Category Archives: Music

Battle Bards Episode 3: Spooky & Magical

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bardssquaresmallThis week on Battle Bards, the crew explores the darkly mysterious realm of music as they focus on spooky and magical tracks from MMOs.  The fun of this episode comes as each of the bards interprets what the “spooky and magical” combo means.  What songs will they pluck on their lutes?  Tune in and find out!

Episode 3 show notes

Contact the Bards:

Special thanks to Tesh for the logo!

Cranking up the tunes

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On my church’s last summer mission trip, we wrapped up the week by throwing a spontaneous dance party with a hundred or so teens.  I let it slip to the coordinator that I used to be a DJ in college (true story) and before I knew it, I was in charge of the music.  This meant that I had a captive, dancing audience to the nerdiest songs in my library, and I had a blast throwing out the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song and Spice Girls’ Wannabe to see if they’d get it and/or like it (which, surprisingly, they did.  I have hope for this generation.).

The reason I bring this up is because I’ve always had a passion for finding and collecting geeky music — and it’s been a long time since I’ve had an audience who’s willing to let me bombard their ears with my stuff.  My wife, oddly enough, just really isn’t into music at all.  I do little dance parties with my kids (there exists a video of me and my infant swooning to Dirty Dancing’s Hungry Eyes that you shall never, ever see).  But I guess I’ve really been burning just to share some of what I find interesting.

That’s why I not only started the MMO Music page here on Bio Break and the Jukebox Heroes column on Massively, but have been engaging more people in conversation about what kinds of video game (and specifically, MMO) tunes they like.  I have my outlet now, and it’s proving to be very cathartic.

Prior to starting Jukebox Heroes, I thought I had a pretty good collection of MMO music, but it turns out that what I had was rather incomplete, scattered, and missing many, many major titles.  Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time tracking down free MMO music as well as purchasing whatever albums are out there (which are more than I originally expected).  I’ve found that many composers have several free MP3 files of their video game music on their websites.  And I’ve made a list of all of the games that I want to cover, which as it stands right now, will take me through 2015 or so.

Anyway, I guess I’m just putting it out there that this has quickly become a growing central interest in my hobby instead of something way on the fringe.  I’m amazed at all of the great MMO music that I’m finding that I’ve never heard before.  I think that most players tend to know a few scores pretty well (insert “Age of Conan is the best soundtrack evar!” here), but there’s so much more out there.

I’ve done several additions to the MMO Music page over the past week, including adding these soundtracks:

  • Glitch (free)
  • Spiral Knights vol. 1 and vol. 2
  • Drakensang Online
  • Hellgate London
  • SUN
  • Zu Online
  • Atriarch
  • Free Going Rogue tunes
  • PlaneShift

Soundtrack day! Ooh la la!

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I’m just rolling in MMO soundtracks lately, and today was a pretty big day for me in regards to them.  First of all, I realized that the Mists of Pandaria score was out on iTunes, so I snagged that and am looking forward to listening to another stellar WoW score.

But then Turbine went and released Chance Thomas’ Riders of Rohan soundtrack as well — a whopping 23 tracks of Middle-earth awesomeness.  I’ve listened to about 10 of these so far, and I can say that it’s by far the best music done in LOTRO to date.  It’s really stirring, emotive stuff.  I’ll be reviewing it for next week’s Jukebox Heroes (today I did The Secret World, if you missed it).

I also updated the MMO music page on Bio Break to reflect these scores and links to them.  As always, if you find outlets that are selling or giving away (legally) MMO soundtracks, let me know!

More MMO music! More! More!

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A few small additions to the MMO Music page here on Bio Break:

As always, if you see any MMO soundtracks being made available (legally), either free or paid, let me know!  I’m particularly keen on finding, either on CD or elsewhere, the soundtracks for EverQuest, EverQuest II, Ultima Online, Wizard101 (not just the ringtones), and Runes of Magic.