Game Music Archives - Page 7 of 8

#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: Blue Sky Town – Dol Dona (.hack//G.U.)

Posted on March 30, 2020 by Taro Omiya

#WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music. Today’s track is Blue Sky Town – Dol Dona, composed by Chikayo Fukuda. It’s a pleasant town music from Bandai Namco’s mega-long multi-media series, .hack, specifically, the .hack//G.U. trilogy.

Before there was Sword Art Online (SAO), there was .hack. That’s right, this game, manga, and anime series all takes place in the fictional MMO Action-RPG, The World. Dull naming aside, much like SAO, players start falling into a comatose state, both in-game and in real-life. Unlike SAO, the devs blame it to a computer virus, presumably spread by malicious players. The G.U. trilogy stars Haseo, who seeks for revenge after his close friend catches this comatose spell.

.hack//G.U. is a single-player action-JRPG series. Unlike, you know, real MMORPGs, .hack//G.U. is a story-driven game with no character customization, and A.I.-controlled party members. The party explores randomly-generated dungeons: battle initiates when a monster gets close to the party, constraining them into a tight circle. Perhaps the more unique side of the game is how narrative plays: there are email logs, marriage simulation, and other MMORPG-like communication methods to suck the player into its universe.

.hack//G.U. is available on PC via Steam, PS4, and PS2.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Give Me a Chance (The World Ends With You)

Posted on March 23, 2020 by Taro Omiya

#WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music. This time we’ll cover Give Me a Chance, composed by Takeharu Ishimoto and sung by Ayuko Tanaka and Mai Matsuda. It’s a composition from the cult-hit Square Enix game, The World Ends With You, an almost trading card game (TCG) JRPG and a banger soundtrack.

You can tell The World Ends With You is created by the same company famous for their Final Fantasy franchise when it stars an anti-social, brooding teen named Neku. This insufferable jerk eventually learns to get better when he’s suddenly pitted in a life-and-death game about fighting sound-based monsters and lazy grim reapers using a deck of shirt pins. To survive this terrifying game, this loser must make a sacrifice arbitrarily chosen by the game master (in this case, his memory, of course) and pair with a partner to fight together with. Did I mention this all makes sense in context?

Anyway, where The World Ends With You best shines is its real-time combat. Originally developed for the Nintendo DS, this game utilizes nearly every single feature in the portable console, including — get this — the closing-the-lid sleep function, as part of combat. Unfortunately for this blogger, his introduction to the game was on iOS, so he’ll describe how the combat works there instead: The World Ends With You TCG-like battle system operates by having each pin execute when a specific touch or swipe gesture is made. Multiple pins in a deck may share the same gesture; the pin placed on the top of the deck gets prioritized first, until it hits a cool-down state, in which the rest of the pins takes effect. Partners can also be summoned, using yet another gesture assigned to them: this helps build both a combo meter, and a super attack. It’s super fun, and I highly recommend checking it out!

The World Ends With You is available on Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Nintendo DS.

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