An interview worth reading.

Well folks, things have been pretty slow lately. Our staff has been caught up enjoying the fading days of summer and the blog has slipped by. Hopefully the rest of you have been enjoying your summer too, but anyway I’ll keep my post short for once. I recently read a fascinating interview with Hiroki Kikuta about his times working on Seiken Densetsu 2 (Secret of Mana) and with Square. Enjoy!

http://squarehaven.com/news/2007/06/16/Hiroki-Kikuta-Lost-Files-Regained

~Dan

A Series of Series: Pokemon

My next string of articles will be reviewing music for games that  are in a series. I’ll start with the pokemon series and go on from there. It’s interesting to watch a series progress from game to game and platform to platform because the composers often change hands, or styles in many cases.

FF7: Crisis Core: Can I have a Piggyback Uematsu?

After hearing “the Price of Freedom” a couple times I decided it was about time I finally gave the full soundtrack a listen through. Before hearing it my initial thoughts still echoed after listening to the soundtrack and reading the plot: are we really still doing this? At ground value, it’s about time they stopped “milking” the Final Fantasy VII cow to death… no really. Uematsu left square already because he didn’t like square’s new facilities, but I wouldn’t hold it against him if he resented the reskinning as much as any intelligent gamer (not that he has a choice since he doesn’t have rights to any FF music).

Now before I get any further I just want to state that I’ll get my ranting out first because I believe that although Crisis Core is one too many, fresh composer Takeharu Ishimoto deserves a fair chance to be considered despite square’s decisions.

Stand Out Game Introductions

Well today I was playing an online Video Game Music quiz and I happened upon the opening theme of Cannon Fodder. I’ll just say that I had no idea what was coming there, it starts out with ska chords and goes into “♫ War, never been so much fun…♫” So for the focus of this article I will talk about some attention grabbing intros.  Not all of them need take the Cannon Fodder approach but all of them have some quality that makes them unforgettable.

Breaking Up the Monotony with some Snood

Well I was moseying around my old computer and I noticed an image on the desktop. An image that I knew immediately and any fan would too:

It is non other than Jake the snood. Back when this game was getting popular and I discovered it, I was surfing AOL 7.0 on my Windows 98 PC -  those were the days.

But anyway, today I bring you a revisit of Snood, a game that had its start way back in 1996 (at this point that does not sound right to say) by creator David M. Dobson.