Posts tagged composers 
Jukebox Heroes: Guild Wars Factions' soundtrack
East Asian-themed music in MMOs is something that I generally welcome. Even if the title isn't an Asian MMO, chances are that sooner or later developers like to work an Eastern zone, class, or city into the game -- and with that comes a specific sound. I'm by no means educated on what instruments ...
Jukebox Heroes: The Sims Online's soundtrack
The recent SimCity is by far not the only botched product that EA's launched with the Sims name on it. The truth is that The Sims Online had a great potential and franchise behind it, but it let the ball drop, big-time. It was already visually obsolete by the time it launched, and that was the ...
Jukebox Heroes: Final Fantasy XI's soundtrack
Hey you! Want a good way to die a horrible, painful death? Enter into any geek domain and put down the music of the Final Fantasy series. Do it. I double-dog dare you. Even scrubs who couldn't identify a single other composer or notable video game soundtrack will leap to the defense of One-Winged ...
Jukebox Heroes: The Matrix Online's soundtrack
It's been almost three-and-a-half years since players were forced to unplug from The Matrix Online for the last time, but the memories and music remain. When I first was wowed by The Matrix back in 1999, the dark, action-packed score became an instant favorite of mine. It's a franchise in which ...
Music on the frontier: An interview with WildStar composer Jeff Kurtenacker
A great soundtrack has the ability to raise the mundane to memorable and the wonderful to epic. It's hard to imagine films like Star Wars or Back to the Future without their iconic scores or video games like Super Mario Bros. and Final Fantasy without their catchy tunes. So I'm always keen to ...
Jukebox Heroes: Soul of the Ultimate Nation's soundtrack
Yes, you're seeing the header graphic correctly; Howard Shore is the powerhouse behind Soul of the Ultimate Nation's soundtrack. Yes, it's that Howard Shore -- The Lord of the Rings guy (not to mention all of his dozens of other film score projects dating back to 1979). How this smallish MMO was ...
PlanetSide 2 rocks: An interview with composer Jeff Broadbent
In this post-Halo age, it's hard to imagine any sort of galactic ground battle happening without a stirring score at your back. So the challenge to the SOE audio team and Composer Jeff Broadbent was formidable: PlanetSide 2's soundtrack had to rock so hard that it would bring tears to the eyes of ...
Jukebox Heroes: Spiral Knights' soundtrack
Wow, talk about a soundtrack that leaped up and bit me on the... earbuds! Sometimes I'm surprised how the smaller MMOs get treated to such lavish score releases while big-name games hoard their music to themselves, but in the case of Spiral Knights, I'm sincerely glad that this two-volume set was ...
Jukebox Heroes: Granado Espada's soundtrack
So here's an impossible task that lies before me right now: picking one musical genre that defines Granado Espada's score. I can't. It simply cannot be done. I've listened to a lot of soundtracks, my friends, and this game's score is literally all over the place. I don't know how or why the ...
Jukebox Heroes: A few of my favorite MMO soundtracks
I could hear some of you thinking in disbelief last week, "If Age of Conan isn't one of your top MMO scores, what is? And just how much am I not sending you a Christmas card this year, you loser?" You were kind enough to just think it and not say it, but I could hear it even so. As we've ...
