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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SimCity 2000 was probably the first game to strike me with the depressing realization that I have no creativity. I absolutely fail at these kind of god games. I know not how to create, but to destroy. Maybe if I grew up with a PC instead of a NES/Genesis, I’d have developed some different interests. Oh well. That’s why the game offered you wonderful catastrophe tools such as plane crashes, floods, and volcanos. The music is a delightfully cheesy jazz. It sounds like the kind of background music that would serve as a segue piece for an 80′s urban sitcom, as the camera converges from one setting to the other. Maybe it’s a retired genre, but I keep it for the nostalgia.

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I’ll try not to repeat what hundreds of blogs have stated but the short of it is, this game was amazing, yet it sold terribly. You need to acquire it by any means necessary. A lot of the blame can be placed on UbiSoft for not marketing it worth a shit, and also for releasing it in November, the most competitive month for game releases. There have been a couple videos hinting at a sequel, but if you’ve followed the roller-coaster of announcements and denouncements, you’d believe that nothing is set in stone. Even if we do get a sequel, I’m not sure it will be what we want. I’m sure UbiSoft will be making some massive changes to the formula. From a business point of view, the product didn’t sell, therefor something must be wrong with it, and needs “fixing”. I’ve seen a lot of fans clamoring for more Jade, but I’m placing my coin on pessimism this time.

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Take music from one of the most light-hearted, colorful games ever made, slow it down, grunge it up, and you’re left with this. While I’m a fan of The Neskimos, I can understand why they don’t get the kind of attention that The Minibosses do. Neskimos just don’t have the kind of clean, predictable arrangements most casual listeners want. They’re less about bringing back nostalgia, and more about toying around with the actual music. It’s just a shame they seem to be nonactive in recent years. Also check out Metroid – Norfair Tenement Blues. It’s their only track with vocals, and probably their most experimental song. It’s not for everyone, but I think it’s very unique.

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When you’re tired of all the metal game arrangements out there, make your way over to The OneUps. For 9 years now, these guys have been launching classic themes into brand new genres of music, and with every release, they surprise me with how natural it sounds. The team is led by Mustin and Dale North, the latter of which is a very busy Destructoid writer as well. Their two self-titled albums are simply wide-reaching single track selections performed in a “Fusion/Funk/Jazz” hybrid style. It should grow on you. While their albums aren’t free, the obvious level of professionalism and the perfect recording quality should temp you. Amazon offers all the albums free of DRM, and lets you sample all the tracks before-hand.

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Forgotten for a reason, this is the Street Fighter that wasn’t a Street Fighter game. In fact, the only connection it has to the series, is the character’s name is Ken, and that’s only true for the English versions, where certain ridiculous liberties were taken with the translation. That aside, I grew up with and enjoyed this game very much. The action/platformer mechanics were pretty impressive for the NES. It had some creative combos as well as wall climbing/jumping and backflips. And being the eternal rule of Capcom, the music was at the very least, decent. ScrewAttack has a funny Vault overview of the game. The difficulty was a bit overstated though. It’s certainly no Battletoads or Solar Jetman. Or to stay on topic, let’s just say Street Fighter 4′s Seth would eat this thing for breakfast.

01/17/10 Edit: Guys, listen to this album immediately. If I hadn’t already picked Danimal’s track, I’d have definitely posted Stairway to the Light.

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I was quite hyped for this game when it released. The GameCube was a bit starved for original RPGs; so much so that I even finished both Lost Kingdoms games, when I bet anything that if they were on any other platform I would have paid them no mind. Unlike Lost Kingdoms however, BT seemed to have a lot going for it. It had stellar graphics, a unique visual style, original story and cardplay mechanics, and it was being scored by the legendary Motoi Sakuraba, who’s done the majority of such series as Tales Of …, Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile, Shining Force, and Golden Sun. The man knows his way around an RPG soundtrack. The game itself unfortunately could not hold my interest past the 1st disc, but at least I had the OST to listen to six times over. This track is one of many that demonstrates how Sakuraba broke out of his safe zone with this game, leaving behind his more traditional reverb thick, flute and organ focused sound, in exchange for something far more…psychedelic.

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I came across this album thanks to the massive listing over at Chrono Compendium. This is definitely the highlight of the set, giving new energy to the final battle with Lavos. Doujin (aka fan made) albums seem to be very hard to come across online or even hear about at all, unless you are natively Japanese and are within that scene over there. I guess the language barrier is quite literal in some cases. I think the big key difference here is that on the English side, the vast majority of remixers do it for free, while on the Japanese side, there are thriving markets for this stuff on physical media, instead of digital distribution. I wonder how they get around the legal issues or profiting off of others’ compositions… or are there any to begin with over there?

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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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For the few tracks that Kevin “Lorenzo” Sisk put out back in the day, he quickly became one of my favorite mixers. He doesn’t go crazy with the effects, or try inserting drastically different tones. Instead, he excels at taking 8-bit and 16-bit tunes and sprucing them up without removing the retro vibe. Lorenzo hasn’t been mixing as of late, due to his upcoming voice role in the mega-hyped Source engine mod, Black Mesa, which will remake the original Half-Life experience. I owned this game as a child, and I am certainly not suggesting anyone play it. It was garbage then and it is garbage now. This will torture you enough. Except for the music of course, which was composed by Tim Follin, who’s made quite a track record. Lorenzo has given me permission to share more, so here’s two other tracks I love, which most likely came from VGMix before the restructuring.

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