Tag: Xbox 360

Weekly Game Music: Bird’s Eye (Senko no Ronde DUO)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

New week, new music.  This week’s music is a futuristic composition, Bird’s Eye, that sounds like it’s only a step away from spaghetti western.  This strange hybrid of music genre by Yasuhisa Watanabe is conveniently in a game that also combines two unlikely gameplay: Senko no Ronde DUO.

Senko no Ronde DUO describes a future where the human race now lives beyond Earth.  The Aria Federation, the space army of sorts, learns of an evil plot: someone is trying to obtain their best superweapon!  The Federation immediately commands eight mech pilots to hunt and destroy this terrorist.

Senko no Rondo DUO is a 2-player mech fighter where both characters navigate on a single plane.  Hits are dealt not through fists and feets, but through laser guns.  And LOTS of them.  Each character’s super-power practically turns them into a bullet-hell boss, switching the game from a 2-player shoot’em up to a bullet-dodging exercise.

Senko no Rondo DUO was released for Xbox 360 in Japan in 2010.  No US or European release has been made.

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Weekly Game Music: Glasgow Mega-Snake (Spec Ops: The Line)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

New week, new music.  Ready for another melancholic music?  Here’s Glasgow Mega-Snake by the Scottish rock bad, Mogwai.  While it may initially sound like a generic rock music, the composition very quickly wades into an amazing mixture of sadness and rage.  A fitting music to this unexpectedly excellent brown shooter, Spec Ops: The Line.

Spec Ops: The Line is most famous for its Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) inspired narrative: recon team Captain Martin Walker, Lieutenant Alphonse Adams, and Sergeant John Lugo receives a distress call from Colonel John Konrad, indicating that “evacuation of Dubai ended in complete failure.”  Considering Dubai was struck by the worst dust storm 6 months prior, this worries Captain Walker, and decides with his 3-man team to investigate on the matter.  Their mission?  Find any survivors, then message the US army for a safe evacuation.

If by looking at the concept art below, you thought that Spec Ops: The Line is a generic third-person shooter, well, you’d be right.  However, Spec Ops is more than that: it’s a devastating deconstruction of brown shooter themselves.  Intentionally hypocritical, the game rewards the player for acts that progressively gets worse and worse.  And considering the game is mostly linear, there’s little that the player can do, other than moan from something they have done.  As each of the characters get more shaken and delusional, the game does an excellent job reminding us what Post-Traumatic Disorder feels like.

Spec Ops: The Line was released on Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC in 2012.

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Weekly Game Music: Team Fortress 2 (Main Theme)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

New week, new music.  As a sort of belated celebration that Team Fortress 2 Beta is now out for Linux, I present you, Team Fortress 2 (Main Theme)!  The fast-paced orchestrated composition by Mike Morasky really gets the adrenaline running.

So, about Team Fortress 2‘s story.  It’s only mentioned via webcomics and other non-game related mediums, but it goes something like this: two brothers, Redmond and Blutarch, convinces their wealthy father, Zepheniah Mann to purchase several land pieces in the US.  As fate may have it, Zepheniah comically catches every disease possible while traveling to these newly bought landmarks.  Upon death, Zepheniah made sure his son had to earn his land.  Thus, both brothers decide to hire mercenaries to take over Zepheniah’s land.

Team Fortress 2 is a team-based first-person shooter which pits team RED and BLU against each other.  The various missions can include capture-the-flag (or briefcase, in this case), defending/taking over marked bases, and man-of-the-mountain.  On top of various different characters that all plays differently from each other, Team Fortress 2 also has a lot of unlockables as well.

Team Fortress 2 was first released on the PC in 2007.  It’s available on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Mac, and Linux via Steam.

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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: Setting Sail, Coming Home (Bastion)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

Third on my Christmas video game music rush has some lyrics!  Set Sail, Coming Home is Darren Korb’s excellent combination of his 2 other music,Mother, I’m Here and Build That Wall, both featured prominently in the game,Bastion.  In context, this song depicts the decision of taking on a new direction in life.  It does a great job conveying a hopeful but mysterious and unnerving outlook on the future ahead.

Bastion begins right after a catastrophic event know as the Calamity, where every land is torn apart and nothing is held on solid ground.  The player directs the Kid, while Rulf the engineer narrates every action he takes.  They both work hard to get Rulf’s time-reverting machine, Bastion, back up and working.

Bastion plays like a top-down action RPG where the Kid switches between a variety of different weaponry, all with well-calculated pros and cons.  At any one point, the Kid can carry two, along with 2 special attacks.  The enemies you encounter are varied, and require different tactics to kill, thus requiring a lot of wit from the player to take out efficiently.

Bastion was released on 2011 for the Xbox 360.  It’s also available on Google Chrome’s Webstore, PC, Mac, Linux, and Steam.

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Weekly Game Music: Another Winter (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

New week, new music.  Here’s an excellent music from an indie video game, based off of a movie, based off of a graphic nove- aw, screw it!  Here’s Another Winter from the excellent chiptune band, Anamanaguchi.  It’s from the downloadable game, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game is lightly based off of Bryan O’Malley’s graphic novel series, Scott Pilgrim.  Unlike the novels, it starts with Scott Pilgrim meeting and making out with Ramona Flowers, instead of Knives Chau.  From there, the game wastes no time: Scott Pilgrim has to defeat Ramona’s 7 ex-boyfriends, and his girl friend and band-mates, Stephen Stills and Kim Pine gets to join in the fun.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game plays very much like an old-school 2D beat’em-ups.  Up to 4 players can join in on the bash-fest of numerous pixelated thugs and enemies.  To spice things up, one can earn money to learn new abilities and experience points.  Furthermore, many items, including fallen bodies, can be picked up and thrown for extra damage.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game was released on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 in 2010.
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