Rush Hour is a rather spicy jazz piece that is very suiting for a city full of highways, shopping malls, offices, and "busy" areas in town.Along with the mesmerizingly epic Oasis.Sim City 4 has the stunningly awesome Epicenter.and then there is the garage music, which is predominantly composed of garage noises. The entire hard rock playlist ("YOU'RE THE CZAR IN YOUR GOOD OLD KICK-ASS CAR!").Bluegrass 3 and 6 ("I'm just a on the windshield of life.").Despite the game being unfortunately riddled with Obvious Beta bugs that probably will never be fixed (since it was released back in 1997), the soundtrack actually manages to be even more memorable and awesome than the SimCopter score, and many of the songs were recycled into The Sims and even The Sims 3. Streets of Sim City received the same Jerry Martin treatment in the music department.Jazz 5 especially shines among the jazz tunes (just listen to that sax!), but we've also got Jazz 4 and 6.
The Career Menu theme, and the orchestrated version that plays as the Hangar Backdrop.While the literally horrifying graphics of SimCopter left much to be desired, the soundtrack went a long way towards making up for it.Magic City is six minutes of distilled, beautiful awesome.The Ambient and Epic New Terrain, which almost always plays when you're staring at a blank canvas that will become a new city.Seriously, of all the SimCity 3000 Music, Broadway is the most upbeat and dynamic.The songs are especially awesome due to the fact that they aren't just jazzy sounding melodies, but full, complete jazz songs, right down to the amazing improvs, which aren't generally used so completely in regular gameplay elsewhere (generally being only used for credits or special sequences and such), and they have a great band besides, especially in SimCity 3000: Their composer, Jerry Martin, is a genius. If you're a fan of jazz music, then you can't go wrong with the soundtracks to pretty much every SimCity game since 2000.Probably my proudest was in the summer of ‘97, when I edited all the building sprites in the game to be tall, glittering, sci-fi spires, and then loaded up a city I’d built especially on a terraced hill, so it formed this completely sick futuristic pyramid.It was meant to be what I reckoned Coruscant looked like (that’s the city planet off of Star Wars, by the way, which only existed in books for bullied kids at the time, because there were still only three movies). It probably sounded a bit like, but I swear to grond that it seemed a real rip-roarer at the time.I know I’m now going to reach the end of the post without really discussing SimCity2000 itself, but I’m just captivated thinking about all the broke-ass technological stretches that surrounded my playing of that game. For some reason, therefore, the undisputed theme song for SimCity 2000, in my head, is a MIDI arrangement of The Heat Is On by Glenn Frey, from Beverly Hills Cop 2.
Because thinking all the way back to 1996, I didn’t have any CDs, and even 56k internet was still two years off in our household, so my only way of listening to music was via cassette tapes on a sort of portable hifi thing.Until one day, that is, when my mate gave me a floppy disc full of MIDI files of pop tunes and movie soundtracks.īut that was the only digital sound archive I had, and so that was what I listened to. And when I tip an old game’s memory, flopping, onto the deck of my consciousness, the music scrabbles out of its mouth, blinks in the sunlight, and clacks a catchy rhythm with its pincer-tips as it scurries back into the sea.This time, the amusement being dragged from the engrammatic brine is, and its musical parasite is one that shows my age even more than the game itself. The tunes are bycatch: scavengers of the benthic mind, which get caught up in my net whenever I trawl the depths for recollections. I rarely intend to do this, mind, but it happens nonetheless. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.Given that ‘Have You Played’ posts tend towards reminiscence, I find I often end up talking about the music I listened to while playing the games in question. Is an endless stream of game retrospectives.