Auricular Discovery

Comix Zone. There is still nothing like it. Well maybe Viewtiful Joe , but that’s stretching it. One of the final great Genesis titles, Comix Zone was a love letter to comics nerds everywhere. Tons of 4th wall breaking to be had here, by the very fact that you get pulled into your own comic book from the real world. Easily one of the most beautiful and creative Genesis games ever made. It only really suffers from high difficulty and short length, and lack of multiplayer perhaps. Brawlers always need multi. The music, while catchy, had some pretty rough quality samples on the guitar side of things. Fortunately, Howard Drossin, Sega-centric composer, lead an effort to perform, arrange, and vocalize 6 tracks from the game. And what a great job he did. This stuff could have passed for radio play in the 90′s, I think, not that I’m being condescending in that statement. That’s a unique thing in the world of game music.

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It’s not very often that game remixers can step up to the plate and provide vocals for a change. While I much rather prefer instrumental music over lyrical, Danny was quite impressive here. OCR gives a much better description of the track here. Also, Daniel was recently a guest on episode #295 of ChatterBox Video Game Radio, and he gave a fantastic rant on how game music is not only often ignored, but disrespected and ripped off by “musicians” in other mediums. Unfortunately the hosts, like usual, had very little worthwhile commentary on the subject at hand, and instead tried and failed to make jokes to fill air time.

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I will never give up the claim that X-Men 2 for the Genesis was one of the best 2D Beat ‘Em Ups ever. It’s all too often ignored as just another crappy licensed title, but it’s so much more. It had very large, detailed, smoothly animated sprites for the system, great level design, 2-player coop, featured some under-appreciated characters, and let you play as Magneto. Oh, and the music rocked hard. The only thing holding the game back was the lack of a throwing mechanic. Being a surprising move in 1996, Sega decided to produce a 5-disc set of music aptly known as Sega Tunes. Each disc focused on arranging one game (or many, in Sonic’s case) in much higher quality than the system was capable of. The game’s music and this arranged release were composed by Kurt Harland.

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