Great Gaming Music #18: Atom Bomb

The Wipeout series is known for delivering thrilling high-speed futuristic anti-gravity racing. While superficially similar to Nintendo's F-Zero games, Wipeout distinguishes itself through an extreme sense of speed and a history of trance soundtracks featuring big-name artists, including Orbital, The Chemical Brothers, Underworld, Prodigy and Fluke.

The soundtrack to the Psygnosis-developed Wipeout XL was heavily promoted in partnership with Red Bull Energy Drink. Stations running the game were set up in nightclubs and an extensive marketing campaign was set in motion. The soundtrack album spawned a single, "Atom Bomb" by Fluke (featured above) which reached #20 on the UK charts. "Atom Bomb" also appeared on Fluke's fourth album Risotto and represents one of their most successful creations.

Great Gaming Music #8: Silent Hill

Akira Yamaoka's music for Silent Hill is the pinnacle of the field of Japanese survival-horror soundtracks. While his Theme of Laura from Silent Hill 2 seems to have become the default franchise mascot, I vastly prefer his creepy musical introduction to the original game, featured here alongside footage from the Silent Hill movie.

I think one of the reasons why Yamaoka's work on Silent Hill is so memorable is the way he avoids a lot of cliches of horror music. He marries up genuinely creepy passages of music with traditional guitar to reflect the juxtaposition of nightmare and normal which is a running theme of the series.

Not only did Yamaoka compose the soundtracks for all four of the original Silent Hill games plus Origins, Homecoming, and the film: he also worked as sound director on the core titles. Wikipedia informs that he recorded over 200 different footstep sounds for use in Silent Hill 2. His music has also been featured heavily throughout Konami's Beatmania IIDX franchise.

Great Gaming Music #6: Metal Gear Solid Main Theme

Harry Gregson-Williams is one of the most talented composers working Hollywood today, and his Metal Gear Solid Main Theme is easily one of his best works. The version shown above is as featured in the opening to Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance, which for my money is the best of the several arrangements showcased throughout the franchise. The music for the Metal Gear Solid games, combined with Hideo Kojima's direction, are responsible for the memorable big-screen cinematic feel of the franchise.

Gregson-Williams has also produced scores for a huge range of big-budget films of the last decade, including but not limited to the two Chronicles of Narnia movies, the Shrek movies, and Kingdom of Heaven. He collaborated with Hans Zimmer on The Rock and will be scoring the upcoming X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie.

Great Gaming Music #4: One-Winged Angel

Final Fantasy VII was a generation-defining game which ended with an apocalyptic confrontation between the main characters and the game's arch-villain Sephiroth. Nobuo Uematsu's theme for that fight, One-Winged Angel, is one of the most thrilling and memorable songs in gaming history.

Uematsu is well known as the composer for a large number of Square-Enix and Mistwalker games, including Chrono Trigger, Lost Odyssey, Blue Dragon and all the Final Fantasy titles to date. He is also the creator of the excellent main theme from Super Smash Bros Brawl. His works have been featured in a number of live orchestral concerts and he tours as part of rock band The Black Mages.

The version of One-Winged Angel that appears above is as performed live by the Eminence Symphony Orchestra at the Sydney Town Hall. Those who want to hear the song as it originally appeared on the PlayStation version of FF7 can click here, although they're warned that it doesn't have quite the sound quality they may remember.

PSOne Games for PSP require PS3

That's a lot of uses of "PS" in the post-title. Huh.

Anyway, some time ago Sony promised us we'd be able to download and play original Playstation games on the PSP. The word is now in that (as I feared) the games can't be downloaded direct to the PSP - you have to obtain them through the Playstation 3 online service.

That's right, you have to own a Playstation 3 AND a PSP to download and play the games. Oh, and they could cost anywhere from $10 AUD to $30 AUD, depending on how much Sony feels like ripping us off. Plus, if you don't already have a memory stick for the PSP that holds at least 600 meg, you'll need to get one of those too.

If I wasn't enjoying the PSP port of Tales of Eternia so much right now I'd be tempted to call it a useless piece-of-#$!& doorstop. Dagnabbit.

Full story here via Gamespot.