Posts tagged with “music”

Got an XBox 360, and want a fun old school platform puzzler for $3? Then go onto the indies channel (XBLIG) and download Escape Goat, the latest offering by Magical Time Bean.

In escape goat you star as an inexplicably purple colored goat who has been imprisoned for witchcraft. Teaming up with a small mouse with a taste for magic hats you have to navigate and escape from 64 puzzle rooms using a relatively simple rule set of jump, dash, push button, avoid fireball. The game shines because the level design is fairly tight and most of the levels are fun and interesting to play, and the few bits of dialog you encounter are relatively amusing.

My gripes with the game are few; the graphics aren’t very impressive, some of the critical elements blend into the background too much, and the game elements all have a similar look and feel (for instance, keys and magic hats look almost identical). However none of these points are damning, and we found ourselves coming back to this for more on a regular basis until we beat the game. The title even comes with a level editor that is surprisingly easy to use and fun to make your own levels.

If you are an indie fan and want a puzzler then this is certainly one to get. And for $3 it’s pretty damn cheap. Go on XBLIG and grab it now!

Oh yeah, and if you like the game’s music (composed by the dev, mixed by Chainsaw of Twisted Pixel fame) then you can grab it for whatever you want here.

Hey SBS fans!

We’re excited today to be releasing the original soundtrack for Slam Bolt Scrappers! We’re offering it as a free download over on this page.

The 13 tracks making up the soundtrack were composed and produced just for SBS by me and Jeff Nickel, who’s also responsible for the soundtrack to our thugged out team video. This is the first released game music for both of us — we learned a ton and had a blast getting the tracks ready for the game. We hope you’ve enjoyed listening to them too.

So go download the tracks now, or listen on YouTube to get a taste!

Last week Brenton, an indie dev from Upstate NY, drove all the way here to Boston to talk to our monthly meet up for local indie devs. He was showing off Planck, an interesting new take on a music game being worked on by new start up Shadegrown Games.

The game is kind of like a mash up between a shoot ‘em up and Frequency. You play as an invincible speedboat zipping along a tar black sea, shooting objects in your path with 1 to 4 weapons. Each of your weapons plays the notes of a different violin, and each of the enemies explodes in a little firework which plays notes as well. As you can imagine there is a lot of shooting going on, and you wind up making a fairly coherent, looping, and simple yet gratifying song in the process. Different weapons/instruments behave in different ways, but none of it really matters much as you are invincible so you don’t have much pressure to shoot/explode targets beyond what music you’re trying to make. You also have the ability to “crossfade”, which shifts the tint of the playing field and the style of the music you’re making while keeping the same beat and theme. The whole thing has a nice neon and water aesthetic, and kind of reminds me of Auditorium.

The game is interesting, and fun to play even if it is a bit rough around the edges. The song gets a bit repetitive after a while (only one track is available in the demo), and the gameplay seems aimless at times. That said the game is a neat psychedelic experience, and certainly worth a play. It also looks fairly polished for such an early stage of development. We’re excited to see where these guys go with the game – we’re looking forward to new mechanics, new levels and abilities, and more compelling gameplay choices. And I bet the Shadegrown guys can deliver!

Go download the game and give it a shot, especially if you like music games!

Vincent Diamante and Steve Johnson are two of my favorite people. They are the two sound geeks behind the music in Flower, and they are VERY good at what they do. Here is a talk they recently gave on using sound and music to create narrative in that game, and it’s a really cool listen! They discuss influences, how they went about creating music on a shifting project with an abstract goal, and what interesting things they did to make the game sound awesome. And considering that Flower is (in my opinion) one of the best sounding new games out there I’d say they did a great job?

Yes, this is only the first 8 minutes of an hour long talk. Wanna watch the whole thing? You can catch it the full talk (chopped up into 8 sections) here.

SEMI-RELATED TANGENT TIME!

1. As long as we’re talking about video game music, does anyone else think that the Bionic Commando Rearmed soundtrack was extra awesome?

2. I’d like to point out that in addition to being a composer nerd Vincent is also has a kick ass blog on photography, food, and anything else interesting that comes to mind. Definitely a fun read.

Another lecture blog post? HELLS YES. We’ll stop putting these up when the awesome guys at GAMBIT stop making them. Thanks to Gene, Abe, Ken Zolot, and anyone else who was involved with making this that I’m not aware of.

In this talk Eran Egozy (co-founder and CTO of Harmonix, whom you know and love for Guitar Hero and Rock Band) talks about how Harmonix started out, how they got off the ground and shifted into (and ultimately defined the genre of) music games, and then fields a bunch of questions from some really smart MIT and Sloan students. Check it out!