predcon

I was just re-listening to this tonight, and I picked up on something not-so-subtle, but also hidden in plain sight. Right around 2:33, the acoustic guitar that cuts in is from his earlier "Acrophobia" remix of the "Falling on a Landmine/Buttville/Use Your Head" track from EWJ. That's a really deep callback, and I think it's great.

I like it. It gives me that same feeling I got the second or third time I played through the game, when it starts to sink in just how close I am to the end of it.

Lately I've had RAF/Laura Branigan's "Self Control" on my mind, and this scratches all of that itch. Top job!

I'd figured it was an instrument/voice limit issue, just wasn't sure how the chip decided which one to suspend.

You know when you're playing a game on an old system, and you pause to do something, then you unpause, and one of the instruments in the BGM that's playing is silenced for whatever note it was playing, and then picks up again a second after? What causes that? Why one instrument and not all?

This is the sort of tune you imagine playing alongside the credits scroll, perhaps with bits of concept art fading in and out. Well done!

Well done, fellows! I really appreciate the modern treatment. Now I can count, just a little bit more, on my younger contemporaries having heard of this melody!

My favourite musical memory will always be the first time I heard "Rainbow Islands" as it was played in the Amiga version of Lemmings. The closest second is the title theme to Zool 2.

There's something about the synthesized chimes and 'cantered' pace synth-guitar. It says 'I need lyrics'.

It certainly is popular. I was just on the phone with the billing department at work, and the woman's phone went off, and this was the ringtone. That bugger was loud, too. Like she wanted everyone to hear it.

Would it be too self-serving to promote the fact that Croteam almost exclusively used Lightwave 3D to model the original The First Encounter game? Maybe somewhere in the "insert foldout".

It's a tall order, making an "album" request. But Sam deserves it. I've not seen one Serious Sam remix on OCR since the first Serious Sam game in 2001. Even Duke has had his day. But not Sam. It seems he's cursed to be forever locked in the past.

My only complaint is the decision to cut "Airbased" from even the Bonus disc. I don't download a whole lot of these OC Remix albums (the last two were the Doom and "All American" albums), but it looks like all the music is composed specially for album judges' consideration at the time of it's announcement. Is that how it works?

"Easily disappointed" is someone who's disappointed by a wide range of things. I was disappointed by the absence of a single element (not to mention the surplus of another element). BUT! The whole of the Tyrian soundtrack, or at least the tracks that were scored for the original 1995 Epic MegaGames release (Tyrian 2000 has all of them, but the "OST" included on the CD lacked several tracks) can be found on Alexander Brandon's personal Bandcamp.com page. And there's even little factoids for each track as you play them!

I must say, when I saw the Bad Ass Bosses album, I thought "This might be it! Someone might have included Vykromod!" (I often wondered why he wasn't a contender in GameSpot's "Ultimate Villain" contest. I guess too many people were pre-occupied with FF). And I was greatly disappointed. Who doesn't remember reading the Vykromod DataCube after the very first ever level of Tyrian, which boils down to "I'll be back!", and then reading the second DataCube from ol' Vyk right before entering the last level of the first episode, saying "I'm back, I'm pissed, and I'm more heavily armed than last time...Have a nice day"? You might not remember the 'Cubes, but you'll most certainly remember the boss theme. The strains of the synthesized string section (the General MIDI version has more easily identifiable "string" instruments than the original FM Synth version), and the tolling of that, er, one bell. But it's a bass bell! The kind that drives the rest of the melody with the sort of pulse-pounding, "this is the final stand!" urgency (as if dodging the ridiculously rapid firing guns of Vykromod's improved ship didn't already give you that impression)! And you could supplement it with "Come Back Again To Savara", that creepy tune that played during the end text scroll of Episode 1. You know, the one with the dude's skull on a spike, and his spine wrapped around it?