Thursday 6 July 2017

We Are Now Rushing Into Zone B

Look at it. Isn't it beautiful? Two disco space pilots stand side by side with a giant monolith of an arcade cabinet. And it is a giant. Darius was played over a three screen set up. Unheard of at the time, unheard of even now. Though to be fair, arcades themselves are pretty much unheard of now.

The Darius series of video games were made by Taito, and normally consist of a lone pilot shooting a seemingly endless wave of robotic space fish. There is chrome. Much chrome. There is also music, and that's what I'm going to be enthusiastically flapping about today.

Taito's "house band" was Zuntata, who wrote a great many soundtracks for Taito's games. That was pretty unusual was a company to have a house band in itself, but Zuntata would also perform live on occasion and their scores were very atypical from yer usual video game soundtrack. Anything from experimental electronica, fusion, synth pop and gawd knows what else. In fact the best way to get across their sound is probably just to play you some tracks...


VISIONNERZ




From Darius Gaiden. Probably my favourite Zuntata track. A haunting sprawling joy of a song which is at extreme contrast to the robot bastard death fish action that's happening on screen. One of my favourite things about it is the fact it doesn't actually stop when you finish the first stage. It continues on into the second whilst evolving all the time. Lovely.


B.T. Dutch




From G-Darius. An ominous little number that builds into a relentless march. Industrial sounds, samples and whatnot clunk along unevenly. A wonky march for a fairly wonky game. Polygons for the eyes, polygons for the ears.


Hinder Three



From one of the more recent Darius games, which has gone through some revisions and updates and can now be found it it's final(?) form on the Playstation 4 right now under the name Dariusburst Chronicles Saviours. One of their more unhinged tracks, a chattering nonsense that gives way to fanfare before returning to gabbering. Queasy. Very queasy. Not enough songs are queasy. We need more quease.

There you go. Music to shoot robot fish to. Get shooting.

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