brandonabley.com

 Please listen to this as you read:

http://www.brandonabley.com/files/Bullet%20Hell.mp3

So, a few weeks ago, a stunningly brilliant RMXP game was released called USG: A New Beginning.

This is actually a pretty mild screenshot with not that many bullets on-screen.  On harder difficulties, it gets pretty insane.

In USG, you gain experience points, level up, buy new abilities, and explore all the trappings of an Japanese RPG gameplay system — but the game itself is a bullet hell shooter!  The game follows a unique risk-reward system where you get more experience points for killing enemies when there are more bullets on the screen.  You are therefore encouraged to keep the action as tight and intense as possible in order to get more of the valuable points that purchase abilities.  In requisite form, obnoxiously long cutscenes bookend each stage of the game.  It’s my new favorite RM game, but with one qualification: the music sucks.

All of the music in the game is ripped from anime soundtracks and is horrible.  The sample quality is varied (and usually bad) and the music choices themselves are not very good.  After playing the game, I immediately emailed the creator and requested that I compose an emergency replacement soundtrack.  He enthusiastically agreed!

The interface is a little confusing, but as you can probably figure out this game has a reasonably in-depth customization system similar to jRPGs such as Final Fantasy Tactics.

So I am writing a new soundtrack for this excellent game.  I have a few tracks finished so far, and I thought I would share one of them with my readers (this is the same link as above):

http://www.brandonabley.com/files/Bullet%20Hell.mp3

I’m going for an intentionally-cheesy classic video game style with Big Band and Classical trappings.  I hope you enjoy.

For personally-motivated reasons I won’t provide a download link to the game until I finish the OST and the updated version is released.  It shouldn’t be too hard to find around the internet though. 

I expect to finish the OST before the end of the month of May.

In other news: You may have noticed that I restored the login and other site controls.  I can’t believe I had taken them down.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 11:11 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.