ReMix: Cave Story 'Escape Route'

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As you may have already seen from our homepage announcement, we'll have an official presence + meetup for the first time at this year's MAGFest, a gaming and game music festival that occurs, this year at least, about fifteen minutes from where I live, in Vienna, Virginia (USA), from January 4th to January 7th - check out www.magfest.org/ for more info; it's an OCR meetup, festival, and game music concert all roled into one. Very cool.

Moving on, our latest submission is from Corran, aka Bryan Garris, who's sent in mixes previously but finally gets past those troublesome judges with this ReMix from a little game called Cave Story. For those of you unfamiliar with this game, it's a homebrew Japanese platformer for Windows that took five years to make and was created entirely by one guy, including the music. Sugoi desu, ne? If your Nihongo is a little rusty you might wanna try the English patch that's been released, so you can understand what's going on, which is sometimes helpful. This game has an avid Internet fanbase, so it's perhaps not entirely surprising that k-wix was able to build up critical mass and create the Cave Story Remix Project, completed 6/24/2006, that this ReMix from Corran is part of. Check out the project site for more excellent music and project artwork.

This piece is an interesting combination of slower, brooding rock and more energetic, rhythm-guitar driven, Jethro Tull flute soloing rock. There's an interesting drum solo about halfway through that's rather fun, and also exposes the heavy gating effect being applied to the drums, which we don't hear all that often (see Paul Simon's Graceland for tons of examples of gated drums). Guitar and synth get melodic dominance, but there's also synth textures and, sometimes but not all the time, an electric bass. zyko sez:

"this track is very nice. it does start off very conservatively and then migrates out. very good idea, too - given the source material, i don't think it would have been easy to swallow, otherwise. the transitions are smooth and do a good job to never give the impression that he was starting to go on a tangent... slick in bringin the original melody back, too. the flute work is beautiful. then again, this is corran and i expect that. the instrumentation is great, the reverse cymbals do their trick. the upbeat section is awesome."

JJT and Vig both pointed out, and I concur, that when the bass is absent, things can sound a little thin... but that also achieves a sort of floating, meandering feeling which isn't altogether misplaced, either. Good stuff from Corran - fourth time was the charm - which represents OCR's first ReMix of a homebrew game. Check it out, then check out MAGFest, followed be the Cave Story Remix Project. That should keep you busy for awhile.

― djpretzel