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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