This is the sequel to Sim Theme Park (or Theme Park World) and the music is similarly structured. 9 songs but nearly 2 hours of music.
Unfortunately, whereas Sim Theme Park was kind of cool and ambitious, this music is…not. There are three 30 minute tunes and like the last game, I assume they built up over time to have more and more instruments.
The problem is that they start much heavier than the other ones. Where Sim Theme Park was content to let you sit with just some drums and noises for like, 23 minutes, this one jumps in on the melody right away. Basically it shows its hand almost immediately, and any buildup is really just repetition of the same elements. Except more at a time, sometimes.
The worst offender is the “Land of Invention” track which has so many god damned HONK HONK sound effects mixed in with all sorts of other annoying clunks and clanks and sproings that it’s hellish. It doesn’t help that the only melody is about 10 seconds long, so it just repeats that once in a while. And then the tempo increases so it’s just more HONK sproing CLANK plink plink plink HONK HONK
Fucking terrible. And that’s from a noted clown-liking weirdo.
Anyway, don’t recommend. I had a hell of a time getting through it all.
I bet you thought i was fucking DEAD for not posting for 15 days. Turns out that’s how long it takes to listen to the SimCopter OST.
120 (!) tracks, ~2.5 hours of audio. SimCopter was the first game I played to have GTA-style radio stations. Guess what: it predates the first GTA game by 13 months. So I guess GTA 3 was the third game I played to have SimCopter style radio stations.
Anyway, the music is good! Unfortunately, it also in such a shitty bitrate (and the bass pumped up tremendously) that it kind of sounds like shit!
This is a real shame for the Jazz station in particular, because it’s obvious that Jerry Martin got together a bunch of session musicians to play The Most 90’s Possible kind of jazz. The tracks are like, not phenomenal to the modern ear but they’re so of a time that it’s impossible to dislike them.
Listen to this! It sounds like a beautiful sitcom is about to start, and we’ll all be launched into the comforting embrace of some people who have small problems that always get solved in 22 minutes. It’s great!
There are also Rock, Classical, and Techno stations. I didn’t find any of these to be particularly enlightening, but some of the Rock tunes sound a lot like Burnout music to me, but about 5 years earlier:
I guess they mostly sound like instrumental butt rock, so not really like SimCopter was presaging anything here.
I wish the techno tunes were better! They’re fine but nothing really to write home about.
As far as the other bunch of tracks, that’s all fake commercials. They have aged surprisingly well - the most questionable thing is the worst fake scottish accent I’ve ever heard:
There are quite a few genuinely funny commercials in here too:
My favorite recurring joke is the directions they give at the end being totally absurd:
Anyway!! I actually reached out to Jerry Martin through the two contact emails I could scrounge up to see if he had better bitrate versions of these songs. I haven’t heard back but uh, fingers crossed. I’ll let y’all know if I hear anything.
16 songs, 5 and a half minutes of music. One of the worst yet. Weird, meandering tunes with a single instrument that barely resolve and would sound almost experimental if they weren’t so boring. What the hell is this
like seriously what the fuck is this. they’re all like this, it’s so annoying. who thought this was a good idea.
I’ve been stuck on this for several months because it sounds exactly like The Illusion of Gaia except it doesn’t have like, any substance. It’s reverberates and dings and whooshes but doesn’t inspire anything in me whatsoever.
@meauxdal described it as “dissociative” at the meetup and I think that’s the best word. Listen to this track and how the volume changes to be really loud for a couple of bars:
Like, what is that? It reminds me of being sick as a kid. In my fevered state, some sounds would somehow both be loud and quiet at the same time, completely overwhelming me in a deeply unpleasant way.
The song titled “Aquarium” is about 4 minutes long and just fucking wanders around:
It’s neither ambient enough to allow that kind of wandering, nor purposeful enough to suit its instrumentation. why is the kick alternating between the left and right channels? It’s disorienting, but not in a fun or interesting way, it just makes it impossible for me to listen to it and give a shit about it
I’ve listened to this in full at least three times and I’m done with it. There’s nothing interesting here to say. It’s just a bunch of notes.
This one starts out with a guy who sounds like kermit the frog telling you that he is Gaia, then giving you a 4 minute lecture on the history of the entire earth:
It kinda rocks in motion, and is extremely epic. I suggest you watch it all so you can get the experience I did of hearing the title music directly after that amazing intro:
The rest of the music is equally cheesy and bad, though it does have some range. Sometimes it’s cheesy-bad noir music:
Sometimes it’s cheesy-bad…synth wave? Car music?
etc.
At least it has aspirations! It’s doing something! It’s just not very good at it.
These are the only MIDIs I’ve heard that sound worse on the MT-32. The soundtrack is hot garbage anyway but god damn.
8 tracks, ~7 minutes of music. Most of these are obviously short ditties. I played this game as a kid and didn’t hear most of this anyway, other than the title. Here, I think you should listen to this one called Alien:
wow what a weird and kind of bad song! now listen to it on the Roland MT-32:
those horns. This was clearly written for General MIDI because those instruments are all stupid.
Anyway, bad game with a bad soundtrack. Nothing noteworthy here.
Armed with none of the tongue-in-cheek humor that Maxis’ prior games were known for, the only real link to the franchise was the SimCity 2000-inspired user interface.
Schlesinger found that adopting an extreme libertarian ideology including ending Medicare and many other government services resulted in almost hands-off victory although “the entire private insurance industry goes bankrupt in the first three months”.
i forgot you posted about this game, but i was rereading this thread while i was thinking about what to write for
SimIsle (MS-DOS Version)
and saw your post. I have no idea if the game is any good but I think you, in particular, might be interested in the soundtrack.
15 tracks, ~38 minutes of music. This soundtrack…it’s really damn good. I’ve listened to it three times now and enjoyed it each time.
I 100% thought this was going to be just like, really stereotypical “island” music, but it’s seriously not. The first track is though, and so it really lulled me into "welp this one will be easy to write about.
But the rest of the soundtrack ranges from almost-industrial-sounding music to some of the nicest ambient tracks I’ve ever heard.
Here’s BGM15:
I’ve been getting sort of into Ambient a little more seriously lately, and this is genuinely one of the nicest tracks I’ve heard. It’s got that cheesy-synth lead I love to hear, it has a nice melody that it repeats a lot, and some really nice pads to just vibrate with. It’s good!
I starred six tracks in this soundtrack, so almost half of the soundtrack. Let’s look at the rest of them.
BGM11:
This reminds me of Startopia quite a bit, and it also has the sort of “imaginary 80’s” vibe that synthwave has, but comes by it honestly. I love the really dramatic piano quite a bit too. Really great track.
BGM10:
Wow, vocals! I wish I knew what they say, but hey, what the heck. Also it introduces a melody that we’ll hear a few other times in this soundtrack. It’s super eerie, and I simply don’t know what to make of it. But I like it a lot.
BGM9:
Carrington Institute vibes here, but 5 years earlier. So I guess Carrington Institute has SimIsle BGM9 vibes. This one isn’t astounding, exactly, but it’s a nice change of pace (in the backwards direction we’re going). Very smooth and chill.
BGM5:
This definitely sounds like a spy game now. I love the introduction of the electric guitar - it’s so cheesy. But what the hell is this song doing in a game about the ecosystems of rainforests??
Like, remember that this is simisle?? Because I definitely keep forgetting which game this is in. I love how it just doesn’t match my expectations at all.
Lastly, BGM4:
This is the one that sounds industrial-adjacent to me. Like if Trent Reznor was making dance music in 1995. It’s good!! It has fucking crowds cheering near the 1 minute mark for some reason. IT’s so weird!!
So yeah, SimIsle has a weird fucken soundtrack. It’s surprisingly good, totally incongruous with the material, and…i dunno it’s just great. I really enjoyed listening to it - a pleasant surprise. The other tracks are also quite good, they just didn’t stand out as much to me. I honestly reocmmend just listening to the whole thing:
(For some reason, this is in a different order than I have)
Okay I was looking into the composer for SimIsle and it’s a guy named Harry Holmwood. It’s one of his two music credits:
In the modern world, it seems like he’s a games writer of some sort. I didn’t dig too deeply, but he’s definitely around.
I am trying to find the music from his other credit, USS Ticonderoga Life and Death on the High Seas, and all I can find is a video where a guy talks about the game but doesn’t play it, and a video where someone has like 15 screenshots of the game in total silence. This is the latter video:
It’s incredible. Also you should read the entire description and i’m not joking. My favorite part is:
ALL THESE GAMES ARE “GOOD” GAMES OR “BAD” GAMES BUT ABOVE ALL WE MUST NOT FORGET THAT ALL ARE “GAMES” AND,OF COURSE,WE LOVE THEM ALL.
Anyway, I did find it on archive.org and the game is huge by DOS standards at nearly 500 mb. I wasn’t really PC gaming in 1995, but I never really thought about DOS and the CD-ROM era interacting at all. But they must have.
However, the Archive online version crashed and wouldn’t load, so that ended up being a no-go as well. So instead, I downloaded the game myself to see if I could find the audio files. And guess what? I did!
After a little fiddling in Audacity, I think I have it sounding like it would have in game. Here, give this track a listen:
It’s alright huh? Unfortunately, the rest is mostly bombastic naval music - nothing really standout. But anyway, there you go, a song from a soundtrack that seems to be essentially unavailable without weird conversion stuff. If you want the rest, I zipped em up:
