I’ve mentioned before that it’s possible to run Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic in DOSBox with Tandy sound enabled but I couldn’t figure out how to get it working. Today I’m back with good news in that I can tell you how to get this fixed so the trillions of SWFM fans out there can enjoy this fantastic game with the excellent Tandy sound!
Today’s installment of Moments In Gaming covers the 1997 Playstation game Fighting Force. It was one of those games in the late nineties era of video games where the fresh 3D technology of the Playstation spawned an avalanche of outstanding 3D games.
In Fighting Force you play the role of one ruffian (or ruffine) who is hired to intrude the premises of a certain villain named Zeng with the goal to eliminate him. So much for the story!
The graphics are of the typical early era PSX low-poly style but the environments that act as staging grounds for the rumble work surprisingly well. The gameplay is fun for a couple of rounds. You have a set of attack moves and combos available and you are able to pick up stuff from the ground like weapons, sandwiches, coke cans as well as bundles of dollar bills and even gold bars! Some items like cars, vending machines and trash cans can be destroyed to spawn makeshift weapons like metal bars that help dispatching bad guys quicker.
But the one feature that makes Fighting Force worth mentioning is the soundtrack by Martin Iveson. A well shuffled mixture of Electro and Techno beats blended perfectly together with filtered guitar riffs, fat bass lines and police sirens, sometimes uptempo and other times subtle and atmospheric. This is one of those soundtracks that has a very personal note and stands on its own among the deluge of orchestral mass ware and prefab sound loops often found in games today.
Today’s video pick (yeah right, as if I had a new post everyday here) is from YouTube user Five5Six and about how he managed to get Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic to run on DOSBox with Tandy sound enabled. That’s right, Tandy sound! By default the game uses those bleepy PC speaker sounds as in my own video. Personally I haven’t yet figured out how to get Tandy sound working with this game, so there … a video with the marvelous Tandy-enabled sound of SW1:FM in all it’s glory …
I’ve been busy with some audio work recently again and decided to remix the famous Turrican I Title Theme by Chris Huelsbeck. Here it is … I haven’t intentionally made too many changes to the arrangement because I wanted to stick close to the original on the first approach and concentrate on the instrumentation instead which has been completely changed. You can download it too (if you’re into synth music/game tune remixes that is).
(All work done in REAPER. Instruments used: Synth1, V-Station, minimonsta, Nexus, MOTU BPM for drums.)
finally found an excellent sorted database site about all sorts of game music! on www.mirsoft.info is a well worked out database containing info on all kinds of video games and formats! even found some info about the fighting force 1 soundtrack, which became one of my favorite by the time…. despite others gave it a medium rating, i’d say it is well made! they cover alot of formats from digital audio to Turbo Grafx-16 HES music but there is no original music downloadable, except for several MIDI files and alot of links to other sites.
