Many of the Half-Life 2 tracks use extremely heavy baselines; they should be listened to on a decent sound system, with a decent sub woofer, in order to give the tracks, the justice they deserve

In addition to the note above; the quality of the clips below compares only marginally to that on the official sound track (which happens to come with Audiosurf).

Triage at Dawn

Song #16

CP Violation

Requiem for Ravenholm

Escape Array

Guard Down

Vortal Combat

Sector Sweep

Last Legs

Below are some select sound tracks, one or two from the official sound track, and the remainder from in-game locations by third party artists;

I’m listing these first; purely because I prefer to listen to them first

Club Afterlife
(Saki Kaska – Callista)

Club Dark Star
(John Morgan – Happiness)

Humans are Disappearing

The Illusive Man

The music in Mass Effect was unfortunately not as ‘significant’ as I would have liked it to be. The tracks all seemed to lack the “ability” to be listened to outside of the game. A lot of the tracks were required to be coupled alongside game play in order to make their effect more prominent. This rendered the official soundtrack regrettably “forgettable”.

However, with every batch of not-so-great game music, or there are some stand out tracks from Mass Effect that provided that “Zelda-music like” connection to the game.

Only a select few from the album made it here. Vigil being my favourite (and Mass Effect menu music), with a good old “Love Theme” rendition coming in second. “Uncharted Worlds” was at first slightly ‘annoying’ but it grew on me over time. “Feros” gets an honourable mention, but once again, requires you to be “in the game” to experience it at it’s full potential.

Vigil

Love Theme

Uncharted Worlds

Feros

Sonic the Hedgehog! Only after finding a quiz on Sporcle related to the game music did the memories of the classic Green Hill Zone and super trendy Chemical Plant Zone music come flooding back. Below is the collection of my favourite Sonic themes.

Greenhill Zone

Spring Yard Zone

Labyrinth Zone

Boss Music

Emerald Hill Zone

Chemical Plant Zone

Hill Top Zone

Mystic Cave Zone

Marble Garden Zone (Act 1)

Carnival Night Zone (Act 1)

Special Stage Zone

Mushroom Hill Zone (Act 1)

Mushroom Hill Zone (Act 2)

Flying Battery Zone (Act 1)

Flying Battery Zone (Act 2)

While it may be dependant on the game in question, I’m not having a ‘go’ at the game itself, but the people and consequent websites who believe the GTA and Guitar Hero music is proper video game music.

On a final note, this page may be quite memory consuming with all the embedded files — but hey, it’s worth it

Okay, so rant aside, I decided to post my own thoughts of some of my favourite game music. The list below isn’t ranked in any sort of order, but is instead merely a collection of game music/themes that have stuck with me.

What can I say, I could publish a single post full of Zelda music. The following represents the tiniest fraction of the amazing music throughout the N64 Zelda series.

Calling the Four Giants

Pirate Fortress Theme

Song of Healing

Last End (The Final Hour)

Midna’s Theme

Midna’s Desperate Hour

The orchestral pieces through Oblivion are quite amazing; here are two pieces, one from general travelling and one played while in a town

Atmosphere #7

Town #5

The Terran theme was always nice throughout during a game of ‘Sunken D’ or ‘Tower D’.

Terran Theme #2

Terran Theme #3

Fable contains a few nice orchestral pieces throughout the world of Albion. Some of the tracks are just slight derivations (e.g. Temple of Light and Hall of Heroes) of each other. While this may suggest that the tune gets repetitive, it doesn’t

Greatwood

Temple of Light
Hall of Heroes

Oakvale
Hook Coast
Knothole Glade

While this is an amazing game, there were only two pieces that really stood out as music that could be listened to independent of the game. Most of the music needs to be coupled with the nature of the game to be appreciated in full.

Welcome to Rapture

Cohens Masterpiece

This game contains some nice orchestral pieces as well including a new take on the original Super Mario Bros theme from the NES days.

Super Mario 2007

Still Alive

Menu Music

Sometimes not all games have access to professional music development bodies, composers or large orchestras. This means they may need to rely on other peoples creations in order to help introduce a musical dimension into the game. While this may seem to contradict the previous ‘real world game music’ statement, it comes down to the type of game in question. Indie games like Braid, made by independent, small time developers, rely on this ‘real world’ music distributed by small time music labels.

I would like to include all the tracks from this game, however I would also prefer that your browser didn’t crash under the weight of  all flash content

Tell It By Heart

Some game music gains enough momentum that it becomes an inspiration source for musical talent around the world. The Legend of Zelda in particular provides an ‘epic’ source of inspiration for people to start following music on the piano, and other instruments.

The violin compliments this Zelda song so well

Song of Storms Violin Remix

To re-iterate, using real world songs in a game may be preferable to other music; some prime examples include GTA IV and Guitar Hero. Other games, like Fallout 3 for example, utilise a compilation of real world music to provide an experience unique to the storyline or general game play.

I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire

Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall

Schweine (Vladivostok FM)

Click the image to make it bigger, if it’s still not big enough, Right click then “Open in new tab/window” or similar.

BioShock 2 Pre-Purchase Now

JANUARY 19, 2010, 1:59 PM – VALVE – GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENT

BioShock 2 is now available for pre-purchase on Steam! Save 10% and earn an extra copy of BioShock free! If you already own BioShock then gift it to any of your friends!
Want to play with a few of your friends? The BioShock 2 Four Pack gives you four copies of BioShock 2 and four free copies of BioShock to give out to your friends!

However, the price for Australia in Steam appears to be substantially higher, $27 USD higher… Using the two links below show two different prices, and unfortunately unless you have a US billing address, you wont be able to use the US store page.

AUD Bioshock Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/8859/?cc=au
USD Bioshock Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/8859/?cc=us

Suggestions for getting the lower price range from illegal to legal, however probably the easiest legal method is to just get it gifted from someone in America then pay them back via PayPal.

Below is video from YouTube of the song played piano

You can also view the scene from BioShock involving “Young Fitzpatrick” and Cohen’s masterpiece in the following video

I thought it would be interesting to source the sheet music and take a look at it. My favourite parts are from bars 4 through 7 (0:12 – ~0:25 in the topmost video), and the similar variations of that segment throughout the rest of the piece.

The pictures below are the three pages that make up the manuscript.

You can download the manuscript as a PDF: BioShock: “Cohen’s Masterpiece”.

One of the latest most anticipated releases on Steam seems to have missed its launch date. Déjà vu anyone?

The Steam Forums and Steam community are responding sluggishly to requests, most likely bursting at the seams from the influx of gamers that want to get their hands dirty and start playing…

Most users attempting to access the Steam Community site are being presented with a ‘Down for Maintenance’ message, pictured below.

Personally, I am not to fussed if the deadlines aren’t met down to the second — managing the release of a game across millions of computers worldwide isn’t an easy feat. So Valve, take your time, just ignore the barrage of insults and gamer rage…
In the mean time gamers, visit the stats page to view the new in-game achievements and various records statistics.

UPDATE (+ 15 Minutes)

Having blocked comments on the event page (most likely to reduce server load), gamers can now no longer leave their insulting comments.. which is probably a good thing… This has allowed people to once again, gain access to Steam community.

UPDATE (+ 1 Hour)

An hour passed the launch time and L4D2 is finally showing signs of being released. The Steam store page has been revamped and a new post has made it onto the L4D blog site. Maybe daylight savings had something do with it

UPDATE (+1 Hour 15 Minutes)

Users are now able to decrypt game files Happy Gaming!

]]> http://www.shadowsplace.net/general/games/left-4-dead-2-release/feed/ 0 http://www.shadowsplace.net/general/games/borderlands-music/ http://www.shadowsplace.net/general/games/borderlands-music/#comments Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:16:16 +0000 Shadow http://www.shadowsplace.net/?p=466 While the art direction in Borderlands is fairly interesting, so is the music.

Here are two tracks from Borderlands that should be on the OST (Official Sound Track) at any rate.

“Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” by Cage The Elephant

• Show Lyrics

“No Heaven” by DJ Champion

• Show Lyrics