Labels:text | screenshot | font OCR: AM/FM Title Lethal Xcess (Wings of Death II) Disks 2 Company Eclipse Music Jochen Hippel AM/FM Ratings:: Presentation 90 % Composition 90 % Samples 85 % - Overall 88 % Reviewed by Jogeir Liljedahl The Title-introtune starts fading in, and you hear that something different is being played. The soundcolor is incredible, basically because the music-routine handles 7 channels. The tune is very moody and atmospheric, and the quality is much above average. It lasts for about 9 minutes with lots of variation, nice rhythms and nice melodies. Hippel got his very own style, using powerful drums and bass lines. The music-routine has been "programmed" by Jochen Hippel himself, and it's called TFMX Pro. Chris Huslbeck, another German, made the basic- routine called TFMX, and it looks like Hippel and Hulsbeck are the only owners of this editor. The music-routine is copyrighted by Jochen Hippel and Chris Hulsbeck, both excellent musicians with years of experience. The title-tune itself is good, but now he uses "only" 4 channels. If you have heard the "The Last Ninja" music from the C64, this tune is in many ways similar. The soundcolor is awesome here too. His routine handles bassdrums and snaredrums within the bassline. Let's say you're mixing a bassdrum with a bassline in Protracker to spare a channel. It doesn't sound the same if you're playing the notes "A1" and "C3". You can hear the bassdrum is following the bass, and when a bassdrum sounds good at "C3", it doesn't sound good at "A1". (that's logic) Hippel has managed to do this without loosing the "beat" of the bassdrum. If he plays a "C3" note the bassdrum sounds and if he plays the note "A1" it still sounds good. In that way, in most of his tunes, he uses only 1 channel for the bass and the drums. Then he got 1 channel for chords, 1 for a lead and still he got an empty channel to fill. good, You can choose between Effects (only), Music(only) and Music+(combination). The ingame-tunes fits the game good. Since this is a standard "shoot'em up" game, it isn't so difficult to make a fast beating tune. No melodies here, though I don't think many of us really are expecting one. A nice rhythm with some nice "vocoder" sounds and a bassline happily following the bassdrums. Here and there a lead bumps in, but generally there are no real melodies. The rest of the tunes are equally the same as the first. The effects are a bit above the normal standard of a "shoot'em up" game. Some speech-samples together with lots of lazer, blasts and shooting-fxs. It's difficult to find out if the quality is bad or not, but it sounds good. Overally the music in this game is very good. The intro-titletune is the reason why the music is ranked so high. Hippel is truly one of the best game-musicians around. Get your hands on this game, not for playing of course, but for listening to the incredible title-introtune. It's worth it! AM/FM
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