A book by Dmitry Glukhovski "
Metro 2033" has passed around the world like a tornado. The enormous success among readers, several reprints, the Encouragement Award in the prestigious Eurocon contest in 2007, numerous translations abroad and a total circulation of 500.000 copies - not bad for a first book, right? Post-nuclear future within the walls of such a familiar subway resembles a plot of a fantastic action movie. So it’s no wonder that at the same time when the book was being written, the Ukrainians from
4A Games (a part of the crew that made the original
S.T.A.L.K.E.R., btw) launched a video game adaptation. Time has proved that this policy was right. On the whole Glukhovski was lucky to have such guys from the brotherly republic, as the game Metro 2033 fully repeated the success of the book and now has good chances to become one of the best games of the year.
The music for this interesting project was written by our old friends – Anthesteria project. Probably, everyone remembers their posh Outcry. Today we decided to talk with
George Beloglazov, a thought leader of
Antestheria, about how the music for “Metro 2033” was being created. As a bonus, from the second part of the interview you'll learn about a new project by Phantomery Interactive entitled
Phobos: 1953. The game is the ideological successor to Outcry, it has an improved version of its engine and can boast of an interesting analogue-style soundtrack. It’s noteworthy that this game is based on a recently released in Russia movie “Phobos”, but the game is set in a totally different time period without any teenagers participating and in general the only thing that this game has in common with the movie is a scene of action - an abandoned bunker.
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Bioshock sequel has divided its fans into two camps. One said that the game was absolutely nothing new and that’s why all copies should be burnt in an electric chair. The others (and your humble servant is in this group) came to a simple and a pleasant conclusion – there’s even more Bioshock here! It reminds of a situation with Fallout 1-2, right?
In any case, the action is again set in an underwater city Rapture, which was designed as utopia for creative people. Built by Andrew Ryan in the seabed of the Atlantic Ocean, inaccessible from the outside world, it could represent the ideal state for thinkers, artists, poets and entrepreneurs. Andrew wanted to create a place free from moral constraints, where everyone could be what he wanted to be. The discovery of “ADAM” serum, which allowed people to reshape their gene structure at their desire, should have helped to the inhabitants of Rapture to achieve these aims.
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"Assassin's Creed" franchise has only two full-fledged games so far (versions for portable platforms do not count), but for a progressive video games composer Jesper Kyd it has already become not less important than a series about Hitman, which has made this Danish electronic musician an icon of modern game music. Like Hitman, Assassin’s Creed is a game about a killer though very ancient one. A medieval setting for Kyd is not a barrier but vice versa it’s an incentive. It’s not just a stimulus to step into a territory of unusual for him creative directions, simply to do something new but to reinvent a particular music style, to deconstruct music, take all familiar elements to pieces so as to reconstruct them later to his own taste, gracefully ignoring standards and authenticity. For the composer who has long gone beyond the framework of electronic sound and pure genres, in whose career there was both cold IDM, organically woven into the disturbing orchestration, and choir of the Hungarian Radio, performing pseudo-Soviet patriotic songs in broken Russian to the accompaniment of techno rhythms and vintage synthesizers, there are no obstacles and nothing is impossible. Each new Kyd’s work is not similar to the preceding, it has no analogues in the game industry and sometimes no analogues at all.
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