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  Game Music Festival & Holiday Bundle Launch Extravaganza

  November 29, 2013 | Brenna Wilkes | Comments Off on Game Music Festival & Holiday Bundle Launch Extravaganza Share this Game Music Festival & Holiday Bundle Launch Extravaganza

  

  Your Black Friday doesn’t need to be all about shopping store massacres and finding the best deals. Why not kick back, enjoy your Turkey Day hangover, and have the deals brought to you? Not only deals, but also a 4-day music e-festival!

  Running from Black Friday until Cyber Monday, the Game Music Festival will be bringing you not only the opportunity to grab the Game Music Bundle 6, but also enjoy a ton of content, including interviews with artists such as Disasterpiece (Fez), composers like Grant Kirkhope (Banjo-Kazooie) and internet game music starts such as our recent bearded, feline-loving acapella sensation Smooth McGroove. Enjoy the Game Music Bundle’s more than 20 game soundtrack albums, all while chilling out with fellow fans and having a bunch of game content thrown at your faces!

  The Game Music Bundle 6, which marks the 2-year anniversary of the GMB’s start, will be available as always for $1 for 5 soundtracks, and the entire 20-game ensemble for $10. Also available will be exclusive deals on tons of other game-related albums for a fraction of their prices, all in time for the holidays! Check it all out at http://www.gamemusicfestival.com/ and spend your Black Friday the right way.

• Featured, Game Music, Reviews

  Videri’s “Portals” (Review)

  November 4, 2013 | Richard McDonald | 1 Comment Share this Videri’s “Portals” (Review)

  

  Purchase: iTunes | Loudr

  EDITOR’S NOTE: For the sake of full disclosure … Videri String Quartet’s debut album Portals was promoted by Scarlet Moon Productions, founded by Jayson Napolitano. Below, OSV blogger Richard McDonald gives his own opinion of the album.

  As gamers from the ’80s and early ’90s come into their late 20s /early 30s, some of the more musically minded of them have started looking back to the games of yesteryear for musical inspiration. It seems that now is the time for instrumental albums of old game music. Professional string orchestra Angèle Dubeau & La Pietà brought out a Game Music album lately, that was truly amazing, and I’ve been enjoying The Greatest Video Game Music 2 album as well of late. However, what with the affordability of recording equipment and amazing music distribution sites like Bandcamp and Loudr, smaller groups are getting in on the act. Bands like The OneUps have been covering game music for years and now classical ensembles are putting their 2 cents in.

  So; in comes the Videri String Quartet, a group of professionally trained classical musicians whose debut album comprises of a compilation of popular game music tracks and medleys. Glancing though the track list, I immediately see the classics. Super Mario Bros, Sonic the Hedgehog, Final Fantasy VII and Halo. Like many others, this is an album aimed squarely at the 20-30 something gaming audience with a yen for nostalgia and a disposable income. But I also see more modern tracks, like Final Fantasy X, Journey and Kingdom Hearts, and it is here that I think this albums falls a little. (more…)

• Featured, Game Music, Indie Music, Reviews

  It’s a stick-up! Gunpoint Soundtrack (Review)

  September 23, 2013 | Richard McDonald | 1 Comment Share this It’s a stick-up! Gunpoint Soundtrack (Review)

  

  It seems that if you have the talent and the drive, game developers are able to go it alone these days. Jonathan Blow (Braid), Daisuke Amaya (Cave Story) and now Tom Francis with Gunpoint are all single developers that have made it to the top. The opposite almost seems to be true for game soundtracks. Famously, Jonathan Blow selected several tracks from the website Magnatune, all from different artists, and the final fantasy series has several composers on hand to write music. Tom Francis seems to have gone for the multi composer route by choosing 3 artists to write the soundtrack for his game, Gunpoint.

  (Amaya is the exception, as he wrote all his own music for Cave Story.)

  After the jump, I’ll let you in on who all wrote the soundtrack for this riveting new indie game, and what I thought of each composer’s work respectively. (more…)

• Doujin, Featured, Game Music, Indie Music

  Videri, Project Destati, and other new Joypad Releases

  September 19, 2013 | Patrick Gann | 1 Comment Share this Videri, Project Destati, and other new Joypad Releases

  

  The good folks at Joypad Records continue to attract new and interesting talent for new VGM arrangements. Surely by now y’all have heard the glory of Smooth McGroove, right?

  I wanted to take a moment to highlight some new releases that I’ve been very much enjoying. First up (and pictured above) is the debut album from Videri String Quartet, entitled “Portals.” I haven’t heard a good string quartet album in awhile, so I was excited to check this one out. It features a collection of generally well-known tunes, including full medleys for a handful of popular games including The Legend of Zelda, Halo and Final Fantasy VII. It’s available on Loudr for 12.00 USD. Full disclosure: I first found out about this album from a press release written by none other than OSV’s illustrious Jayson Napolitano.

  Another great little album worth checking out is the first in a series of albums from a collective calling themselves “Project Destati.” For those of you who somehow forgot, “Destati” is the name of one of the best up-tempo, intense battle themes from Yoko Shimomura’s Kingdom Hearts compositions. Project Destati intends to release a lot of music … for now, they have a 5-track, 18-minute EP out called “Awakening.” It’s available on Loudr for 3.00 USD. I learned about this one via an RPGFan news story.

  There are other new albums worth checking out as well: I’ll put in my own recommendation for DJ Cutman and Spamtron’s “MeowMeow & BowWow” — which serves as an EDM-style tribute to the Game Boy classic Link’s Awakening.

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