Valis III and some weirdness...

[whisper2053]

So I was taking turns today with a friend of mine playing the game, and we had the strangest thing happen. After taking a break for a while, we came back to it and continued the game from our save...everything loaded correctly, but on top of the music and regular audio there is an *EXTREMELY* annoying (and loud) single tone, somewhat reminiscent of an industrial fire alarm.

 

It won't seem to go away, and persists unwaveringly during gameplay.  We tried reloading the game a few times to see if it was just a one time thing, but no luck there either. Has anyone experienced this before?

[esteban]

So I was taking turns today with a friend of mine playing the game, and we had the strangest thing happen. After taking a break for a while, we came back to it and continued the game from our save...everything loaded correctly, but on top of the music and regular audio there is an *EXTREMELY* annoying (and loud) single tone, somewhat reminiscent of an industrial fire alarm.

 

It won't seem to go away, and persists unwaveringly during gameplay.  We tried reloading the game a few times to see if it was just a one time thing, but no luck there either. Has anyone experienced this before?

No, I don't think I ever encountered this. Weird bug, or failing hardware...

[ctophil]

Sounds like your console got loading problems.  I had that before where a constant noise from the game kept looping itself.  But of course, if I just turn it off and reboot the system, it should load fine again.  If it keeps doing that even after rebooting the PC Engine, then you need to at least adjust the laser. 

[whisper2053]

Well, powering it down and reloading seems to have fixed the problem. I am curious as to why it does that.

[esteban]

Well, powering it down and reloading seems to have fixed the problem. I am curious as to why it does that.

It was a pioneering feature—an alarm to indicate how poorly a person was playing. Mess up too many times and you are forced to quit because the tone becomes unbearable.

[_joshuaTurbo]

interestingly, I've had the exact same thing happen to me when playing Valis III (PCE Import version) after playing another game.  I powered it down and tried it again and it worked fine.

Perhaps there is just a bug/issue that was never really tested.  I've heard some pretty faint tones when resetting games (run+select) before, but never as bad as this one was.  And it only became audible when Valis III was loaded and the cutscene starts.  Pretty odd.

It's like a musical chip sound that was left behind in the Turbo CD/Duo when the disc was removed... what would you call this?  The game I first noticed it happening in was Terraforming SCD.  That was so annoying!!

[ctophil]

Well, powering it down and reloading seems to have fixed the problem. I am curious as to why it does that.

It was probably just a glitch when loading the game.  Your console could of loaded the sound clip into RAM and then didn't unload it at the appropriate time.  Therefore, it got stuck in limbo and kept looping over and over.  The glitch could be created by the game code or your console.  It's something that happens from time to time on any console, not just your system.  I've had something similar happen on my Xbox 360.  So I don't think you should be too concerned with it. 

[whisper2053]

Thanks all for the feedback. I didn't think it was something that was too terribly concerning, but it's still good to know. Chalk up some more OBEY knowledge for *this* guy