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Jukebox Heroes: Star Wars Galaxies' soundtrack
Ah, Star Wars Galaxies. Even almost two years after your demise, it doesn't seem possible to shake you loose from our thoughts. Maybe the NGE was a blessing in disguise, a never-depleting power source of rage that will forever give life to your memories. In any case, it's time to talk about the one aspect of the game that was there before SWG was created and will go on indefinitely afterward: the soundtrack. Talking about Star Wars Galaxies' soundtrack puts me in an odd position because a great deal of the OST is lifted directly from John Williams' movie scores. And what hasn't been said about those classics, really? But there are a few tracks here and there that I could pick out as being unique to the game, although the actual composer who did the job escapes my Google Fu. So let's take one last trip to a Galaxies far, far away, shall we?
CIG releases Star Citizen livestream vids, tops $33 million
If you missed yesterday's four-hour Star Citizen livestream, you missed several new behind-the-scenes videos that are definitely worth a look. We got to see footage of the Avenger with its new texturing and PBR effects, a peek inside SC's orchestral recording sessions with composer Pedro Camacho and audio director Martin Galway, and a look at the game's HUD and UI development hosted by all of the principle developers, including Iron Man 3 design veteran John Likens. Finally, we got a quick look at the new hangar-based weapons test rig that will be playable by the end of the year as well as a second look at the Foundry 42 video released last week. Oh yeah, and the game topped $33 million in crowdfunding, too, prompting yet another letter from the chairman. We've embedded all the videos for you after the cut.
Jukebox Heroes: Dragon's Prophet's soundtrack
Considering the lack of chatter I've heard about Dragon's Prophet post-launch, I'm willing to say that this title's been having a difficult time gaining traction in the main MMO community. Gameplay aside, I was looking forward to this MMO's release because I hold Runewaker's Runes of Magic in high regard when it comes to its soundtrack. I was hoping for the same level of quality in Dragon's Prophet, and I really wasn't disappointed. The OST was composed by Alex Pfeffer, Alexander Röder, Mindy Lo, and Rmoney Chen. It's a series of grand, stirring orchestral tunes that would be at home transplanted to just about any fantasy MMO that you're playing. Listening through it all, I found that it had a high ratio of quality tracks, so much so that narrowing it down to six picks proved problematic. I think I found a good balance, however.
Jukebox Heroes: Helm's Deep's soundtrack
Well this was a particularly pleasant surprise! As the resident Lord of the Rings Online writer around these here parts, I've been pretty excited about this week's Helm's Deep release. I totally did not expect Turbine to give away the entire soundtrack for free on SoundCloud a week ago, especially after selling Riders of Rohan's score as a digital album. But that's what happened, and I am very much not complaining. While the esteemed Chance Thomas did not compose the second part of the Rohan saga, the studio did make the effort to create an original score in-house instead of just rehashing previous tracks. The result is an album of 25 new tunes for us to evaluate in anticipation of the next chapter of LotRO. So I threw out my original plans for this week's column, microwaved up some coffee, and gave the new score a listen. It was difficult narrowing the field down to six standout tracks, but the coffee was strong and so was my will. Let's take a listen through Helm's Deep, shall we?
Jukebox Heroes: Ultima X Odyssey's soundtrack
Out of all of the MMOs that never made it to launch, Ultima X Odyssey could have really been something. It had a wonderfully stylized look, an immense amount of resources and talent behind it, the Ultima franchise legacy to draw upon, a cool morality choice system, and a pretty strong following. All of that fell apart when EA pulled the plug on the project in 2004, leaving fans in the lurch. However, since UXO was far enough along in development, it's one of those cancelled MMOs that has an actual soundtrack (just like Project Copernicus, which I talked about a few weeks ago). Composer Chris Field completed and recorded an album for the game in 2003, and although it was never released, it was distributed into the wild for free, and certain portions of the soundtrack were repurposed for the game Lord of Ultima. I have to say that it's a good (possibly even great) score, and it's a shame it didn't get to be in an MMO for us gamers to appreciate. That doesn't mean we can't have a listen right now and speculate on what players in parallel universes might be enjoying right now, yes?
Lord of the Rings Online offers up the Helm's Deep soundtrack
All right, Lord of the Rings Online fans, another expansion is coming out really soon. It's only a week away. But maybe you still can't stand the wait. You're logging in and playing the game every night but you need something to make the next few days bearable. That's a bit of an overreaction, but Turbine has you covered with the addition of the Helm's Deep soundtrack to SoundCloud. Yes, you can now listen to the entire soundtrack from wherever, although you won't be able to download the tracks for obvious reasons. The music is the same orchestral score that players have come to expect from the game, with an atmosphere of desperate conflict and impending violence. It's the sort of thing that's very well-suited to a protracted siege and a last stand against Mordor, in other words. Even if you're not a fan of Lord of the Rings Online you can enjoy the soundtrack.
Jukebox Heroes: RuneScape's soundtrack
How much music does the average MMO contain? It depends, of course, but I doubt that many games are able to reach the number that RuneScape does. Are you ready for it? It's 982 tracks. I'm dead serious. It's not just that RuneScape has been out since the beginning of the internet but that the team continues to add new music regularly. It's really insane -- just check out this list of updates. What's even neater is that RuneScape treats its music as unlockable content, just like other types of rewards. So while you start out with 70 or so tracks in your in-game music player, you'll have to go to certain places or perform certain feats to get the rest. Why have I never heard of this before? That's brilliant! So obviously, even if I had all 982 tracks on my computer (which I do not), I'm not going to take a week off of work to review them all for you. I love you, but that love has limits. Instead, I've listened to perhaps a tenth of that (including the new stuff by Composer James Hannigan) and chosen a few tracks to share that I feel exemplify this MMO's score.
Mega Man anniversary, Symphony of the Night remix albums released [update]
Update: This post's lede is meant to reference the absence of a new Mega Man game, but is written in a way that suggests Capcom was not involved in the production of these albums. Capcom Community Manager Brett Elston pitched and oversaw the production of both albums, meaning both are a collaboration between the publisher and fans of the series. Capcom didn't do much for the 25th anniversary of Mega Man, but its fans sure did! Two new albums celebrating the series' sonic history, MM25: Mega Man Rocks and For Everlasting Peace: 25 Years of Mega Man, are ready to bring back fond memories of the blue bomber's legacy via waveforms. MM25: Mega Man Rocks is an 18-track effort from six bands; Armcannon, The Megas, Mega Ran, X-Hunters, The Protomen and Bit Brigade. MM25 also features new songs - The Protomen's "Built to Last" and Mega Ran's "20XX" - so there should be something here for you even if you've recently been to a show. For Everlasting Peace: 25 Years of Mega Man boasts 21 remixes from the fine musicians at OC Remix, all of which originate from the first game in a Mega Man series. To be specific, the album features re-imagined tracks from Mega Man, Mega Man X, Mega Man Legends, Mega Man Battle Network, Mega Man Zero, Mega Man ZX and Mega Man Star Force. Both of these albums are available on iTunes for $9.99. If you've spent more of your time whipping Medusa heads out of the air and eating questionably-stored chickens, Dj Cutman has released Nerdcore Instrumentals, a free remix album dedicated to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night's soundtrack. Cutman writes on the album's site that the involved beats were produced by Sammus and mastered by himself, describing the venture as an "experiment" to use techniques he would typically "reserve for dance music on hiphop instrumentals." [Thanks, Dj Cutman!]
Jukebox Heroes: Halloween tunes
Darkness falls across the land. The midnight hour is close at hand. Creatures crawl in search of blood to terrorize your neighbourhood. And whosoever shall be found without the soul for getting down must stand and face the hounds of hell. ~ Thriller Is it thriller night already? It's just about, actually, and that means that we need to get a little freaky and a lot creepy in today's edition of Jukebox Heroes. Let's put aside our jaunty ballads and epic fanfares for music of the crypt. Let's dance with skeletons and play pin-the-wart-on-the-witch as these tunes fill our ears. My advice? Turn it up. If you keep the monsters rocking out, then they'll be too preoccupied to eat you.
Jukebox Heroes: Reader requests 2
It's been far too long -- going on 10 months now, in fact -- since we last had a reader request week here on Jukebox Heroes. My bad! I'll try to do these a little more often from now on. The idea here is to take all of your comments from previous columns, sift them for "oh man, why didn't you include [name of tune]? That's the best!" mentions, and compile a few of them to share with everyone. After all, I'm certainly not the beginning, middle, and end of taste in MMO music. So here we go with several reader requests over the past year, covering a wide span of MMO scores. There's bound to be a few good listens in here, so give them all a try and let me know which of your favorite tracks we should cover in part 3!
Watch an orchestra perform War Thunder's Symphony of Steel
Gaijin is making a concerted effort to publicize its War Thunder World War II sim of late, and one of this week's more noteworthy reveals is a performance of the Baltic Symphonic Orchestra captured on video. The group is shown recording Symphony of Steel, a new track written for the game's upcoming ground battles. Feast your eyes -- and ears -- after the cut! [Thanks hilaryminc!]
Jukebox Heroes: Project Copernicus' soundtrack
Out of the many tragedies that emerged from the 38 Studios fiasco was the fact that so much artistry was ultimately abandoned, unseen, and unheard by players. I can't imagine what it would be like to be a composer who spent months working on a full MMO score only to have the studio tank and the music silenced. Well, I can't bring back 38 Studios or Project Copernicus, but today we can at least hear a little of the music that went into the game. As a helpful commenter noted in the Sound Cloud column a couple of weeks ago, Composer Gene Rozenberg of The Witcher 3 fame posted a heap of the (then upcoming) Project Copernicus score on his page. Since it's still there, although not downloadable, I wanted to highlight a few of the best tracks before this too gets erased.
Jukebox Heroes: Lineage II's soundtrack
Once again, I must begin this column by advising you to jettison your attitude toward an MMO when it comes to evaluating its music. Lineage II doesn't have the rabid following in the West that it seems to overseas, and I've heard a lot of negativity thrown its way (some of it quite deserved, but this is me jettisoning). However -- and I don't say this lightly -- its musical score is absolutely superb. It's right up there with the best of the industry and deserves to be heard. Its many soundtrack albums have a small army of composers powering them: Bill Brown, Jamie Christopherson, Inon Zur, Hyobum Lim, Chihwan Kim, Junyup Lee, Junghwan Park, Junghye Hong, and Changbeom Kim. Collaboratively, these folks have assembled a sizable body of work that spans a decade of video game music. The Lineage II soundtrack is, at times, cinematic, tranquil, lovely, and exciting. Check out these six tracks for a taste of the best, and if that interests you, you might want to listen to my recent Battle Bards podcast in which we dissect this score.
Jukebox Heroes: 14 MMO soundtracks you can check out on SoundCloud
I'm a pretty slow adopter of new technology and services, so I've only recently really started paying attention to the music-sharing service that is SoundCloud because I've started to see more and more MMO composers plopping down their work onto the site for the world to enjoy. Now that I've spent some time with SoundCloud, I've got to say just how impressed I am with what it can offer to the soundtrack community. Composers and studios can put their soundtracks up on the site for people to listen through without that annoying arbitrary 30-second limit that certain digital distribution platforms use. In addition to providing music for the ears, musicians have the option to show where these albums can be purchased -- and in some cases, offer the tracks as a free download. In return, listeners can tag portions of the songs and have back-and-forth discussions with the composers. I've done a lot of digging and have discovered quite a few MMO soundtracks that are available on SoundCloud, including some that you can legally download and enjoy today. Here are 14 to get you started, but if you see any more, please let us all know in the comments!
Jukebox Heroes: The Secret World's radio songs
With its contemporary setting, The Secret World has the opportunity to include not only an original score but regular songs as well. Funcom's handled this by broadcasting rock, techno, and other genre tunes over the many in-game radios, much as how Grand Theft Auto fans can tune into different stations to hear a wide variety of tracks. Not so long ago, the studio even held a contest for fans and artists to submit additional tunes to be included in the game, ending up with 11 new tracks that you might hear while clothes shopping, hanging out at a club, or perusing records at a store. Some are pretty darn good, too. So let's dispense with the traditional format of this column today and take a listen to what Radio TSW has to offer us. Alas, there will be no "Thriller." We checked.
Jukebox Heroes: Tracy W. Bush opens up about WoW, Dungeon Runners, and DCUO
Odds are that even if you don't know who Tracy W. Bush is, you've allowed him to pipe music from his mind directly into your ears at one point or another during your MMO gameplay. Bush has contributed to tons of MMO soundtracks over the past decade-plus, including World of Warcraft, Tabula Rasa, Dungeon Runners, Auto Assault, and DC Universe Online. It was actually this column's discussion of the Tabula Rasa soundtrack that prompted Bush to write in (fun fact: Blue Turns to Grey was the first track he wrote for the game, but the team held off putting it in until the very end), and I asked him if he'd be open to chatting about his collective work here. That didn't take much arm-twisting, no sirree. So with that, I'm going to turn the mike over to Tracy Bush and let him share with you what it's like to create soundscapes that echo so powerfully in your memories.
Jukebox Heroes: TERA's soundtrack
Within the small but passionate video game music community, there's a common gripe that goes around regarding studios' haphazard methods of distributing and selling original soundtracks. My general thought is that it's not that hard to just make a soundtrack a digital purchase through Amazon, iTunes, etc. for those who are interested in purchasing it, but more often than not, one has to look high and low to figure out how to get the desired music. What's even worse is when a soundtrack is released in different editions by region. Take today's subject, TERA, as an example. TERA's OST was at least released, but in two different editions: the limited 26-track edition given to Europe and Japan and the expansive 50-track edition that debuted in the US. It's just silly to do this sort of thing, but we see it all the time (and don't get me started on the way-too-expensive Japanese import of Final Fantasy XIV's Before Meteor). Anyway, I have a burr in my saddle about this today because TERA is a tremendous soundtrack. It's rich, evocative, and just plain catchy in parts. If you've listened to only part of this score composed by Inon Zur and Rod Abernethy, then you owe it to yourself to scrounge up the full deal. Here are my favorites!
Jukebox Heroes: World of Warcraft's Mosaic soundtrack
If you were one of the lucky ducks who went to BlizzCon in 2009 and you were a soundtrack fan, then life smiled upon you. It was there and there only that Blizzard sold a now-rare World of Warcraft soundtrack called Mosaic. I guess "Mosaic" sounded better than "Leftovers," although that's really what it was: a collection of leftover tracks that hadn't been included in an official WoW soundtrack to date. The amazing thing is, Mosaic is quite good -- better, I think, than The Burning Crusade. I was pretty shocked to discover it a year or so ago, although I wasn't as shocked considering how much I've come to realize that studios just don't put out a lot of their game's music. So what we have here is a hodge-podge of 16 tracks ranging from the silly to the sublime. They might not be as famous as some of the featured tunes from the other soundtracks, but chances are that if you played WoW, you'll recognize them even so. Here are my picks for the best of the litter.
Jukebox Heroes: Age of Wushu's soundtrack
You're probably not going to catch me in Age of Wushu any time soon. I mean, don't get me wrong, kidnapping and castration are definitely the innovative features we as an MMO community have been begging for, but "PvP sandbox" is like spraying a game with anti-Justin repellent. But I will gladly listen to Age of Wushu's soundtrack because it is simply wonderful. I was really just expecting very generic Chinese music -- you know, the kind you might hear as muzak in your local take-out restaurant. Instead, this is a score worthy of a movie adjacent to Jet Li's presence. Perhaps that's why he's shilling for this game. I couldn't track down the composer for this, so if any of you know, drop me a line and I'll make sure to give you credit. What I do know is that it was a great pleasure to listen through this entire score, and picking out just six tracks to highlight proved a challenging task.
Jukebox Heroes: Wurm Online's soundtrack
When is a soundtrack not a soundtrack? When it's Wurm Online, of course. This cult sandbox has one of the most unusual scores that I've ever heard paired with an MMO. It's made up of sparsely used incidental music that just so happens to be folksy blues songs (with lyrics), composed by Joss Sanglier and performed by 21st Century Blues. It's catchy, don't get me wrong, but it comes with a case of mental whiplash if you were expecting the typical fantasy fare. Think of it this way: All of these songs sound as if they were originally made for a steakhouse commercial. "In Wurm, we don't play music constantly," explained Lead Designer Rolf Jansson. "Instead we play a song every now and then often based on the setting or a special event such as when you form a village. If you ever played the Lara Croft Tomb Raider game, the rare music scores really enhanced special situations, and that's what I was aiming for as well." To make matters more interesting, recently the Wurm Online team has sponsored the creation of not one, not two, but three concept albums that will be worked into the game itself. The first such album, Meditation and Work, is now out and is quite good. While we're going to look at the "classic" Wurm tunes today, I didn't want to overlook this new project. Perhaps we'll even get back to it some day!
