little bits of everything

We borrowed Kirby's Epic Yarn for Wii over half-term. It's a delightfully inventive game and I'd recommend it for children of all ages. It's quite forgiving, but that doesn't make it easy. One of the things that struck me was the variety of music on the soundtrack. Before I cover that though, some thoughts on computer games music generally. Because gaming doesn't occupy a high place in popular culture compared with its turnover, and because it's mostly background, I think it doesn't generally get thought about. Recently, though, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra  played a concert to mark 25 years of Legend of Zelda. Mostly it seems like it's pretty generic stuff, see Exhibit A - the music to Da Blob. However even the music on that is cleverer than it appears as the melody only plays while you're painting, but cuts in and out at the right moments. The World of Goo music is quite distinctive and I think it sounds like a film soundtrack. Yo...

You know you're old when they make a programme about your childhood. I watched Micro Men on BBC4 last night, about the rivalry between Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry as they developed their home computers. Our school got a ZX80 and then a ZX81 and we got a Spectrum at home (Sinclair's machines). We also got a BBC computer (made by Curry's Acorn company) at our school. So these machines were part of my childhood. I heard names I hadn't heard for a long time like Sinclair QL, Dragon, Oric and BBC Master. Towards the end they sit in a pub and speculate what it would have been like if they'd worked together, however I think the home computer market may still have dried up. Someone's probably done the analysis, but I guess consoles took over from these computers for games, and PCs for "serious" stuff. One of my sons got a T-shirt yesterday that said "retro gamer" with a picture of a cassette tape on it. The tape also said 2kB. One of them a...