After last week’s vampiric masterpiece it’s time to come a bit closer to home and chill out at the bar with some gentle sax. So sit back and unwind with the music to SkyGoblin’s The Journey Down.
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Game Music: The Journey Down
Let’s Enthuse About: The Journey Down
The best part about being laid out for several days with a respiratory tract infection is the chance to catch up some games you’ve been meaning to play for ages. And so it was that earlier this week I got to lay back with the iPad and play SkyGoblin’s The Journey Down. And now I’m going to enthuse about it.
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Not Quite Game Music: The Big Giant Christmas EP
With summer well under way filling our lives with sunny days and warm still evenings where we can sit outside enjoying a nice cool beer*, what better musical accompaniment could you ask for than some chiptune Christmas carols? None, obviously. Hence… Big Giant Circles’ “Big Giant Christmas EP”.
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Everquest Next: Massively Multiplayer Online Voxels?
Rock Paper Shotgun just posted an article covering the first look at the upcoming Everquest Game, cunningly named Everquest Next. Unless Sony Online Entertainment have access to a cadre of wizards or time travellers many of the announced features will almost certainly not live up to the hype (Radiant AI, anyone?), but one in particular piqued my interest.
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Intense Serious Fun!
Rekabmot recently hosted a competition – write a review and win a copy of Monaco. The retro gods must have been smiling because my Tyrian review was one of the winners. Heists, capers and hijinks await!
Congratulations to my compatriot in victory, Sam Hogarth, for his heartfelt review of Bastion.
A personal history of game music: Part 6 – A New Generation
Advances in audio technology and the hardware to drive it powered the latest evolution of soundtracks early in the early years of the new millennium. High fidelity, CD-quality, studio-recorded, surround sound music became the norm and the line between gaming and cinema grew ever more blurred. But as we know, the old-school never really dies…
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Game Music: Metroid Metal
This week’s soundtrack is actually an album and an EP composed of tracks taken from one of the longest-running franchises in video game history, “re-recorded and ‘redone a bit'” for live performance. Covering almost three decades of the Metroid series, it’s Metroid Metal.
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A personal history of game music: Part 5 – Interludes and Anecdotes
Due to one thing or another there wasn’t enough time to write the article I had planned for this week. Rather than just wait a fortnight I’ve decided instead to take the opportunity for a bit of a link clearance. So here follows a grab-bag of interesting music-related stories, articles and titbits that have built up over the years.
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Game Music: Mass Effect
After introducing Jack Wall last week it would be insanity not to follow up with another of his scores, and perhaps my favourite game soundtrack of all time. Fitting, since it’s for one of the greatest games ever created. I am referring, of course, to Mass Effect.
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A personal history of game music: Part 4 – A Time of Transition
Early PC games were packed with great soundtracks and technological developments, but the real advances were still to come. With sound cards and CD-ROMs becoming more mainstream the technical and artistic horizons of composers broadened considerably. Soon full orchestral scores would be the norm, but before then, technology was still catching up. The 90s then, were a period of transition bridging the MIDI age with what we know today.
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