Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: many soundtrack releases, emulated audio
Info
Here’s a classic Taito soundtrack that I’m going to revisit, since an emulated port with a remixed soundtrack came out last year. Night Striker is a behind-the-back rail shooter similar to Space Harrier or Star Fox where you fly around the screen and shoot enemies that are flying toward you, except in this game you’re in a flying car. There are a ton of different recordings of this soundtrack that have been released over the years and I’m extremely not going to try to figure out which one is the best release; instead, I’m just going to listen to the version that was also included on the remixed soundtrack album.
Night Striker fits firmly in Taito’s early M.O. of having arcade soundtracks that were slightly weirder than what everyone else was doing. A lot of it is pretty easily identifiable as scrolling shooter music: soaring, energetic melodies with a little bit of rock influence, galloping basslines, and some franticness (particularly in boss themes) clock this pretty quickly. When the soundtrack departs from this formula it’s usually when the music gets randomly a bit ambient and sound design-y in the intro or in the middle of a track, giving it a little of a moodier, Darius feeling at times. It’s also rhythmically kinda bumpy, chiefly by throwing in a shortened measure into a transition in a number of tracks, but there’s a little bit of pseudo-polymetric writing and actual time signature switches in there too. There’s also occasionally a slightly weirder scale or chord than you’d expect there to be, but the compositions don’t generally get super weird beyond that.
The soundtrack’s not bad and does distinguish itself a little from its less weird contemporaries, though I wasn’t really a super big fan of it; aside from one piece, I pretty much just liked a short segment (usually the intro) of any other given track and not especially the whole thing.
Recommended tracks:
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“TRANCE PARLENT IN BLUE [Suburb Theme]” gets the most rhythmically complicated that this soundtrack gets at 1:16, I had to slow it down to figure out it starts with a bar of 15/8 before going to 7/4
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“BRAIN WORKER [Underground Factory Theme]” is the only piece of music that’s really weird from start to finish, so obviously it’s my favorite
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“BOSS 5” has a nice programmed fadeout at the end of the loop
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“commune [NAME SET]” has my favorite overall sound design of the soundtrack, some good noises in this
(subtitles are unofficial translations from VGMdb)
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