Posts Tagged ‘music’
Podcast: Top Scores, Volume 3
Video game soundtracks transcend time to the right audience. No matter how many you have heard, there’s always that track that escapes you or is just on the tip of your tongue that you can’t recognize. Whether it’s nostalgia or a killer cut you’re hearing for the first time, the community and our hosts Fred and Jam have a great show of video game music this time around. Missed the first two volumes? Check out Top Scores, Vol. 1 and Top Scores, Vol. 2!
Please Note: Those that listened to the live show may have noticed a quality drop in the stream from time to time. As a result, all music tracks were re-edited in as masters in this final episode. You should notice no quality drops.
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Podcast: Top Scores
This week Fred flies solo again and he’s celebrating his favorite songs from video game soundtracks. The entire history of games is reflected from 8-bit and 16-bit to the glory of CDs and red book audio. Kick back with a good time wasting game and enjoy a journey through gaming’s musical past.
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Review: Make My Own Music Video (Sega CD)
Console: Sega-CD/Mega-CD
Released: 1992
Developer: Digital Pictures
Publisher: Sony Imagesoft
Instruction Manual: Not necessary
Difficulty: Non-existent
Played it as a child? Yes
Value: pricecharting.com has hilarously not even covered these games
Price: Don’t even bother
Other Releases: Absolutely Not
Digital Release? No, aside from how horrible they are, the music is timely
There is just no getting around this, these are terrible video games. Not only are they pop groups that only existed in the early part of the 1990s, but they aren’t games at all. You goal is just as it sounds: make a music video. It’s a crash course in linear digital editing where three streams of video appear on the screen at once and you use the A, B, and C button to select the “active” feed that will become your master video. Unfortunately the three feeds are made up of a random lot of public domain videos from the first half of the century, sometimes altered slightly for the beat, and the original music video for the game. I’m not saying that these videos are directorial masterpieces, but when combined with the patethic hodgepodge of public domain video, they’re the next Star Wars, I have never once wanted to leave the feed of the main video. Having said that, they are amazing fun at a party when you want to laugh your head off at how pathetically cheesy this generation of pop music was.
Beat Hazard (Cold Beam Games)
When I think about the combination of music and video games, I can’t help but think Konami and Harmonix. Thanks to the Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) series by Konami – c’mon gamers, everyone tried it at one point – your love for music and games could be realized. Unfortunately the series focused on techno music, many tracks from Japan, and there wasn’t that connection with the songs you really wanted (although there was this awesome DDR on the original Xbox that had a remix of the Neverending Story Theme). Enter Harmonix, a company that made its humble beginnings in similar techno infused video games with titles like Frequency, and its idea to take a big cumbersome plastic guitar and mix it with hard rock tunes. Guitar Hero and the slew of spin-offs that Activision juiced out of it had one painful flaw: you were still limited with the songs that were released. Even today Rock Band has thousands of songs but you aren’t able to pick anything you want/like. That’s where Beat Hazard comes in. A twin-stick shmup that utilizes any music track you provide to create an entire level lasting the length of that track.
Okay, let’s get the setup clear because a “level” will be in a fixed location (Asteroids, Geometry Wars) and not a scrolling level (Gradius, R-Type). Enemies will appear along with certain aspects of the code to generate the various obstacles that will be thrown at you – everything from actual asteroids to large bosses. I don’t think that developer Cold Beam Games has released any info on how the game is able to take your music and create a level, but if I were the developer I’d keep that secret until my game had run its course. Even more impressive is that Cold Beam Games CEO Steve Hunt appears to have created (and possibly developed) the game by himself, although I can’t find concrete evidence of that. In addition, Hunt admits to taking the addictive concept in Geometry Wars and adapting it to taking codes from MP3 files. As time has gone on he has updated the game as well as created a definitive version, Beat Hazard Ultra, which now supports many formats such as iTunes’ AAC format and even streaming formats like those found on Last FM. The original, which can be found on the XNA community channel on Xbox Live, only supports MP3 files as far as I know.
Gaming History 101 