6 tracks, 2 minutes. I wouldn’t necessarily call this a soundtrack. There are 5 tracks of just…short snippets of music. Only 5-7 seconds long. One of them is the the first two bars of the title music of Sim City 2000 which is, of course, just as irritating as the first 900 times I heard it.
Then there’s one track that’s ~1.5 minutes long, and it’s just some ambient nature noises.
So yeah, nothing really interesting going on here.
1 track, 22 seconds long. Imagine “Safari Music” for 22 seconds. You’ve heard the soundtrack. The end.
10 tracks, 47 seconds. Most of these are just little snippets for the theater, which I assume you can hear as you scroll past it. So yeah, just more snippets.
Remember SimCity Jr.? That was a port of this game, and so I’ve already heard the 3 tracks (7 minutes) before.
But notably this version apparently sounds like dogshit:
You really gotta hear this, trust me. It’s so immediately irritating and dissonant. It doesn’t even loop cleanly. The Super Famicom version is much, much nicer.
I assume this is probably another one of these MIDI issues though - perhaps the recordings are on a lower end device, and the original compositions are not so irritating.
This can in fact be confirmed by listening to the Youtube version below:
They’re not great, but they sound…normal? They even loop better. It makes me wonder where the heck this collection sourced the music and why it sounds so different.
In any case, this also led me to discover there’s a 2007 game called SimCity Societies, which was not developed by Maxis and therefore is not in this collection. I might seek it out as a bonus, but there’s still a long way to go until that.
I say that, but we’re down to the last three games!!! The next two are gonna take me a while so I just burned through these real fast. And after that I have a bonus I already plan on doing.
Damn, the Sim Isle soundtrack is really not what I expected! This song sounds like a b-side off of my favorite surreal “4th world” ambient record:
I definitely thought the game would have more, like, “global new age coffee shop” music, not dark ambient techno/industrial. I really should have gotten this game when I was a kid, my mind might be even more warped. Thank you for investigating!
I actually think the jacked up midi version sounds pretty cool
64 tracks, an 1 hour and 44 minutes of music. You better believe I listened to all of it. This was the most challenging OST yet. While you start reading this post, I would implore you to listen to this, to give you some small simulacrum of what I went through to bring this post to you:
I had this game as a kid. It’s what convinced me that I would never be able to make music (lol). I actually think it’s a really, really neat tool. The idea is that you paint with colored pixels, each color representing a different note. Then you place little bugs that move forward and each time they encounter a pixel, they play a note. The bugs are, of course, little instruments, like pianos, drums, guys that say “doo” or “wah”, etc.
It’s all very playful! The real trick is drawing pictures that are also songs, and there are about 60 of those included with the game.
Unfortunately, they almost all sound like dog shit. And this is why SimTunes delayed my confidence in my musical talent: everything I made sounded like dog shit.
Okay you can stop the irritating track now. You’ve got more songs to listen to, and it’s only uphill from here.
This game was directed by the same guy (Toshio Iwai) who ended up doing Electroplankton which, for my money, is one of the best musical toys ever made. Simtunes is, unfortunately, a little too complex to be a toy, but not complex enough to be a tool.
Okay listen to this and I dare you not to laugh at the horn:
I think SimTunes excels at making the dumbest shit possible. The visual nature of it really encourages really stupid shit like the above. Just how many pixels can we make this horn go over at once? HONKHONKHONKHONKTOOTHONKHONK
What if we made a song out of stupid cartoon noises??
(This one’s actually good IMO)
There are a few real cool tracks though. Listen to this one now:
That reverb effect is nice! It’s a good track, and I’m impressed at the trick they use to get it working (multiple copies of the same instrument playing at lower volumes on a delay. cool idea!!)
But yeah, overall SimTunes is real neat but it produces some very, very annoying noises. I really suffered for this one if i’m being honest, and the standouts are like. Not that good.
ONLY TWO GAMES LEFT
oh wow, this was part of my morrowind soundtrack, i probably haven’t heard this in 10 years but heard it hundreds of times probably
It’s a really cool record, I can’t think of anything that sounds like it.
ooh i popped ‘Gravity’ by Gorillaz in mine
this and OSB’s reply are the only mention of Afterlife anywhere on SB. and OSB is like, probably for the best… as if the game sucks!! does it… suck? i played the tutorial for a few minutes on my Mac and the game seems really interesting to that point. i hope it doesn’t suck because it’s fascinating
I dunno, I vaguely remember reading a review that really trashed it like 20 years ago, that’s all. Maybe it’s a hidden gem, beats me! It does have a winning premise for a sim game.
Afterlife is gorgeous, imaginative, and has horrendous balance and it is not intuitive at all how you’re supposed to actually do well in the game