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playinginthesystem · 7 years

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video game composers that I love

a note before we begin: So that this list wasn’t 3 years long, I’ve only chosen composers whose work appears in many games I’ve played and loved the soundtracks to. I’ve put some honorable mentions at the end, for composers who have only written for one or two games, but they were great ones.

Jesper Kyd - you’ve heard his work in the Borderlands games, some entries in the Assassin’s Creed franchise (namely, 1, 2, Revelations and Brotherhood), Darksiders 2, and the Hitman franchise, including Hitman: Blood Money, Hitman 2, and Hitman: Contracts. Has great hair/facial hair going on. Find his work on Spotify, or on SoundCloud if that’s more your thing. I highly recommend a Jesper Kyd Pandora station, as well (ha ha Borderlands jokes)

Grant Kirkhope - responsible for Banjo-Kazooie. Need I say more? Yes? Oh, all right, how does Civilization: Beyond Earth grab you? Or Kingdoms of Amalur, or Viva Piñata, or Perfect Dark, or Grabbed by the Ghoulies, or Donkey Kong 64... He’s hilarious on Twitter too and was once on Game Grumps and it was great. Find him on Bandcamp, or on Spotify.

Russell Brower - Big fun fantasy stuff! He’s Blizzard Entertainment’s Senior Director of Audio. Brower writes for World of Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, Hearthstone, etc and also has GREAT HAIR. He’s not the *only* Blizzard composer, but most of the time when I find myself humming something from WoW, it’s something Brower wrote. Listen to the dang theme from Wrath of the Lich King and tell me it isn’t awesome, I dare you. Find more on Spotify, or use him as the base for a Pandora station and feel like you can take down an army.

Koji Kondo: an industry legend, who wrote most of the Nintendo music you love so much: the Legend of Zelda series, Super Mario, Yoshi’s Island, Star Fox. He also designs sound effects for many Nintendo games. There’s not much to say about Koji Kondo besides the fact that he composed the sound of your childhood and mine. Some of his work is on Spotify, but I’d say your best (and most nostalgic) bet is to make a Koji Kondo Pandora station.

Russell Shaw: Composed the fun dark fantasy sound of the Fable series, as well as the soundtrack for Black & White. He took the challenge of hearing a theme created by Danny freakin’ Elfman and crafted a beautiful, spooky, and glorious soundtrack around it. That’s amazing, I don’t care who you are. Check him out on Spotify, or on Last.fm.

Darren Korb: Bastion! Transistor! This dude blends storytelling into the music for Supergiant’s games and it’s utterly unspeakably amazing. Korb is the exception to my above-stated rule, simply because Supergiant is a small team and I feel safe in my assumption that he’s going to continue to put out amazing stuff for future Supergiant games. Plus, he has great taste in accessories & facial hair. Find his music on Spotify or on Bandcamp.

Jeremy Soule: Composed music for the Elder Scrolls series - Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, as well as Baldur’s Gate: the Dark Alliance, Guild Wars, the Harry Potter games, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. He also worked on the Mists of Pandaria soundtrack. Make a Pandora station based on his work, or check it out on Last.fm.

Steve Jablonsky: This is big-budget action-movie stuff. He’s written music for the Gears of War series (Gears 2, 3, and Judgement), The Sims 3, Prince of Persia: the Forgotten Sands, and Command & Conquer 3. He’s also written a LOT of music for films and TV. Listen on Spotify or Last.fm - he also makes for a great Pandora station.

Jerry Martin (and Marc Russo): Do you remember loving the music in The Sims and The Sims 2? How about SimSafari, SimPark, SimCopter, SimCity 3000 or SimCity 4? If so, you’ve got Jerry Martin (and Marc Russo) to thank. The Zydeco styled stuff in The Sims Unleashed (Russo) and the piano music in Build/Buy modes (Martin) in The Sims are my personal favorites. Go on, relive your youth by listening to the Sims 1 soundtrack on Spotify, or check out some demos of Martin’s music on his website. He also did an AMA one time.

Honorable Mentions: Toby Fox (Undertale, gave the world “MEGALOVANIA”), Jake Kaufman (Shovel Knight), and Cœur de Pirate (Child of Light, not technically a full-time video game composer).

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#video game music #video game composers #vgm #words from your editor

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siouxempirepodcast · 7 years

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Game & Dad: The Less-Than-Artful Scam of Skylanders

This week I am writing about micro-transactions and my general distaste for the business practice in retail games. The subject of microtransactions and what they have been doing in the gaming world is not news, but I feel like this past year’s releases from Activision have been really bad for micro transactions. From the cosmetic items for sale in Destiny to the egregious Call of Duty requisition packs that can give players access to the best weapons in the game. Running into this crap on my games is bad enough, but now Activision is jamming these things into my kid’s games.

As a father, I have to endure the annual releases of the Skylanders games. My kids love the damn things and between buying the games and the toys I can’t even imagine how much I have spent even if I always buy them on sale (seriously shop around, there is always a retailer having a sale on them). BUT I know my kids enjoy them and they make easy presents for birthdays and holidays.

This year’s Skylanders has added an in-game store to purchase items for the characters to wear in the game. The cost of these packs is similar to what you might find on a free to play phone game (somewhere around 2 to 10 dollars each). Now I think that it is the right of any company to charge and offer these services to whoever wants them. I also think that every consumer should know the facts that paying for this garbage when a parent has already paid in a lot of money to this game is complete bullshit.

The game is already designed to sell plastic toys, now they riddle the damn thing with even more hidden costs. I guess this will be a good lesson for the kids since this kind of crap seems to be here to stay I might as well teach them to dislike it as much as I do.

Snake Pass – From Game & Dad

Suggested game to play this week

Here is a quick little suggestion for a game to play to play with the kids. It’s a fun game called Snake Pass (available on Switch, PS 4, Xbox One, and PC). It will cost you 20 bucks.

Snake pass is a physics based platformer that has no enemies, the goal is to move a snake around a fun and colorful obstacle that has a similar style to Banjo- Kazooie or Viva Piñata. It’s non-violent and colorful for kids but it has a steep learning curve and can be pretty challenging for adults. I think this game would be best played passing the controller back and forth to the younger kids to make sure that they aren’t having too tough a time with the controls. If you have older kids that can handle challenging gameplay they should be able to handle this game just fine.

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