Niko-chan Battle (VB, unreleased)

Game info: Planet Virtual Boy
Listening: N/A

Credits

The prototype for this game has no staff roll. It was developed by LOCOMOTIVE, so it seems likely that the audio was handled by some combination of Takashi Kumegawa and Akiko Hida like all their other VB games. A lecture profile for Kumegawa listed “Virtual Shooting” as a work, which doesn’t match the title of any known games except maybe a SEGA theme park attraction, so it’s possible that’s referring to this game in a generic way, though it seems more likely that’s referring to a different canceled game, Virtual Gunman.

Info

Been kinda putting this one off because I didn’t super feel like spending the time going through gameplay videos to listen to this, but it turns out that this game also has a debug menu with a music player! So it was easy to listen to the whole time! Oh well. It’s really good that I found this, actually, because it appears that they never got around to implementing most of the music into the game proper.

This is a 3D maze deathmatch shooter, a followup to the Faceball games for Game Boy, SNES, and PC-Engine CD, which were console/handheld versions of the Atari ST game MIDI Maze. Niko-chan in the game title is a cutesy way to refer to a smiley face, which all the characters in the game are; it’s derived from onomatopoeic word nikoniko (ニコニコ), which you might recognize from video sharing site Niconico. This game was never released, but a prototype was found, dumped, and then released online in 2013.

I said in my post about SD Gundam Dimension War that that was my favorite LOCOMOTIVE soundtrack for the Virtual Boy, so it figures that that one’s completely unripped; well it turns out that I actually like this one even more, so it extra figures that this game was never released. This was easily the most compositionally interesting soundtrack of theirs to me by far, which honestly I’m saying in large part because this goes a lot further into a weird electronica direction than their previous works, and there’s a marked increase in how adventurous they got with manipulating the wavetable channels and going for a respectably wider variety of drum samples.

Recommended tracks:

  • Track 4 has a weird polymetric 5/4 beep loop

  • Track 5 reminds me a little bit of Virtual Boy Wario Land in being sparse and sneaky with funny sounds

  • In-Game Music” grooves out a bit before busting out the 5x triplets at 0:27

(track titles are unofficial)

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