Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: emulated audio, YouTube
Credits
Sound Program: Hideo Sugiyama
Music: Ken Kojima
Sound Effect: Tadashi Nakatsuji
Info
As a kid who grew up loving a vector graphics tank shooter (Spectre) and a 6DOF spaceship shooter (Descent II), T&E Soft’s Red Alarm always looked incredibly cool to me as a wireframe spaceship shooter. As I am as of a few months ago a possessor of a modded 3DS, maybe I should load up an emulator and actually try it one of these days…
The music for this and T&E’s other Virtual Boy games we’ll get to later was done by staff composer Ken Kojima, who I was obsessed with for a couple of years like a decade and a half ago because a bunch of his music is real wonky in ways you don’t hear too often in video game music. The way I used to talk about him was honestly pretty rude, casting him as an outsider who just talked into T&E Soft one day or something, but as we’ll see in a few posts, he was in fact capable of making music that mostly sounds like a human wrote it.
This post isn’t about his normal music, though, it’s about his abnormal music, and this is his most abnormal soundtrack, fuckin’ Red Alarm. We’ve got ugly melodies and sound programming, weird dissonances, drum parts that don’t particularly fit in with the rest of the composition, and other stuff you just can’t explain. It all sounds very alien, it’s uncomfortable and skitters around your brain, which for a game about blasting aliens is a pretty good vibe to hit.
Recommended tracks:
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“BOSS2” starts this incoherent alert beeping solo at 0:39
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“STAGE3” falls down a staircase at 1:19
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“BOSS4” has a melody at 0:16 that pans randomly for no reason
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“STAGE5” makes some good use of white noise for a transition at 0:48 and has a weirdly syncopated bit at 1:00
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“BOSS5” gets dangerously funky at 0:21
(track titles are taken from the sound test)
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