Tag: Gamecube

Weekly Game Music: Machine Passage (Kirby Air Ride)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

New week, new music.  Nintendo is generally known for its cute and adorable characters.  While the Kirby series are no exceptions to this, Machine Passage from Kirby Air Ride would make you think otherwise.  This creepy, jarring, and melancholic composition by Hirokazu Ando, Shogo Sakai, Tadashi Ikegami and Jun Ishikawa stands in stark contrast to an otherwise cheery, happy racing game.

Kirby Air Ride is a cartoon racing game where Kirby, a pink puffball, and his gang races on Warp Stars across different themed courses.  Unique to this game are the controls.  Instead of holding a button to accelerate, vehicles in Air Ride automatically moves forward.  Instead, one holds the A-button to brake, while also charging the vehicle’s booster.  Gliding are also an important component to this game, allowing one to take many different aerial shortcuts.  Lastly, much like the Mario Kart series, Kirby can suck in enemies scattered each course to use their abilities to hinder rivals’ progress.

Kirby Air Ride  was released on the Gamecube in 2003.

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Weekly Game Music: Deep Red Pastures (Baten Kaitos Origins)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

New week, new music.  We start this year with a little-known JRPG game.  The genre is full of audio surprises.  Anyway, here’s Deep Red Pastures, composed by Motoi Sakuraba.  It fits with the windy setting of the game, Baten Kaitos Origins.

Baten Kaitos Origins starts with our hero, Sagi, tasked to commit murder by his boss.  Yeah….no, Sagi doesn’t fall for this one, but another unknown being takes care of the job for him.  Sagi, of course, gets blamed for it, and has to uncover the case behind this problem to clear his name.

Baten Kaitos Origins is a card game, where every weapon, equipment, magic, and items are represented as a card.  It’s quite an explorer-happy game where a card could be hidden at any nook and cranny.  All battles are turn-based, where in each turn, the player has a hand of cards (and thus, moves) to choose from before attacking or defending.

Baten Kaitos Origins was released on the Gamecube in 2006.

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Weekly Game Music: Escape from the City (Sonic Adventures 2)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

New week, new music.  Since last week was an onslaught of indie games, let’s go with a more main stream and more well-known song this time.  Here’s Escape from the City, composed by Jun Senoue and sung by Ted Poley and Tony Harnell.  It’s a speed-inducing music played during the first not-that-bad-3D-Sonic-game, Sonic Adventures 2.

Sonic Adventures 2 tells a story told from the good guys and bad guys perspective: the bad guys — Shadow, Dr. Robotnik, Rouge (sort-of-bad-girl?) — attempts to prepare a planet-sized laser gun (and even successfully obliterates the moon) while the good guys — Sonic, Tails, Knuckles — are wrongly accused of threatening the good citizens and tries to find the culprits.  Mixed in with talk of ancient technologies, lots of furballs, and a bad guys who is just misunderstood (and have amnesia to boot), and you’ve got one camp story.

Sonic Adventures 2 is a platformer with 3 different objectives and controls, represented by one of the six characters.  Sonic and Shadow both play as a generic platformer: find the goal by jumping a lot and attacking enemies.  Tails and Dr. Robotnik plays as a bipedal tank game where both fires their guns via a target-detecting laser system.  Finally Knuckles and Rouge also plays like a generic platformer with a different mission: searching for 3 chaos emeralds scattered in each stage.

Sonic Adventures 2 was released on the Dreamcast in 2001.  It was later ported to the GameCube, PlayStation 3 (via PSN), and Xbox 360 (via XBLA).

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Weekly Game Music: Wind Waker Unplugged (Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

New week, new music.  Late again this week, but I’m currently checking out SIGGRAPH 2012, and it’s quite a bit exhausting.  Anyways, lets go with something special this week.  Here’s Fredrik Larsson’s medley, Wind Waker Unplugged , which quite predictably blends together various tunes from Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.  It does great justice to the original compositions by Kenta Nagata, Hajime Wakai, Toru Minegishi, and Koji Kondo.

Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker begins with a common formula in the recent Zelda series: as a young boy named Link, you’re unsuspectingly thrown into an epic adventure when someone very close to him — his sister, Aryll — gets kidnapped by a gigantic bird.  Determined to save his sister, Link gets dropped square into the plot of a growing, evil force.

Sticking with the series’ tradition, Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker plays like an action-adventure.  Sword combat is executed through a simple control-stick, B-button combination.  New to the series is the introduction of countering and using dropped weapons against your enemies.  Wind Waker also strongly focuses on its wind physics, where gliding and sailing becomes essential.  Of course, no Zelda game is complete without complex dungeons and many creative tools to conquer them!

Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker was published by Nintendo on the Gamecube in 2003.  No other port exists.

Extra!

Title: Hyrule Field Theme
Game: Super Smash Bros. Brawl
Remixer: Yutaka Iraha
Original Composer: Koji Kondo

Title: Saria’s Song
Game: Super Smash Bros. Melee
Remixer: Hirokazu Ando, Tadashi Ikegami, Shōgo Sakai, Takuto Kitsuta
Original Composer: Koji Kondo


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Weekly Game Music: Some Like it Red Hot (Viewtiful Joe)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

New week, new music. This week’s music is Some Like it Red Hot, baby!  Two cool dudes, Masakazu Sugimori and Masami Ueda, manage to capture the exciting and flashy nature of a city.  It best fits the rad superhero action game, Viewtiful Joe.

Viewtiful Joe, is, like, an action game about a stupid nobody named Joe.  The loser is such a hopeless fanboy of Captain Blue, man!  Even ends up being the only audience in a movie re-run, with his, you know, hot girlfriend Silvia.  Poor girl.  Anyway, Silvia totally gets kidnapped into the movie world, and Joe gets sucked into it by force.  But wait, it gets better!  Joe gets this rad V-Watch, turning him into a red-suited action hero.  Man, those pants are tight!

Anyhoo, Viewtiful Joe is this action-packed 2.5D beat’em-up all the cool kids are talking about.  To spice up his action, Joe can make time run slower or faster, allowing him to solve puzzles, cream enemies, or just look plain wicked.  On top of that, the game has this sweet cell-shaded graphics that totally makes it look like a cartoon.  It’s just how Joe rolls.

Viewtiful Joe was originally released on the Gamecube in 2009. It has also been ported to the PS2 as well.  It’s hardcore, dude!
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Weekly Game Music: Dissociative Identity (Killer7)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

New week, new music. I haven’t posted that many sad music, so here’s one from the surreal noir game, Killer7. It’s Dissociative Identity by Masafumi Takada. The music plays during a sudden revelation when Garcian Smith (in the video below) discovers his real identity.

Killer7 story follows a group of assassins with the same name, hired to take on several targets directed by the US government. A group of terrorists calledHeavenly Smiles are literally destroying the peaceful foundation created by the US, and Killer7 are the only group of people who can see and kill Heavenly Smiles. Killer7, of course, aren’t normal people either. In fact, they’re actually one person with 8 different bodies, personalities, and abilities. Since each mission takes place at different time and places, the story is frequently disjointed and difficult to follow.

Killer7 is a bloody, controversial game that does everything in its power to make you feel uncomfortable, without being frustrating. It’s controls are a great example: instead of allowing you to run and kill whenever you want to, your character is forced to walk on a specific track forwards and back. Killing enemies, of course, involves first listening for a disturbing laugh (Heavenly Smiles are invisible, remember), then aiming towards the sound in first person (you stationary at this position), and scanning the area to make the enemies visible. The game’s distinct gameplay allows it to use dramatic — and again, uncomfortable — camera angles to highlight either the character or area in interest. Almost all puzzles are in point-and-click affair, adding the disjointedness to the game.

Killer7 was originally released on the Gamecube in 2005. It has been ported to PS2.

Extra!

Title: Rave On
Game: Killer7
Composer: Masafumi Takada


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