8GR8 #04: Seiken Densetsu 3 (Supersized Edition!)

Time for another installment of 8GR8, the feature that takes eight awesome pieces of video game music that tie around a certain theme and put them together in list form. This time, we're looking exclusively at one game: Seiken Densetsu 3, the excellent sequel to Secret of Mana that never got released (officially, anyway) outside Japan.

Normally, in 8GR8, we look at a wide array of different games. But sometimes, it's fun and also timely to narrow the focus. Not only are we examining a single game today, but we're also looking at more songs from it—twelve, to be exact, rather than the usual eight. The game on the docket is Seiken Densetsu 3, an adventure in all ways superior not only to its predecessor, Secret of Mana, but to many (if not all) of the games in the series that came after it as well. Seiken Densetsu 3 claims the honor of being my favorite JRPG of all time, and the 20th anniversary of its release falls on September 30, and so there's no better time to take a look at its excellent soundtrack, composed entirely, like Secret of Mana, by Hiroki Kikuta.


1. "Little Sweet Café"

Kicking off with one of the town themes, probably the most relaxed one. There's a moment in games of this scope where you realize you're inhabiting a quaint little pocket of peace before some universe-bending stuff goes down, and it's tempting to want to stay in that pocket. And technically, you can—I mean, it's not like there's ever a time limit in these games, despite the pressing issues at hand. Sometimes, it even prevents me from finishing games. You could probably pipe this into a Starbucks and no one would bat an eyelash. Actually, how about you go save the universe? I'll just sit here nursing this venti caramel frappuccino.


2. "Nuclear Fusion"

I'll admit that Seiken Densetsu 3's oddball sound design is an acquired taste. The drums resemble nothing so much as a Street Fighter punch connecting with an opponent's jaw, and intense melee combat often sounds like jelly monsters having a slapfight. But if you can get past the former, you'll find it gives a huge adrenaline boost to many of the soundtrack's drum-heavy songs. This is one track I think benefits greatly from it, and it contains a callback to "Meridian Dance" from Secret of Mana to boot.


3. "Splash Hop"

Following the "bigger is better" credo, Seiken Densetsu 3 features not one travel buddy animal, but two. Flammie the white dragon shows up later in the game, but before he arrives, you get Booskaboo, a turtle in a snorkel summoned at certain shores by the Pihyara Flute. Booskaboo is a laid-back kind of guy, and his theme, a loping reggae tune, reflects that well. Back in the 90s, you couldn't swing a cat by the tail without hitting a VGM track with steel drums in it, but I love the bouncy breakdown featuring them here, as well as the effusive followup phrase that ends the loop. Few tracks in the game are as whistle-able as this one.


4. "Harvest November"

"Sultry" isn't generally a word that comes to mind when considering desert themes, except when playing this (and possibly a Shantae game). The heat of Navarre isn't of the oppressive variety. As deserts go, it's actually a pretty relaxing, pleasant, and fertile place. (The game saves its scary licks for the Valley of Flames, nestled deep within the desert.)


5. "Different Road"

The theme that plays while traveling the Path to the Heavens, a series of winding caves and rock bridges that culminates in both the meeting of Flammie and a view that by Super Nintendo standards is absolutely breathtaking. I like that Kikuta managed to bake such a sense of urgency into an otherwise steady-tempo'd track; it comes early in the adventure, but there are still things to be done, a world to save, and no time to waste.


6. "High Tension Wire"

Seiken Densetsu 3 has a number of different boss themes, many of which correspond to a certain type of boss or circumstance. "High Tension Wire", my favorite song on the entire soundtrack, plays during bosses that fly, like the harpy-esque Tzenker and one of the god-beasts[1], Dangaard, a two-headed griffin, whom your party fights while aboard a soaring Flammie. It's not enough to just post the song; this one has to be witnessed in the proper context. The first time I entered that battle, it literally took my breath away for a few seconds.


7. "Faith Total Machine"

Another boss theme, this one playing during bosses that are ghosts, like Gorva on the ghost ship and god-beast Lightgazer. This one was a grower for me, as I originally preferred the Dolan-battle-exclusive "Black Soup", but over time the arrhythmic drums of the intro to "Faith Total Machine" plus its overall tempo have given this one the edge over it.


8. "Three of Darkside"

Most of Seiken Densetsu 3's soundtrack either gets your adrenaline pumping or massages your brain, but Kikuta can unleash the creep factor when he needs to as well. I love it in RPGs when characters enter the void, and the party in this game does so in spectacular fashion, getting sucked into the nether to fight with the eighth and final god-beast, Zable-Fahr—a frightening jester-demon of two heads (later three)—after your ragtag group finds the fabled Mana Stone of Darkness just prior to its destruction. This is a song that makes you feel really hopeless—like no matter how leveled-up you are, the thing you're up against is just too big, and you're not getting out of the Phantom Zone alive.


9. "Angel's Fear"

If you listen to this one for even just past the intro, you'll recognize it as the intro theme to Secret of Mana, and if you know the names of songs that appear in video games, you might have even guessed that before you heard note one. This is a much more melancholy arrangement, however, plucked out on only a piano and an acoustic guitar, both samples sounding totally amazing on that Super Famicom sound chip.


10. "The Sacrifice, Part III"

The final final boss theme of the game, which comes roaring in after the most perfect pregnant pause where you're not sure if you killed it or it's entering its final phase. (Spoiler: it's the latter.) The major key ensures that you flex your muscles and give that boss—whether it's the Dragon Emperor, the Masked Mage, or the Dark Lich[2]—all you've got, while the minor bridge reminds you how far you've come and reins you in, making sure you give the battle the gravity it deserves. If this song doesn't make you fall in love with those wacky punch-noise drums once and for all, nothing will.


11. "Farewell Song"

Songs like this are why I hate beating long games that allow me to get invested in the fates of the characters. The first time I beat this game, I legitimately got misty the first time I beat the game and the Mana Goddess reveals that Mana will be disappearing from the world, but exhorts the heroes to "remember me ... [and] make sure your children remember..." because Mana magic will return to the world in a thousand years. Some of my not playing many RPGs is because I don't have the time to invest in them or I didn't get into them at the height of their popularity, but if I'm being totally truthful, a substantial chunk of it is I don't like saying goodbye to them.


12. "Return to Forever"

Despite the title of the track, this is unfortunately not Chick Corea and his band of jazz fusion masters sitting in for the final track. Nevertheless, it still makes for an excellent end to an incredible quest. Watching Booskaboo and Flammie travel the world thinking, "Well, what are we gonna do now? I guess just hide out for a thousand years" ties up a loose end I didn't know I wanted tied. What I like about the video for this song is that it allows ample playtime for the loop that "ends" the song. Almost half the video's runtime is devoted to that loop, and nothing says "it's over, man, turn it off, go do something else" like four minutes of that. Though I could sit and listen to it for much longer.

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[1] Or "benevodons", if you prefer the official nomenclature.

[2] The game gives you a different final boss and penultimate dungeon depending on which of the six playable characters you choose as your main one.

8GR8 #03: I Am Woman, Hear Me Score

Welcome back to 8GR8, where we take eight video game songs that have something in common and we group them into a playlist. Despite the steps we've taken in our society to put women on equal footing with men, it's still very much a man's world. And few areas in the private sector are more inhospitable to women than the video game industry. GamerGate and its constituents have really made life grossly and unnecessarily difficult for the lady folk. So today, we're celebrating video game music composed by women.


1. Mario & Luigi Dream Team, "Victory in the Dream World"
Composer: Yoko Shimomura
Platform/Year: 3DS, 2013

Can't hardly have a list devoted to compositions by women without including the First Lady of VGM, now can we? Shimomura's golden touch has given us a lot of incredible soundtracks—Street Fighter II, Legend of Mana, and the Japan-only RPG Live-a-Live, to name just a few—but I thought I'd go with one of her more recent works for this one. Nintendo loosens up and gets delightfully weird when they put their flagship characters in RPGS, and I've personally always found the Mario & Luigi flavor more appealing than the Paper variety. I have to say I was a bit surprised by this game's difficulty; its bosses really start to show some fangs as one approaches the midgame. And there's a hard mode on top of that! The dream world parts of the game allow the soundtrack to get a little more wobbly, but this track blends a suspenseful edge with a spirited battle-readiness to great effect.


2. SimCity 2000, "Subway Song"
Composer: Sue Kasper
Platforms/Year: PC/Mac/Amiga, 1994

This game has come out on more platforms than you can count on both hands, but because I mostly played it in grade-school computer labs that were stocked with Macintosh Classics and PowerPCs, I've always largely considered SimCity 2000 to be kind of a Mac "thing". I think the track I used above approximates pretty closely how it sounded on a Mac of the time, but I can't say with much certainty. The sleekness and modernity of SimCity 2000's structures definitely adds to that Mac feeling; I would be lying if I said I still don't daydream from time to time about living in an arcology.


3. Snailiad: A Snaily Game, "Area 2 (Spiralis Silere)"
Composer: Crystal Jacobs
Platform/Year: Browser, 2011

Even though snails move at a glacial pace, this one probably managed to crawl across your radar without leaving any slime trails. It's a cute, enjoyable game, a compact Metroidvania that doesn't take very long to beat and fully explore. As Snaily, a snaily snail, you set out to figure out where all your townmates have disappeared off to. You get to crawl up walls and eat plants and fire projectiles and basically have a pleasant time. It's not going to set your world on fire like, say, Axiom Verge, but you'll have fun. You can play it here.


4. Donkey Kong Land III, "Mill Fever"
Composer: Eveline Fischer[1]
Platform/Year: Game Boy, 1997

In their day, the Donkey Kong Country games were widely considered astounding graphical achievements, but the aesthetic didn't translate so well to the Game Boy, where they mostly just looked like the toner cartridge exploded while they were making Xerox copies of the Super Nintendo graphics. Both versions of this song heavily tease "Can't Buy Me Love"[2], but on the SNES, the melody is muted somewhat by the jungle echo of the xylophone it's played on, whereas on the Game Boy, the piano sound leads the way with gusto, with a strong square-wave bass backing underneath, making it the more enjoyable variant.


5. Breath of Fire III, "Even the Sun's Happy"
Composers: Yoshino Aoki, Akari Kaida
Platform/Year: PlayStation, 1998

Two ladies for the price of one song! This track plays during a fishing minigame, but it sounds like the kind of thing you'd hear in a super-cartoony 40s-style Toontown type of place. Everything bouncing up and down to the beat, even the buildings, and you look up and there's Mr. Sun, smiling down at you, giving you two scoops of Raisin Bran! Yeah! Fiber! All right! It's a rare thing when this song won't lift my mood at least a little bit. That toe-tappin' honkin' horn that barges in after the breakdown is the epitome of a smile in music form. Wipe away that frown! Even the sun is happy!


6. Legendary Wings, "Stage 3"
Composers: Tamayo Kawamoto, Manami Matsumae
Platform/Year: NES, 1988

Another track with four X chromosomes behind it. The former is an erstwhile member of Taito house band Zuntata, and the latter is probably best known as the composer for the very first Mega Man game and, more recently, contributor to a few tracks on the Shovel Knight soundtrack. If you're a fan of that proto-Man sound (see what I did there?), you'll get it in spades here. Both the NES port of Legendary Wings and Mega Man 2 came out in 1988, but the sound of Legendary Wings hews more closely to the military-industrial vibe of the series originator's soundtrack.


7. Ys III: Wanderers from Ys, "Frozen in Time"
Composer: Mieko Ishikawa
Platform/Year: PC-Engine, 1991

Ishikawa was one of the more renowned members of the legendary Falcom Sound Team, second only to Yuzo Koshiro. I've unfortunately never gotten around to playing an Ys game, but the music I've heard from them has been uniformly excellent. There were several versions of this soundtrack, but you know what a sucker for CD-ROM and Redbook audio I am; this one far and away takes the cake. I especially enjoy the way more and more staccato keyboard stabs are gradually added to the main riff in the second "verse".


8. Plants vs. Zombies, "Graze the Roof"
Composer: Laura Shigihara
Platforms/Year: Various, 2009

Laura Shigihara has ascended to fame as an indie darling of sorts on the strength of a handful of Minecraft-related compositions and tracks like "Everything's Alright" and "Jump". These are good, but "VGM with lyrics" isn't a flavor country I'm terribly fond of visiting. In my estimation, this is her highest-profile work to date—this game was flippin' everywhere for a while on every console and platform imaginable, and even had a Game of the Year edition. The song starts off stellar, but it's when the DJ scratches and fat bass start in that the song kicks into another gear altogether.

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[1] Fischer was her surname at the time she composed this soundtrack; she is now Eveline Novakovic.

[2] "I don't care too much for Kiddy / Kiddy was the lamest Kong"

8GR8 #02: Training Day

In 8GR8, we examine eight excellent pieces of video game music that are loosely connected by a theme of some sort. In this installment, we look at music from train levels.


1. Clockwork Knight, "Train Boogie"
Composer: Hirofumi Murasaki
Platform/Year: Saturn, 1995

Why don't we start with a ripper right out of the gate? Clockwork Knight was one of the first platformers with enough 3D to be called 3D, a side-scroller that used sprites rendered from 3D models in a manner similar to the Donkey Kong Country games, but with fully polygonal levels and bosses. Even though the harmonica driving this piece is pure cheeseball MIDI, it'll get your heart racing regardless. As a bonus, it moves significantly faster and with greater urgency than the actual level it appears in, making it ideal for standalone listening.


2. Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind, "The Cattanooga Iron Horse"
Composer: Matt Benardo
Platform/Year: SNES, 1993

The first Bubsy game is one I will defend to my grave. (The others can get bent.) It received fairly positive reviews in its day, but its legacy was so badly tarnished by the legendary awfulness of Bubsy 3D that as a result critics these days tend to throw out the Bubsy with the bathwater. Despite the one-hit death mechanic and the headaches caused by its parallax scrolling, the first game encouraged exploration, provided plenty of extra lives in the early levels if you knew where to look, and had a vivid color palette with excellent animation. Bubsy also regularly takes it on the chin because he talked a lot, and most of that talking consisted of either puns or hack comedy. I think puns can be wonderfully illustrative of the flexibility of the English language, but apparently they're considered a "low" form of humor by lots of people. Well, those people can suck eggs.

This piece plays in the first half of each of the game's desert levels, which took place, naturally, on a train before seguing to a canyon full of far more perilous platforming. It's a short loop, but one with a great spirit of adventure.


3. Wild Guns, "Armored Train"
Composers: Hiroyuki Iwatsuki, Haruo Ohashi
Platform/Year: SNES, 1995

I don't know too much about this game. It was developed and published by Natsume, it's set in the Wild West but there are robots and giant mechs, and the cartridge is really rare and usually goes for around $200 on eBay (even more if it's complete in the box). I just kind of like the way this song pulses along, like being on the inside of the train and feeling all the bumps in the track along the way. For something so low-key, it's pretty awesome, especially when the warbling oOoOoOo synth starts in.


4. Sonic Triple Trouble, "Sunset Park Zone, Act 3"
Composer: Yayoi Wachi
Platform/Year: Game Gear, 1994

The Game Gear was never a great portable, but Sega occasionally threw it some decent exclusive bones. The title is a reference to its three antagonists: the usual Dr. Robotnik, Knuckles the Echidna (still in his crayon-breaking nuisance phase), and treasure hunter Nack the Weasel. Somehow, the intensity of this level is enhanced by the fact that its name doesn't appear at the beginning of it; the beginning of Act 3 is the end-of-level sign from Act 2, and it's straight into autoscrolling train action with dive-bombing foes before the usual showdown with Dr. Robotnik.


5. Railroad Tycoon 3, "No Time to Lose"
Composer: Jim Callahan
Platform/Year: PC, 2003

I've never played any Tycoon game, much less any of the Railroad Tycoons. Neither business management nor real-time strategy is my gaming forte. But that doesn't matter to the mostly indiscriminate VGM thrill-seeker in me. More sumptuous harmonica action here, this time much more realistic-sounding, hitting that sweet spot just beyond "really good" and just short of the soulless mega-talent of a John Popper type.


6. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, "Disco Train"
Composer: David Wise
Platform/Year: SNES, 1995

The DKC2 soundtrack is one of those that is uniformly excellent from front to back, but this is a piece from it that tends to slip through the cracks. It's driven by a bass line that has the wompiness of dubstep years before that was even a thing, and it packs frightening (and well-sampled!) screams and pensive, glittering moments in equal measure. It's probably my favorite song on the soundtrack, to be honest, handily beating out the likes of "Stickerbush Symphony" and haunting tracks like "Forest Interlude".


7. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters, "Metro Train ~ Karai's Theme"
Composers: Kazuhiko Uehara, Hideto Inoue, Harumi Ueko
Platform/Year: SNES, 1993

In retrospect, it's kind of amazing how many fighting games featured original casts of characters during the fighting game boom of the 90s—though, considering how not-great TMNT: Tournament Fighters was, maybe it was best that most developers didn't latch onto preexisting properties. At the time, Karai was an obscure enough character that many thought she had been created for the game, though she had appeared in the Mirage comics prior. Currently, she plays a prominent role in the Nickelodeon cartoon as the Shredder's adopted daughter. Karai was the final boss of both the SNES and Genesis ports, and had a reputation for extreme difficulty that persists today.


8. Batman Returns, "Red Triangle Circus"
Composers: Paul Gadbois, Brian Howarth
Platform/Year: Genesis, 1992

Batman Returns was one of the few games I owned during the brief period of my childhood where I owned a Genesis. I never got far enough to hear this song, because Batman Returns was spine-shatteringly hard, but thankfully, the Internet allows us to behold wonders we were never able to reach as children. Both the SNES and Genesis versions were brawlers, but the SNES version was more of a traditional beat-em-up, while the Genesis one was more of a standard platformer that happened to include punching. I prefer the Genesis one, however, since it used in-game action with no dialogue for its cutscenes more effectively than the SNES used its ugly compressed static images with walls of slow-scrolling text, and its music was much more appropriately Gothic and creepy.


Excluded for being too obvious: Final Fantasy VI, "Phantom Train"; Secret of Mana, "Did You See the Ocean?" (plays in the Grand Palace on the buried yet still operational train car overrun by zombies—Subway: Eat Flesh!); anything from Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time, "Bury My Shell at Wounded Knee"

8GR8 #01: 8 Great Title Screen Themes

In 8GR8, we'll examine eight excellent pieces of video game music, loosely related by some sort of theme. Given it's the first installment, it's only fitting that we check out some great title screen themes.


In video games, where music often serves a more functional and workmanlike purpose than in other media, the title theme has extra burdens to bear. It's the song out on the front lines—the one that has to somehow encapsulate the overall feeling of the entire experience the player is about to explore. You don't get a second chance to make a first impression, so that title screen really has to knock a player's socks off, or at least do its job better than "okay". Here are eight title screen intro themes that have gone way above and beyond the baseline job description and made it into my personal "classics" pantheon.


1. Puzzled - "Title Screen"
Composer: Thomas Mogenson
Platform/Year: Game Boy Color, 2001

This is one of my favorite random discoveries ever. What good is the Internet if you're just going to use it to listen to the same million-view songs over and over again? I've never even played this game. The song evokes memories of the Commodore 64 in the way that it's apparent that the bulk of the compositional effort was put into the title track. The whole soundtrack relies heavily on that trilling sound that appears far more often in chiptune compositions and so-called "de-mixes" than in actual video game songs and seems to most closely represent a Hammond organ, but it's deployed most tastefully on the title screen as a subtle call to the guitar's (or possibly saxophone's) funky responses.


2. Treasure Master - "Title Screen"
Composer: Tim Follin
Platform/Year: NES, 1991

You can hardly have a feature about title screen themes without mentioning Tim Follin. No matter what games he worked on, you could always count on Follin to manage previously inconceivable feats of wizardry with limited sound chips. Follin enjoyed working with the NES sound chip in particular, aptly citing its "character", and his soundtracks on the console rank among his best work. (Hardcore Gaming 101's user base ranked his title theme for Solstice third on their 2011 list of the 250 greatest Western video game songs.)

Distressingly often, one could count on a Tim Follin soundtrack to be the best part of an otherwise mediocre if not downright awful game. Treasure Master is no exception: a stoopid-hard platformer that instantly dated itself both with its ugly-as-sin box art and by yoking itself to a dumb MTV contest. This theme is actually somewhat of a remix of the Starsky and Hutch theme, but it's very well done: obvious enough to pick it out if you listen to them back-to-back, but subtle enough to stand as a tune on its own merits.


3. Castle Master - "Title Theme/In-Game Music"
Composer: Matt Furniss
Platform/Year: Amiga, 1990

It would be too easy to fill a list of great title screen themes with examples from the Commodore Amiga, so we'll just go with a representative that happens to be one of my personal favorites. The European computer's history is stacked with long, sprawling, and most importantly, amazing pieces of music. I found this one while playing a fanmade Lemmings level pack called PimoLems. It's been non-skip material in my VGM playlist ever since. This one's got atmosphere out the wazoo, and just when you think it's about to loop back around to the beginning, it tacks on another spooky segment.


4. Mega Man 3, "Title Screen"
Composer: Yusuaki Fujita
Platform/Year: NES, 1990

I could explore deep cuts all day long, but I should probably choose at least one song that makes this post remotely clickable. This was the first Mega Man game I ever played, and still my favorite, and a big part of it is the rush (no pun intended) I get from turning the game on and being greeted by that intro. Yes, Mega Man 3 is in some ways a highly flawed, rushed product, but it's got the coolest Robot Masters (yes, even Top Man) and the best title track of the series by a wide margin. Inafune can disown this game all he wants, and Capcom people can refer to Mega Man 9 as "the new Mega Man 3"; it'll still be my favorite. Does Mega Man 2 also have the bosses from 3 in it? I rest my case.

5. Spyro the Dragon, "Opening Theme"

Composer: Stewart Copeland

Platform/Year: PlayStation, 1998

Stewart Copeland is best known as the drummer for The Police, but before I ever bought my first copy of Outlandos D'Amour, his rock-star moment for me was composing the Spyro the Dragon soundtrack. Before Spyro hopped on the XTREME bandwagon a decade late and got sucked up and demoted to one more cog in the Skylanders machine, he was the star of his own series of bright, amiable collectathon platformers. Copeland's music incorporated all the elements the games put forward—fun and bouncy, a little rowdy at times, but also redolent with the weight of dragon history and legend. It's a more intriguing career move than Desert Rose, at any rate.


6. The Adventures of Willy Beamish, "Opening Theme"
Composers: Don Latarski, Chris Stevens
Platform/Year: Sega-CD, 1993

Some purists will try to tell you that Redbook audio was the beginning of the end for chip-based OSTs, but I personally can't get enough of the stuff. Before the bulk of more realistic VGM disappeared into a boring orchestral void, many games that featured Redbook audio contained wailing butt-rock guitars, cheesy saxophones, and myriad other instruments one on occasion feels somewhat sheepish about unabashedly enjoying. 

I get a real Saturday morning cartoon vibe from the Willy Beamish theme, which is unusual because I either don't remember a lot of theme songs sounding like this or didn't watch a lot of shows that featured such themes. The only show of the era I can think of that I watched and had such guitars is Mighty Max, though for no discernible reason, the song I always want to hear after this is the intro from the CBS cartoon of Where's Waldo?. In any event, of all the versions of this theme, the Sega-CD version with real instruments in my opinion captures the spirit of the game best.


7. RoboCop 3, "Title Screen"
Composer: Jeroen Tel
Platform/Year: NES, 1992

When I first heard this, I thought, "If this isn't the work of Tim Follin, I'll eat my hat." Consider my hat well and duly eaten.

In related news, Jeroen Tel is currently (as of this writing) crowdfunding a remix album of some of his best Commodore 64 themes, including the above. I don't often consider backing crowdfunded projects but this one definitely has my attention.


8. Metroid II: Return of Samus, "Title Theme"
Composer: Ryoji Yoshitomi
Platform/Year: Game Boy, 1991

When people think of a great Metroid game, they usually think of Super Metroid, and for good reason: it's the best one. But this Game Boy installment is my sentimental favorite. Unlike Super Metroid, which aims to impress the player with its atmosphere and give them a well-rounded experience, Metroid II's atmospherics convey darkness and discomfort. Despite being the most linear Metroid game (until Fusion came out, anyway), the player does not receive a map of any sort, and many of its branching caverns lack true music—only ambient, incidental creeps, crawls, and chitters. In that sense, the title theme is something of a statement of intent, starting with a series of incremental, off-pitch pings before building into a brief soaring moment of ecstasy that soon dies beneath a series of echoing explosions. It's only two minutes long, but it's kind of a chore to get through the whole thing. That's the thing about chores, though: when you finish them, you usually get some kind of reward from it.