Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix is in open beta on XBox Live Arcade until September 5.  The full game is headed to XBLA and PSN, with high resolution sprites by artists at Udon Entertainment and an arranged soundtrack by members of OverClocked ReMix.  London-based musician Malcos has been contributing to the online remixing [...]

  The original idea behind LittleBigPlanet, the largely user-generated platforming title from Media Molecule, was to give musicians a chance to jam with each other online over the Playstation Network.  As it turned out, using the Playstation 3 as a conduit for collaborative improvisation and rehearsal was a trickier problem than expected.  Luckily, a whole [...]

1994 marked the first time for many listeners in English-language regions that videogame soundtrack albums became available. Through promotional offers in gaming magazines, Nobuo Uematsu’s score to Final Fantasy VI was released as the three-disc album "Kefka’s Domain."  The soundtrack to Donkey Kong Country went on sale under the name "DK Jamz."  Around the same [...]

When the musical score for Final Fantasy IV debuted in 1991, videogame audio was at a turning point in Japan. The game's inclusion of a theme of love attempted to approximate an emotional moment on the newly released 16-bit hardware. History suggests that composer Nobuo Uematsu pulled off the experiment.  For many players the song [...]

Hyadain creates game-related remix videos.  Not only is he responsible for arrangements of classic gaming themes, he also writes his own lyrics and sings in a variety of voices that capture the personalities of timeless videogame characters.    After discovering an enthusiastic response to his series on the Japan-based video sharing site Niko Niko Douga, [...]

What is it about videogame music that makes us listen to it?  What's notable about its present state, and why is it that some songs are hard to forget? For the past few months I've been wanting to get a better handle on these question for myself, so I've been posting news items from Siliconera [...]

With digital distribution making it possible for a greater variety of unconventional titles to reach the market, imaginative new forms of puzzle gameplay are emerging.  Echochrome for the Playstation 3 and PSP, whose art direction mirrors the logic-defying line drawings of M.C. Escher, is one such example.  The physical laws of the in-game environment are [...]

Those who have "knocked on the door" of Echochrome are accustomed to its minimalistic style. Players guide a mannequin avatar across beams, onto catapults and up staircases, all of which obey the physical laws of a two-dimensional universe. The innovative puzzle game by Sony called Mugen Kairou or "Infinite Corridor" in Japanese-language regions includes a [...]

The Square Enix Members website has announced that it will be offering an in-game gift to those who pre-order the upcoming Piano Collections Final Fantasy XI album.  In addition to receiving the CD when it ships in late June, a harpsichord will be added to the Mog Houses of PlayOnline members who reserve the item [...]

Omega Five is a horizontal shooter for the Xbox Live Arcade, featuring an unlockable retro mode, during which both the graphics and sound are stylized to imitate 16-bit hardware.  The soundtrack represents a new take on the sidescrolling shooter by revisiting previous conventions of the genre.  The score by Natsume veteran composer Hiroyuki Iwatsuki contains [...]

The music of Square Enix composer Yoko Shimomura has been featured on several arranged albums over the years.  Parasite Eve was treated to trance and techno remixes, songs from Kingdom Hearts were performed by the Eminence Symphony Orchestra, and Live A Live received a limited edition mini-arranged album at the time of its release.  What [...]

kt2 composes music for Tama-Soft, a developer of Japanese text-based PC games.  In 2001, his original soundtrack to the title No Reality was released, followed by the image album For you… from here the edge in 2002, and game soundtracks Abandoner and History Repeats Itself.  Remastered songs from these albums have recently appeared on the [...]

Hiroki Kikuta’s latest album is the first by the composer for a game published by Square since the sequel to Secret of Mana Soukaigi was denied an English-language release.  Concerto: The Extraordinary World of Concerto Gate features tracks by the musician from the massively multiplayer online PC title Concerto Gate.  While Kenji Ito was the [...]

When game composers Hitoshi Sakimoto and Motoi Sakuraba consolidated their artistic assets, merging into a single unified organism, no one could have predicted the startling results. Ambrosia Odyssey Composed by Motoshi Sakriboto Square Enix   [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJyVgKjqo9E[/youtube]   

Team Entertainment's belated release of Rockman 7 OST remains faithful to the traditional series, but the soundtrack is hampered by some unfortunate technical issues. Rockman 7 Composed by Capcom Sound Team Team Entertainment   [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Tt9E4lElWE[/youtube] 

As has perhaps drawn online remixers and doujins to endlessly revisit the early Rockman tunes, the stage music of the original trilogy often managed to illustrate a game stage in a musical idea as effectively as the molten pools of lava and hills of glistening frost appearing on the screen.  A two-year absence followed six [...]