Well, here's my 2 cents. Bought the pack and had a quick listen to all the tracks just now. Only 2 tracks really stand out as musical tracks (OK, I lie - 3, but I'll get to that later)... the other 7 tunes are either pure ambience (I like that term coloured noise, except people always assume 'noise' has negative connotations, it really doesn't!) or with such light/soft harmonies that they are designed for ambience as well. No notable melodies. Which is absolutely fine, I could see them fitting into an RPG game during exploration very well.
No battle music to be heard though.
But comparing them to the Lord of the Rings soundtrack in any way, shape or form is probably false advertising. Still, you give away samples... I havn't listened to them so I can't say whether or not they are a good representation of what you get in the pack.
The two most notable tunes are Elysa and Eventual. One is very very good... and one is quite bad. Elysa has no gel to it at all, it's a haphazard mishmash of a few repeated solo-instrument melodies, a couple of which are quite annoying, too. And 'Theme of the little peoples' is basically another shorter, slightly less annoying version of Elysa. Eventual on the other hand, is a beautiful track - and just as well, too, because I listened to the tracks in alphabetical order and I became a little worried after hearing Elysa =] The melodies and use of instruments in this tune are very well structured and gel very well with each other. Even the breakbeat.
Yes, there's a breakbeat - shattering any resemblance to Lord of the Rings this pack could have possibly had =] But as I said, everything about this tune really is near perfect and could quite easily give any indie RPG a positive boost in professionalism - not sure how well suited to a typical medieval setting it would be, because of the breakbeat, but anything barely resembling modern times (or a technologically advanced town, perhaps) would do well with this tune as it's theme.
All in all, even with only 8 tunes this pack can be well worth the cost to implement in any RPG game and provide a positive boost... The two other tunes... well, what can I say... most RPGs give the little peoples annoying tunes, so it could just fit right in anyway!
I will certainly be very eager to see how Steve progresses when it comes time to release more fantasy music - be it in the form of music pack or theme pack. Another pack full of ambiental soundscapes wouldn't be a bad thing by any stretch - personally I would like to hear some battle musics though. At least one normal battle and one boss/tough battle. Please =]
Interesting so many people say that, but it's really bullcrud. There wasn't really techno overload until CDs became the game distribution format of choice. When you're streaming CD audio, sample space in memory isn't an issue.
No battle music to be heard though.
But comparing them to the Lord of the Rings soundtrack in any way, shape or form is probably false advertising. Still, you give away samples... I havn't listened to them so I can't say whether or not they are a good representation of what you get in the pack.
The two most notable tunes are Elysa and Eventual. One is very very good... and one is quite bad. Elysa has no gel to it at all, it's a haphazard mishmash of a few repeated solo-instrument melodies, a couple of which are quite annoying, too. And 'Theme of the little peoples' is basically another shorter, slightly less annoying version of Elysa. Eventual on the other hand, is a beautiful track - and just as well, too, because I listened to the tracks in alphabetical order and I became a little worried after hearing Elysa =] The melodies and use of instruments in this tune are very well structured and gel very well with each other. Even the breakbeat.
Yes, there's a breakbeat - shattering any resemblance to Lord of the Rings this pack could have possibly had =] But as I said, everything about this tune really is near perfect and could quite easily give any indie RPG a positive boost in professionalism - not sure how well suited to a typical medieval setting it would be, because of the breakbeat, but anything barely resembling modern times (or a technologically advanced town, perhaps) would do well with this tune as it's theme.
All in all, even with only 8 tunes this pack can be well worth the cost to implement in any RPG game and provide a positive boost... The two other tunes... well, what can I say... most RPGs give the little peoples annoying tunes, so it could just fit right in anyway!
I will certainly be very eager to see how Steve progresses when it comes time to release more fantasy music - be it in the form of music pack or theme pack. Another pack full of ambiental soundscapes wouldn't be a bad thing by any stretch - personally I would like to hear some battle musics though. At least one normal battle and one boss/tough battle. Please =]
Trance, techno, dance music is over used in games because of a historical limitation of alloted sample space in memory.
Interesting so many people say that, but it's really bullcrud. There wasn't really techno overload until CDs became the game distribution format of choice. When you're streaming CD audio, sample space in memory isn't an issue.