Luigi talks to himself; The underwater music featured in the SNES Launch title "Super World" with a bizarrely-lopsided logo, and most prominently - games like Super M̸̌̊a̴͛̿█̸͌̑i̵̛͊█̷̾̓ 64, Super M̸̌̊a̴͛̿█̸͌̑i̵̛͊█̷̾̓ Sunshine and Super █̴̧̀a̵̤̐r̷̙̋█̶̰̆o̶͚̚ Galaxy, three games that were bound by a strange malfunction in their presentation, as if they're collectively...held back by something. Or someone.

Your Best Nightmario stood out as the centerpiece of it all, with a title yet more bizarrely mangled than the rest - Super 👉█̸͌̑█̷̾̓😁̶̆͠☼̷̇̃👈̸̂͑█̷̾̓█̾̓ 64. Two fingers, pointing toward a desperate smile. It's-a-me. The rip serves as an incredible multi-stage arrangement of Your Worst Nightmare from Undertale, the boss music for Flowey the Flower. Its already incredibly befitting on the surface level - Undertale is at once one of SiIva's most prominently-ripped games, and a game very much about the state of living game characters have, the idea of how characters in games can affect you in a way that makes them worth remembering for all time. And though the rip is initially in line with the instrumentation of the original Ultimate Koopa theme, it uses the segmented style-shifting sections of Your Worst Nightmare to arrange music from other Nintendo platforming games - the ones primarily bound by featuring characters like Luigi, Peach and Bowser within them, but ones where I can't really place my finger on who their protagonist is. As a result of all these styles and the fervent, desperate, downright nightmarish pace of the music, paired with the full-on galactic-scale orchestral sections near the rips end, it truly feels like a hopeless struggle, a plea from an unknown hero to stay alive, to not be forgotten, to not be lost to the sands of time.

The sheer atmosphere conveyed throughout the entire event was primarily carried through these rips, of course, but it cannot be understated just how much of a part the comments section played in it all. There was no confusion - the buildup had been done so well, the gag established so clearly, that EVERYONE was on board with the day's theming in the comments, and "playing along" with the story's theme. Everyone reminisced and had fond memories of all these games - New Super Bros., Luigi: Superstar Saga, Super 64 DS, and more - yet we were all collectively wondering why things felt so different from before. It was the most fun collective gaslighting I've ever been part of.

As the day came to an end, Mario's fate seemed to be set - the entirety of April 2nd was silent, except for one rip that confirmed that even our beloved Gangsta Mario (see Caramariodansen) was lost. Yet on April 3rd, we were all finally met with Bowser's Finale, a direct followup to Your Best Nightmario by its very same ripper. Blookerstein, the legend behind The expanse of meme in past was split, A fiendish trap has now been set; Behind a tree the villains sit, Terror of sport, the Robbie's Net., this time aided by Sarvéproductions of Goodbye To Love fame, created the absolute perfect way to round out the event - a return to the desperate battle that had once seemed lost, now with the music of Finale instead of Your Worst Nightmare to indicate the turning of the tides - that this legend, nay, SUPER MARIO, was not going to give up. This figment did not deserve to leave us - and Bowser's Finale was his last stand. The excitement in the air, in the comments section, was palpable.

Finale is already an incredible theme, and one that some of us even have some emotional attachment to in the context of SiIva - remember Aphex all the way back in Season 1? Bowser's Finale leverages those feelings, and the theming set up throughout the event as a whole, to incredible effect, with the same structure of going through the styles of various Mario music to rising dramatic effect. Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Galaxy - the first two using songs like Slider and A Secret Course that are beloved by so many SiIvaGunner viewers, the third hitting a emotional gutpunch in its orchestral instrumentation, and all three bound together as the games that started this whole thing, the games part of the 3D All-Stars collection. It is with no exaggeration a pitch-perfect rendition of this idea, better than anything I could've ever anticipated before the event began - once again only elevated through the sheer sense of community the entire comments section held through it all, cheering Mario on, collectively remembering his existence - fighting to bring this lost figment back to reality.

Y'know, I've been critical of Season 5 in the past - it is likely still the Season of the channel I was "least" invested in taken on the whole. That is in large part due to its lack of ties to the channel's ongoing lore, as it was focused primarily on self-contained events just like this one. But GOD, those events. I still see people online today who are less in touch with what SiIvaGunner does, who cite this event - "The Disappearance of Super Mario", as some call it - as the absolute peak of SiIvaGunner's output past the Season 1 finale. I wouldn't necessarily agree - but the event was undoubtedly unforgettable, at once an incredible execution of a long-anticipated bit, surprisingly emotionally gripping, whilst also being subtly tied to the very canon and theming of the SiIvaGunner channel itself. I chose to highlight Your Best Nightmario and Bowser's Finale in particular today, but I emplore you to go watch the entire event yourself through the fanmade YouTube playlists - if nothing else to see just how committed to the bit everyone involved truly was.

But don't forget: There's more to this tale yet to be retold.

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moralem · 10 months

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Slay the Spire - Shop Fusion Collab

Card Art i made for the Barbarian's shop, trying to mimic the varied styles within them was a fun challenge.

I also made the Relics, Consumables, the Barbarian Animation (art by Guardiavoir) and his pointing arm

Big thanks to Blookerstein for modding everything in.

#siivagunner #slay the spire #castle crashers

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wokeupwiththissong · 2 months

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Shop Fusion Collab - SiIvagunner (toonlink, berg8793, PsychLantern, Father Sheep, Blookerstein, athenamite, Sarvéproductions, literallyn01imp0rtant, Ahmaykmewsik, xIncisions, Heboyi, Netyasha Roozi, MtH, The Green Spy, eg_9371, Grambam36, Iollo, Mitchell, Moola Mixtape, ThisGreenDingo, KoltJolt, Nozobot, BluLuigi7, Madinstance, RHMan)

#music #daily #not tagging everyone. no.#siivagunner #Youtube #not on spotify #<- new tag! tho i'm going back and adding it to everything

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7grandmel · 3 months

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Todays rip: 01/02/2024

Outertale

Season 6 Featured on: Transmission Archive ~ The SiIvaGunner All-Star Nuclear Winter Festival Collection

Ripped by Blookerstein

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Unfortunately, I don't really have all too much time to write this post - but hey, that's in the spirit of the game its focused on, isn't it?

I'm a bit sad to say that I sort of missed the hype train on Outer Wilds, one of the most beloved indie games of the current day. I can't quite put my finger on why it didn't click for me, nor do I really care to find out - because that really isn't what this post, or what Outertale, is about. Because Outertale encapsulates so much genuine feeling to it, so much pure, unfiltered love, that it's enough to break someone who doesn't even have much attachment to Outer Wilds itself in two.

You could of course say that that's due to the other half of the rip - the Undertale leitmotif from the game of the same name, which is here arranged in that plucky, acoustic sound of the Outer Wilds' explorer tunes. That's certainly possible - I may not be Undertale's strongest soldier, but in no small part due thanks to SiIvaGunner itself, its music has wound up becoming something very nostalgic for me, and does evoke a lot of emotion no matter the context.

But no, what I believe makes Outertale work so well for me, and to thousands of others, is that sense of...community, it evokes. There are a lot of popular video games out there, and a lot of popular indie-made ones: Shovel Knight, Super Meat Boy, Cave Story, The Binding of Isaac, and of course Hollow Knight, a game Blookerstein ripped to excellent ability with The expanse of meme in past was split, A fiendish trap has now been set; Behind a tree the villains sit, Terror of sport, the Robbie's Net. Yet what I think binds Undertale and Outer Wilds together in my mind, is just how emotionally honest, open, and vulnerable they are, and how those feelings reflect back into its playerbase. In my mind, they're two of the only games I can think of that are enjoyed the world over with shockingly wide reach, yet manage to tell stories that feel ever-so-personal, like an emotional journey made just for you.

Blookerstein employs so many fun little quirks in the arranging here to make fun of all the various music-players to be found in Outer Wilds' vast galaxy, be it the whistling lead melody, the soothing banjo backing, the otherwise uncanny sound of the theremin carrying the song's scaled-back midpoint, before rejoining with the rest of the band, a rattling tambourine keeping pace all throughout, as harmonica plays the song out.

It's the purest essence of a campfire song, yet taken out from its original context within Outer Wilds...it feels as if the campers in question are us, the viewers, pouring our hearts out with each other as company. Uploaded on Christmas Eve in the middle of the Nuclear Winter Festival, an event already dealing with themes of loss, regret, and moving on to a brighter tomorrow, Outertale couldn't have come at a better time, and the emotional attachment I lacked from Outer Wilds has now been made up for a thousandfold with emotional attachment to the end of Season 6.

Though the SiIvaGunner AI may have bid us farewell, and its world left to an uncertain fate, the times we in the SiIva community had across those years are never going to be forgotten. With one world ended and a new one about to begin, we still remain.

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7grandmel · 3 months

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Todays rip: 05/02/2024

Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier

Season 5 Featured on: Rips From Around The Way 7 (Hidden Track)

Ripped by DonnieTheGuy Visuals by moralem, Blookerstein, PsychLantern, Myeauxyoozi

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Requested by crickep! (Discord)

Yknow, for as much as I like to go on and on about Season 2 being my favorite period of the channel's life - it may honestly just be due to my own personal investment being at its highest at that point. Its a herculean, damn near impossible task nowadays to actually try and critically evaluate a season of SiIvaGunner in retrospect, and most of what I go off of obviously just comes from my own experiences and memories. It goes to reason, then, that Season 5 is my least favorite season of the channel not necessarily due to any fault of its own, but just due to my own personal investment in the channel being rather low at the time. I say that, because with every rip I cover from the Season - now including Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier - I'm baffled as to why I'd ever consider the season anything less than peak.

When I have that discussion with other people (or just with the voices in my head), the reasons tend to primarily boil down to a lack of lore developments made during the year. Yet as I talked about way back in Knowledge of the Depths, even that feels like doing the Season a disservice, given just how enjoyable and, in a way, lore-crucial the audio dramas made during Season 4 Episode 2 and Season 5 wound up becoming. Which again makes me point toward my own lack of attentiveness toward the Season as the one to blame: because how else could I have missed out on how genuinely engaging and interesting the lore regarding Lady, Yankin', Masked Wolf and Astronaut in the Ocean was? And as the cherry on top - how could I have missed just how perfect of an ending to it all Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier wound up being?

I've dissected and talked about Masked Wolf before in Aquarium in the Ocean and Snow halocean, as the figment who best fits the role of a true anti-hero within SiIvaGunner - an agent of chaos whose rips only occasionally bother to actually sound good, yet one we wound up loving despite (or because of!) it all. Yet as Season 5 began to truly ramp up, his role seemed to change from agent of chaos to necessary evil - as the only remaining figment capable of stopping the reign of hell that Lady's "Yankover" was subjecting us all to. No doubt SiIva has had its contentious, long-lasting takeovers before (Harlem Shakeover and Totally Shaaking Out Right Now, anyone?), yet nothing truly compared to the neverending downpour of hellfire cast upon us by one particularly crass rapper singing about her genitalia. And for once, it seemed as if the SiIvaGunner team agreed - Lady became, for all intents and purposes, the actual villain of Season 5, with her figment form reimagined as a full-on demon in need of imprisonment. And small nuggets of lore were being handed out week by week (nuggets that I, again, unfortunately glazed over back in the day), Lady's defeat wound up happening at the hands of HoBART, everyone's favorite mixer from the King for Another Day Tournament. Yet to me, Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier still sits at the most pure, befitting end to her reign - a battle between the Season's fallen angel and its lawless demon, set to the tune of a game whose entire hype cycle practically enveloped Season 5 in its entirety.

Back in Satinpanties Symphony, I mused over how Friday Night Funkin became a mainstay feature on SiIvaGunner almost overnight, and how it feels as if the two projects share a lot of DNA that make them a perfect fit for one another, in how they handle the idea of legacy. What better game, then, could there be to depict the encounter between these two legends that defined the season, than with the game that defined the year - coincidentally, one entirely focused on duels between rappers. That's not to imply that Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier isn't an absolute banger on its own - the melodic core of Ugh, paired with the implementation of both Astronaut in the Ocean and Yankin's backings into the back-and-fourth, creates a fantastic re-imagining of the song that's both endlessly relistenable and incredibly charming with the custom visuals. Yet its the same point I made in Take You To The Desert - with all that context in mind of all that led up to this battle, the knowledge of how much the community suffered under the thumb of both rappers yet came to understand one for his harmless-if-strange tendencies yet came to loathe the other...Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier becomes something genuinely legendary. Paired with so many small flourishes added on top, such as the original track's "Ugh" sample being replaced with Masked Wolf's opening "Astro", the reference to Lady's attempted Thanksgiving resurrection ritual in Twerkey (seriously), down to Lady being positioned as the player character to truly sell home how dominant she was during her reign...It feels like yet another one of those, for lack of another word, Perfect, rips.

The cherry on top of it all though is, of course, the ending. Despite the seemingly even back-and-forth in the battle, Lady is suddenly dragged back into the pits of hell, as Masked Wolf leaves her with his parting words.

I believe in G-O-D, don't believe in T-H-O-T.

#todays siivagunner #season 5 #siivagunner #siiva #DonnieTheGuy #rip visuals #moralem #Blookerstein #PsychLantern #Myeauxyoozi #Youtube #astronaut in the ocean #Masked Wolf #yankin #friday night funkin #fnf #fnf mod #friday night funkin music #fnf music

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7grandmel · 9 months

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Todays rips: 06/08/2023

INDUSTRY KNIGHT and INDUSTRY KNIGHT (Beta Mix)

Season 7 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume Ruby

Ripped by BobTheTacocat

Season 7 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume Ruby One Fateful Knight (Beta Mix) - Shovel Knight

Ripped by Blookerstein

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Yeah, doing something a bit different for today - a double feature of two rips. The reason is pretty simple - INDUSTRY KNIGHT didn't feature any visuals, wheras INDUSTRY KNIGHT (Beta Mix) adds visual and slight audio edits to build further on the joke. You can't have one without the other, so I decided to just feature both. Also worth noting - the "Secret SiIva" series of albums aren't official SiIvaGunner album releases, as its an event organized between the team's internal staff rather than a publicized part of the channel.

Anyway - April Fools 2023 was, as I've covered before, an event entirely based around adding to, referencing or remixing previously made rips, as a celebration of the channel's entire history. This celebration included rips already made earlier in the season, and such was the case with INDUSTRY KNIGHT - a rip covering the entirety of Lil Nas X's Industry Baby in the style of Shovel Knight. Beyond being an excellent mashup and melodyswap in its own right, this is one of those rips that goes above and beyond to cover the ENTIRE journey of Shovel Knight, much like Story of Undertale did for Undertale. The excellent use of sound effects tying the different Shovel Knight level themes together ties it all together, and makes it a wonderfully varied listen. That, however, is not where the story ends.

INDUSTRY KNIGHT (Beta Mix) takes BobTheTacocat's already above-and-beyond arrangement, and leads the joke to its natural conclusion. See, Industry Baby was, and to some degree still is, often used in "fandom Slander" videos - those types of shitpost compilations that make fun of fanbases of various vaguely-related topics in a lighthearted way to various reaction gifs? What we have here is exactly one of those - a Slander video on Indie Gaming as a whole, set to an indie-game rendition of a song heavily associated with the meme. The end result is, as commenters have pointed out, an absolute loveletter to indie games as a whole, and the ridiculous parts of the games we love. No game is belittled, no fanbase is looked down upon - its nothing but pure, good fun set to an amazing tune.

As pointed out to me by a commenter, on top of everything, INDUSTRY KNIGHT (Beta Mix) even subtly remixes the rip its building upon to sound more like the slander videos its paying tribute to!! My hat goes off to Blookerstein in putting these silly shitpost GIFs all together - with the sheer variety of games on display, I was convinced this would've been a collaborative effort, yet everything in these two rips appears to be by just these two people!

Good shit, you two! Good, good shit.

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7grandmel · 9 months

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Todays rip: 18/07/2023

The expanse of meme in past was split, A fiendish trap has now been set; Behind a tree the villains sit, Terror of sport, the Robbie's Net.

Season 5 Featured on: The SiIvaGunner Spooktacular Halloween Horror Special: Curse of the Fallen Angel

Ripped by Blookerstein

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In deciding what would be todays post, I had to make a REALLY hard choice between this rip and the equally as excellent When the Impnosktor is Void, both by the same ripper made under the same event. They're both absolute titans of Season 5 and rips that never leave my mind, but I have to play toward my We Are Number One bias just this once.

You may recall (or have just seen, thanks to the reposts) that I covered a We Are Number One post very early on into this blog's life, throwing bunches of praise onto Nape Mango's ability to wield it in Chillin' Like a Villain. While I did touch on just how cool its been for the YTPMV community to have the entire WANO stems and source files available for use, what I wish I'd sold home even more is what that has LED to: A bunch of WANO arrangements with moods and theming wholly different from the original's ska silliness. That's of course notable in Chillin' Like a Villain itself having a far happier, more holiday-cheerful vibe to it due to its original song's instrumentation, and on the complete opposite end of that you find...todays rip, that I won't be spelling out the name of for obvious reasons. This time, shit's SINISTER.

Through the mixing of WANO's instrumentals and the source track's organ backing, this insane boss theme manages to retain almost every aspect of its original oppressive mood despite being sung by Robbie Rotten from LazyTown. Its an absolute treat to the ears to try and decipher what parts of the original WANO are being used where in the song, so densely layered together specifically to create that same dark atmosphere. I think my favorite part althesame is the vocals - in a way, the goofiness of Robbie's original performance starts to fade out of focus thanks to this aforementioned atmosphere, leaving nothing but the overacted villain role performing with full sincerity. Near the middle of the song there's some really clever and well thought out spacing and added reverb to the vocals to specifically make them sync up with the hits of the original song, and it just hits so perfectly. Its not a mere mashup or an automated conversion, but filled with tons of these small little tweaks and layers of depth to ensure the song's full potential is realized.

I remember both this rip and its other potential candidate for the day having a sort of reverance upon being uploaded, due specifically to the sparceness of Hollow Knight rips on the channel before them. The SiIva team have a tendancy of responding to fan requests in a very tounge-and-cheek way, which they'd done previously in the season with Hollow Knight as well, but on this day - the Grimm Trouppe's 4th Anniversary, in the midst of the season's Halloween event - everyone was celebrating with genuine quality. Blookerstein is one hell of a guy to committing to this anniversary as hard as he did, and trust me, he WILL show up again in the future.

#todays siivagunner #season 5 #siivagunner #siiva #Blookerstein #hollow knight #grimm #grimm troupe #indie games #christopher larkin #team cherry #Youtube #Bandcamp #we are number one #wano #lazytown

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