#WeeklyGameMusic Archives - Page 7 of 26

#WeeklyGameMusic: Lone Survivor (Lone Survivor)

Posted on May 11, 2020 by Taro Omiya

It’s been a couple of weeks now since you’ve locked down in your own apartment. How long can you go like this? To ease your mind, you turn on your favorite music collection, “#WeeklyGameMusic.” Superflat Games’ melancholic theme song for their game, Lone Survivor, plays. A fitting theme by composer and game designer, Jasper Byrne.

As you settle down, you think to yourself, where does it all begin? It started with a contagious infection. At first, it was just on the news. But you then hear a friend of a friend catch it. Then your neighbors. And now it’s just you. You, a lone man with a surgeon mask on at all times so as to not catch the virus. All of your friends, now violent monsters…

You snap yourself out. No! Focus on surviving through this terrifying apocalypse! What do I need to do? Well, obviously, you need to collect some food. With monsters infesting your neighborhood, that’ll mean stealthily crawling through every nook and cranny to find what limited resources you can find. Fortunately, you have a pistol to incapacitate the monsters. It’s not much, since you’re a bit short on bullets…and said monsters are probably your friends…and you’ll probably lose your sanity shooting them…but it should help.

Well, you have to start somewhere. Saving at the bed all day isn’t going to get you anywhere. Time to open the door, to the sanity-slipping outside world…

Lone Survivor is available on PC and Mac via Steam. It’s also downloadable on Playstation 3, 4, Vita, and Wii U.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: The Sims Theme (Junkie XL Remix) (The Sims 2: Nightlife)

Posted on May 4, 2020 by Taro Omiya

Going back a little into retro classics, this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic highlights Junkie XL again with The Sims Theme, composed for Maxis’ The Sims 2: Nightlife.

Continuing off the ever-popular The Sims series, The Sims 2: Nightlife is the second expansion to The Sims 2. Much like the prior games, the game allows the player to design houses and even its denizens to react to the world at large. Nightlife, of course, adds more elements related to…night life and after parties to the base game.

While “creativity” and “simulation” is often synonymous with this series, a more interesting aspect is its resource-management aspect: the game requires keeping your household family happy to gain more money to purchase more customization (some quite essential) tools. In a way, it’s pretty similar to idle games like Cookie Clicker: the player buys more, to make more.

The Sims 2: Nightlife was released for the PC and Mac.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: MNN+@0・ (Xenoblade Chronicles X)

Posted on April 27, 2020 by Taro Omiya

#WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music. Time to talk about a track that is frankly very difficult to spell. I’m talking, of course, about MNN+@0・, composed by Hiroyuki Sawano of Attack of the Titans fame. This is probably one of his early music debut in video game context; too bad it was introduced in the ill-fated Wii U game, Xenoblade Chronicles X, by Monolith Soft.

Like a true action JRPG, Xenoblade Chronicles X has quite a length story, loosely inspired by the Tower of Babel. In the future, a mega-space-battle between two advanced alien races takes place, destroying Earth with it. As a last-ditch survival effort, a bunch of ships carrying humans are launched, in hopes of landing on a habitable planet. You — yes, a customized hero designed by you yourself — are awoken from suspended animation by Elma, who introduces you to the sprawling world of Mira that your colony’s ship has crash landed onto. But first, she hands you a laser gun and knife. That’s right, the native alien species on this planet aren’t too fond of visitors!

Exploration is Xenoblade Chronicles X‘s name of the game, as planet Mira is absolutely massive. Much of your time will be spent on uncovering landmarks, tackling both main- and side-quests, and grinding for materials. Mid-way through the game, your party gains access to mechs that fly, opening the world up even further. Battles are held in real-time as you designate what special moves your hero or mech should execute, and at which enemy body part. On a more clever twist, the touch-pad on the Wii U controller can be used to setup mining stations, allowing the player to both make money and materials over time — similar to Universal Paperclips and other idle games. The feature also doubles as a way to buff your party members in specified areas of the map, ideally where more difficult enemies are crawling over.

Xenoblade Chronicles X is available on the Wii U. No other ports exist as of this writing.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Lovely City (Lovely Planet)

Posted on April 20, 2020 by Taro Omiya

#WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music. I’m excited to introduce to you all Lovely City, composed by one of my favorite composers, Calum Bowen. This absolutely jamming track is from the hectic (and Indian!) first-person action game, Lovely Planet.

Lovely Planet is a fast-paced first-person shooter and platformer where all red enemies needs to be eliminated before touching the goal pole. Despite the simple premise, cartoony world, and lack of story, the game is actually designed as a speed-running game. Much of the appeal of the game is optimizing your route to beat your prior–and the world’s–score.

Lovely Planet is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux via Steam.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Hello World (Touch My Katamari)

Posted on April 13, 2020 by Taro Omiya

#WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music. Next up is Hello World, composed by Hiroshi Okubo. And series fans should immediately recognize the music’s hip style, which comes from none other than Touch My Katamari.

The surreal and bizarre Touch My Katamari starts with The King of All Cosmos suddenly becoming depressed after overhearing a small human boy mention he thinks of the king as no greater than other common people he knows. To, uh, rekindle his ~~fragile ego~~ broken spirit, he sends his own son, The Prince, to Earth prove to how great the king is…by having The Prince roll Katamaris. Yes, the story makes just as much sense in context.

Rolling on: Touch My Katamari continues the series trademark of ~~utter insanity and apocalyptic destruction~~ rolling the titular Katamari (roughly translates to “clump” in Japanese), a gravity ball that sticks to objects smaller than itself. Once an object is stuck to a Katamari, it becomes part of its mass, thus making it capable of gathering more larger objects. Unique to this entry is the touch-based gestures one can input on the backside of the PS Vita, which makes the Katamari either squash horizontally and cover more ground, or stretch vertically to fit through tight spaces. The game infamously starts you gathering small objects, like thumbtacks, gum, and small dice, until it ~~horrifyingly~~ colorfully escalates to cats, dogs, people, cars, buildings, cities, islands, entire continents, planets, stars, galaxies…

Touch My Katamari was published by Bandai Namco on the PS Vita. Sadly, no other port exists.

P.S. Snark aside, and to this entry’s credit, it explicitly spells out what was hinted throughout the game series that being rolled up in a Katamari is actually a euphoric and unifying experience. Which of course is why every living being reacts to being rolled up by screaming like there’s no tomorrow.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Credits (Metroid Prime)

Posted on April 7, 2020 by Taro Omiya

#WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music. Today’s track is an oldie, but timeless creepy-crawly…sci-fi tune, the Metroid Prime credits theme, composed by Kenji Yamamoto and Kouichi Kyuma. That’s right, we’re highlighting Retro Studios’ first release, the fantastic sci-fi first-person action-adventure game, Metroid Prime, published by Nintendo.

Where to begin with such a legendary game such as Metroid Prime? The mission starts with infamous bounty hunter, Samus Aran, investigating a seemingly decimated space laboratory that reveals that the evil Space Pirates has, once again, been experimenting with the deadly alien parasites, Metroids. True to the series roots, while Samus successfully destroys the laboratory to prevent further spread of specimens coming out of it, she loses all her upgraded space-suits with it, and needs to regain them from a neighboring planet that she once called home (or more like training ground, but that’s another story for another time). Unbeknownst to her, though, the Space Pirates had some tricks up in their space-sleeves…

Metroid Prime is renowned for successfully genre-shifting the retro-platformer to a first-person shooter, and still garner praise and support from fans of the older series. Despite some similarities, graphic-wise, to modern shooters, Metroid Prime doesn’t feel like a competitive shooter. Instead, the game has a strong emphasis on exploration and puzzle solving, with action occasionally sprinkled to even the game’s pacing. More often than not, the map is going to be your best tool: figuring out where to go next, and more importantly, how to get there defines the game’s core experience. Furthermore, to de-emphasize the action, Metroid Prime utilizes a lock-on mechanic akin to The Legend of Zelda series, making combat focus more on dodging attacks, rather than aiming. Finally, who can forget the scan-visor? It’s a lore-revealing tool that allows Samus to gather information on aliens, plants, data logs, power-ups, and more! This useful, but optional feature allows the player to organically piece together the scattered logs and events by themselves, revealing what has happened to the planet prior to Samus’ arrival.

Metroid Prime was originally released on Nintendo Gamecube. A remake of the entire Gamecube series, Metroid Prime: Trilogy, was also released on the Nintendo Wii, complete with motion-controlled aiming.

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