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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Fighters Megamix was Sega’s attempt at combining their two biggest 3D fighting series. The melding of two distinct fighting engines may remind you of Capcom’s efforts with the SvC and MvC series. It was also chock full of Sega fan-service much in the way of Nintendo’s own Super Smash Bros. While it had fantastic animations and innovative mechanics, there were many sloppily developed characters that screwed up the balance royally. It also lacked the 640×480 resolution Virtua Fighter 2 ran at. Now, I’ll be honest, I’m only posting this track to serve as a sample of the complete set I just released. The short of it is, I imported over the extended music from Fighting Vipers and Virtua Fighter in place of the shortened tracks Fighters Megamix comes with, and then I gave the whole thing all the proper album treatment it could handle. Enjoy!

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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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Easily one of the best JRPGs of all time. Why is Grandia 2 so great? Well, what can I say? It polishes the genre mechanics to perfection, while having the balls to ditch or replace the aspects that often fail. No random encounters. A turn based combat system that moves like a real-time one. A phenomenal soundtrack that makes full use of streamed audio instead of sequencing. A perfect frame rate. A high contrast story that can handle cute, upbeat moments and dark, mature, tragic scenes while treating you like a mature adult. An English dub that includes much of the Metal Gear Solid cast is the cherry on top. While it doesn’t reinvent anything, it administered a much needed evaluation of the JRPG. Even if you absolutely hate the genre to a borderline racist degree, give this one a shot. But, for your own sake, stick with the Dreamcast version. The PS2 got the laziest port imaginable.

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To this day the art, setting, visuals, and music of Panzer Dragoon overwhelm me. Maybe it’s a case of nostalgia goggles. Maybe I was the weird kid on the block who went with a Saturn instead of a PlayStation, which led to me fixating on the few gems I was allotted. I don’t know. They’re still memories I’ll never forget, yet continue to struggle to express what they are. There aren’t many games where I savor every second of the virtual ride within. I shift in and out of my Panzer kicks every few months, so for the moment, here’s a track from an official album most of the fans don’t even know about. While listening, go get lost in a wealth of Panzer knowledge and theories at The Will of the Ancients. I’ve been a big fan of their efforts since about 2002.

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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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Among all the funk in V8, you’ll find this little number. It’s an energetic remix of Toccata and Fugue in D minor traditionally used for representations of Dracula and the such. What happened to the vehicular car combat genre, anyway? Twisted Metal 1 and 2 brought it into the mainstream. Then came an endless supply of crappy sequels and copycat attempts. Before you knew it, the entire genre crashed. Maybe it was just fused in with sandbox games like GTA3. I feel that the two V8 games were the only post-TM entries to stand on their own feet. If anyone else has a thirst for some automobile annihilation, allow me to point you in the direction of the Half-Life 2 mod known as D.I.P.R.I.P.. Vehicular net-code is notoriously bad on the Source engine however, so this is better served as a LAN game.

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I had this bouncy, cheerful, colorful song stuck in my head for a day, and by my power, you shall as well. Topher of Destructoid’s RetroForce Go has sung praise about this game multiple times. If you want the wackiest fighter for Dreamcast…try JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. If you want the 2nd wackiest…oh crap, Guilty Gear X….hmm. Ok, so if you want the third wackiest fighter, try Project Justice. Get some friends over, take 3 minutes to explain the basic commands, and you’ll have quite a few hours of hilarity.

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One of the best bangs for your buck early in Playstation’s life was Die Hard Trilogy. Three distinct games in one, each game serving up a different genre. Not only did each game play differently, but they also sported different styles of music. This track comes from Die Hard 3, which accompanied the vehicle stages. “Wall Street” does a great job portraying the hustle & bustle environments of New York, while still working well as chaotic driving music. Littered throughout the song are the pertinent sounds of currency.

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