Some days you just need music to plot by, a suitable accompaniment to the story you are writing. On those days, Jack Wall should always have a place on your playlist. His scores for Mass Effect 1 and 2 are a regular feature when I’m writing, but every now and then the plot calls for something a little more tribal. This week, Myst IV – Revelation.
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Game Music: Myst IV – Revelation
A personal history of game music: Part 3 – Dawn of the PC
The Spectrum may have been the formative computing experience of my early boyhood but I am, first and foremost, a child of the PC. So here we have part 3 of the series, the early years of the PC where the beeper still held sway. Competing with the might of the Amiga, the PC promised great things…
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Game music: Journey
This week we’re back on albums that are actually soundtracks to games instead of ‘inspired by’ games. However, this week’s soundtrack comes via a recommendation rather than my own experience. Being a PlayStation 3 exclusive I’ve never played it, but the soundtrack to Journey is beautiful and I’m grateful for the recommendation.
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LaTeX, apacite and bibliographies
Just a LaTeX issue and solution, in case anyone else ever spends half an afternoon banging their heads against this particular brick wall.
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You want nostalgia? Here’s more nostalgia than you can possibly handle
The early days of PC gaming were a wonderful, frustrating and mysterious time. Minimum requirements were to be respected and feared, manual configuration was serious business and every last byte of memory counted. I challenge anyone who grew up playing DOS games not to go all misty-eyed at this love-letter from last century…
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A personal history of game music: Part 2 – The NES
After the Spectrum came the NES (or Nintendo Entertainment System for those who really enjoy syllables), a revolution that brought gaming out of arcades and into the living room. With it came a generational leap in audio quality, a series of truly iconic soundtracks and, for the first time, composers who would go on to become infamous.
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Game Music: World of Goo
Goo! Lots of goo. A world of it in fact. And goo must have music, gooey music, musical goo. And here it is, the World Of Goo soundtrack.
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A personal history of game music: Part 1 – The ZX Spectrum
The first computer I ever really played with as a child was my dad’s Dragon 64, an amazing piece of technology where the only games were ones you wrote yourself, using either a knowledge of programming or by copying code from books and magazines. Over time, the latter drifted to the former. My first computer, and the first one I remember having music with its games, was a ZX Spectrum +3.
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Not Quite Game Music: Impostor Nostalgia
In itself, Impostor Nostalgia the soundtrack to a game. There is no Impostor Nostalgia game, no Impostor Nostalgia leaderboards or Impostor Nostalgia achievements. It is, however, a master class in 8-bit chiptune music by one of my favourite composers and featuring some true greats of the genre.
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A personal history of game music
Despite writing quite a lot about game music, and listening to an awful lot of it, it turns out I actually know sod all about it – the history, the technology, the composers. Every now and then I’ll come across an article that touches on it and find it all fascinating. Inquisitive blighter that I am, this is going to change.
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