Sorry for the hiatus on our WAS last week; my time was completely occupied by the World Finals at Evo. So hype!
But I’m back, with a double dose of soundtrack for your enjoyment! For this week’s audio spotlight, we’re lighting up a couple of old PSX gems: Ape Escape, and Tenchu: Stealth Assassins.
Bumping Hip-Hop beats, cool ambience, nice house feel at times, while it may be arguable whether the first game to support dual analog functionality can be considered a classic, the soundtrack certainly is in my book. In many ways, the first Ape Escape captured a magic and addictiveness that the followup games simply had a hard time measuring up to. The soundtrack is one of the biggest. Check it here.
For Part two of this week’s WAS, I give you another PSX classic, and the game that started one of, if not my favorite ninja game series of all time: Tenchu: Stealth Assassins.
To be honest, I can’t really say enough about how revolutionary this game was on many levels. Alongside the legendary Metal Gear Solid, Tenchu really pushed the concept of stealth based action games into the spotlight, and was another jewel in the crown that was the Playstation’s library back in those times. Along with an epic, moving soundtrack (the opening of which being featured in one of our podcasts), Tenchu’s action and story was the first game to really give you the feel of being put in the sandals of a real ninja. A ninja with some amazing background music (that you can find here).
Both of the games this week were published by Sony, incidentally. SCE really put their thing down back in the PSX era, and these two games (and their amazing soundtracks) are shining examples of that. Catch y’all next week!