Game info: website
Listening: Bandcamp
Info
Here’s a collection of fifty fake retro games made for a fake game console, UFO Soft’s LX. A lot of people have compared this to Action 52 or other NES bootleg multicart collections, but a much better comparison would be Retro Game Challenge for the DS, in both the effort taken into making original games that are actually good as well as the creation of a fictional release chronology and development history around them. Most of these games have extremely short soundtracks, having less than ten minutes of music and often less than five, but when you have fifty games overall (plus five tracks for the menus), that still gets you almost seven total hours of music.
The music was all composed by Eirik Suhrke, which is pretty impressive, though the package did take eight years to make, so it’s not like he cranked all this out in a month. He’s primarily a chiptune composer, probably best known for his FM jazz/prog soundtrack to the enhanced Spelunky remake, but he does full production music and more atmospheric/ambient music sometimes too, sometimes at the same time like for Spelunky 2. I really like him a lot! My affinity for prog is well known, but even when he’s writing more normal music and not just randomly throwing odd time into every track for no reason, he still likes slipping surprisingly spicy chord progressions in there.
UFO 50’s soundtrack is all TurboGrafx-16 chiptunes, which is a more uncommon choice for the retro throwback indie game scene, so that’s fun to see. The soundtracks for the games are generally pretty stereotypical retro game music that hit the notes you’d expect for their genres, so the wild west and ninja games hit their standard regional buttons, the driving games have jazzy tunes, the horror game has spooky ambience, and so on. But since Eirik Suhrke is cracked, every other track has odd time or a sick chord progression in it somewhere. You’re honestly not prepared for how much odd time this soundtrack has. (Nope, more than that!) There’s also a fair amount of ambient tracks and weird boss prog, probably a bit more than you’d usually get for these kinds of things, but those are both Suhrke specials so it checks out.
The music programming is never super flashy, blasting you with channel-hopping arpeggiated chaos or anything like you might get from a demoscener or modern chiptunist, but Suhrke uses a lot of interesting-sounding instruments here and there, and there’s plenty of pitch, volume, and tempo manipulation across the soundtrack. Finely detailed is what I’d call it, if you take the time to look at it deeply. Good stuff!
Of the fifty games, my favorite soundtrack of the lot is definitely for Mini & Max, which has a bunch of extremely cool ambient sound effect tracks that seem highly evocative of Metroid II’s cave themes.
Recommended tracks:
-
“UFO 50” is the cute & jazzy game select theme and my favorite of the non-subgame tracks
-
“Velgress – Level 2” is a strongly syncopated fusiony tune
-
“Divers – Red” has a hard-to-grasp rhythm and a bunch of fun background noises
-
“Pingolf – Gameplay” is some upbeat golf jazz fusion, because golf games are legally required to have jazz in them; love the weird bits at 0:36-0:43 and 0:50-0:56
-
“Campanella 2 – Vaalpolis” is a mystical-sounding piece with a real nice scratchy bell tone in it
-
“Lords of Diskonia – Map” tries to sound a bit like an orchestral march (this is apparently a war strategy game, so that works)
-
“Night Manor – Killer” is a chaotic track that honestly has kind of comical Wario vibes to me
-
“Elfazar’s Hat – Special Boss” was my favorite of the prog boss loops, love the stacked lines
-
“Pilot Quest – Dungeon” has a subtly irregular rhythm; I really like at 0:51 when that accompaniment riff starts getting very staccato in the last couple of notes when tailing off
-
“Mini & Max – Micro World A” shows off a lot of what I love about this game’s music programming in one place
-
“Campanella 3 – Zol Data” kinda reminds me of Masaki Izutani’s transposing FM soundtrack to Gunbird a bit, great soundtrack
-
“Cyber Owls – Huxley” is one of the biggest-sounding tracks in the game, tense bit of Contra-esque prog
Leave a Reply