Let’s be honest. Advent Rising was a terrible game. But it had some of the best music I’ve ever heard in any videogame ever – potentially even better than Symphony of the Night. Take a listen if you don’t believe me.

Lungfishopolis MusicCast: Advent Rising

While I didn’t love The Witcher, it did have some fairly decent music. Probably the main reason I didn’t like the game is because it uses the same engine as the original Neverwinter Nights – the engine was my main complaint about NWN too.

Complaints aside, I hope you enjoy listening to the music from The Witcher, because I don’t have very much to say about the game.

Lungfishopolis MusicCast: The Witcher

You knew this one was coming, didn’t you? How could I cover video game music and not hit Beyond Good and Evil? Anyway, there really is some pretty nice music in the game. Hopefully, you enjoy it half as much as I do.

Lungfishopolis MusicCast – Beyond Good and Evil

Here’s the second Lungfishopolis musiccast – this one focuses on the music from Nintendo Wii’s Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I’m not entirely happy with the audio quality on this one – I’ll try to do better next time.

Lungfishopolis MusicCast – The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

I’ve been wanting to do a music segment for a while now, and the first game that came to mind for music is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. The mp3 is nearly 13 minutes long, whereas I was shooting for 10-12 minutes, but given the number of songs I squeezed in, I’d say I did fairly well. If you’re interested in a sampling of some of Symphony of the Night‘s best music, give it a listen.

I should also mention the plethora of technical difficulties I experienced during this recording. Firstly, I was terrorized by (and subsequently smote) a massive bee. Secondly, my cat at one point jumped up onto my server and sat himself down on the intake fan. I jumped up to unseat the feline and my foot caught on the microphone cord – I thought I’d broken my USB condenser mike, but thankfully it survived.

Lungfishopolis MusicCast – Castlevania Symphony of the Night

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

Granted, Audiosurf is a purchase that I made from Steam, and so I really couldn’t sell the game even if I wanted, but it’s a game I’d keep for all the same reasons that I’m keeping all the other games that are physically on my shelf. Audiosurf is pretty damned innovative. It lets you use any mp3 file or CD that you have to dynamically create a track on which to race.

For $10, it’s hard to do better than Audiosurf. You get to listen to good music while you play, and you know it’s good music because you’re picking it. Whether you’re racing to Jethro Tull, Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Joel, or (ahem) Kelly Clarkson, whatever you find to be good music is what you’ll use. Everyone has their own taste in music. Some of my personal favorites for Audiosurf are Sabotage by the Beastie Boys and Don’t Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult. Good mix of fast and slow.

The actual gameplay is a beautiful combination of racing and Tetris. As you speed through the course, it will speed up during intense music represented by downhill spans, and slow down during mellow parts, represented by uphill sections of track. There are many different gameplay modes, but in generaly, you’ll be running over different colored blocks as you race, dropping them onto a Connect-4 type of board, and when you line up enough of a given color, they disappear and you get points for them based on what color they are. Overflow a row, and you’re penalized. Whomever thought up this mechanic is a genius, because it’s the most inventive mashup of game genres since Puzzle Quest.

A lovingly-crafted parody of Oregon Trail, themed to Fallout Boy. There are some nice attempts at Guitar Hero like play, and some really poor attempts at shooter mechanics, but the game sure is funny. I died on the side of the road after my van was capsized by surf zombies. My chicken nuggets sank and my oxen drowned, leaving my van stranded.

Play Fallout Boy Trail

I happened across this recently: Traditional Christmas music done in the style of old 8-bit video games. They’ve actually combined Christmas music with specific game tunes. “Super Jingle Bros.” is a great example. Starts off sounding very much like the Mario Brothers tune, and then you realize it’s “Jingle Bells”. But it all sounds like it’s coming out of a Commodore 64’s SID chip. Good stuff.

8-Bit Jesus

Once I got the game, I went through the guitar tour on Medium and then started vocals on Easy.  Then I did vocals on Medium, then on Hard with a small detour to do drums on Easy.  The vocal tour was, by far, the most fun I had in that game.  Now that Rock Band 2 is here, vocals is still the most fun thing to do, even more so now that you can do the band world tour mode all by your lonesome.

So why is singing the most fun?  A couple of reasons.  For one, singing allows you to be the most expressive of all of the instruments. You can grip the mic two handed, Eddie Vedder style.  You can take it off of the stand (you do have a mic stand, right?) and get down with your bad self.  You can kick, you can move, you can snap your fingers, you can shake your hips, you can even swing the mic around like Roger Daltrey, provided you have high enough ceilings.  When playing drums, you can just sit there.  When playing guitar, you can just stand there, in both cases because you have to keep your eyes on the charts to know what to do next.

Which brings me to my next point, namely that singing is the easiest thing to learn, which then allows you to be more expressive.  The only way to learn songs for guitar, bass or drums in Rock Band or any other instrument based rhythm game for that matter, is to play and play and play.  If you want to sing, you just need to get your hands on a copy of the song, be it from the cd, or downloading the song, or bringing the video up on YouTube and you can listen to it constantly outside of the game.  Once you know the words, it’s much easier to focus on getting the pitch right when you’re in the game, but you can also work on that outside of the game, when you’re your car, or in the shower, or any where you don’t mind having people hear you sing.

The other fun thing about vocals is that no one wants to do it.  Seriously. I bet that if you get a room full of people together to play Rock Band, the only way you’ll get any one to sing is to fill them with booze.  This means that if you sing, you always get to play.  Let everyone else fight over the guitars or the drums.  You focus on the mic, lest it become lonely.

Now, I find that vocals offers the easiest transition from Easy to Hard, but again, I can somewhat carry a tune, and it only takes like three tries before I learn a song, but that may have something to do with having done the vocal tour in the original Rock Band three times.  Outside of the game, I’m sure I sound like shit, but I can drop a 5 star in the game with no problem.  Well, a few problems any way.  Curse you Iron Maiden!  I think that once you learn a song, the tweaks needed to step your game up are so far removed from what you’d need to do to go from Medium to Hard on the other instruments, but again, that’s just my personal experience.   I can tell you that the elated feeling you get when you 5 star a song on Hard isn’t any different when singing then when axe slinging.

So that’s why vocals is the only way to rock.  You can tear shit up, look good doing it and never have to give up your spot.  Plus, everyone knows that the singer gets all of the hottest groupies.

Not only will the Front be represented in Rock Band, but it’s one of his absolutely bestest songs ever, the Achewood inspired track “Livin’ on the Corner of Dude and Catastrophe”. I absolutely can not wait to try my hand at dropping his inconceivably thick rhymes. It’s supposed to drop on Tuesday, so before I go to Vegas I’ll be dropping rhymes like bombs.

The song is in the PAX Pack and also includes the fantastically excellent “Skullcrusher Mountain” by Jonathan Coulton and “Shhh?.” by Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, of which I know nothing. Proceeds from the sale of the songs goes to Child’s Play, so you can rock out, knowing that you’re helping sick kids everywhere.