Alterna Citizen Program M-00: Init (System Noise)

Game info: Giant Bomb, gameplay video
Listening: extracted audio

This game’s subtitle is unofficially translated in a couple of places as The Curse of the Puppet Museum, though “mansion” would be a much better translation than “museum” here.

Credits

Sound Effects: 早川壽浩
Music: Kuniaki Haishima

Info

Alright, let’s switch to something significantly more difficult to listen to. MA-RI-A is a horror point-and-click for your Windows computer where you’re a high school girl, Emily, and you’re looking for your missing classmate, Maria, in a spooky puzzle mansion. In the style of the time, this game is heavy on the FMVs, and so unfortunately a lot of the music doesn’t exist cleanly; there are a few AIFF files that are only music, including what seem to be the main three standard pieces of background music (named simply A, B, and C), but other audio files have dialogue mixed in, and then the game’s QuickTime movie files have a bunch of unique tunes that are mixed with voice and sound effects. This is a ’90s PC game with streamed non-CD audio so the music is of course also compressed to hell with plenty of artifacting to go around, which isn’t a bad thing at all if you want your horror game to have a nice crusty sound to it.

This soundtrack has Haishima’s classic spooky ambient sound design that we’ve been hearing, crystalline synths mixed with metallic noises, so it looks like he’s been pretty consistent in doing that over his career, and if you like that aspect of his work as I do, then here’s more of it! Mixed in there are some orchestra and scary vox, which we’ve seen before, along with some piano here and there, which we haven’t encountered yet but isn’t an unusual instrument for spooky music. Overall it’s more constrained in terms of wacky shit going on either in the production or composition, and all of the pieces are rather short (again not atypical for a game like this), so it’s probably not a great showcase work along with the whole “sound effects and voices” thing, but I did enjoy what was there.

Recommended tracks:

• C is just a little orchestral chord vamp but I like the textural movement in the partwriting

• E2.SND is one of the more chaotic, evilish-sounding tracks in the game

• 1K.MOV has some quality cluster plonks in it

• 1P.MOV is really bendy

• 2A.MOV is the game’s intro and has the most developed music in the game probably, featuring all the elements I mentioned in the second paragraph

• 5I.MOV had my favorite music of a movie file without any voice or dialogue

(tracks are referred to by their filenames)