We need to talk about how good Fat Bard’s game soundtracks are. Super Space Club rebooted Asteroids as “a lo-fi space shooter to chill to,” set to the St. Louis production duo’s beats – and that game is free right now on Epic Game Store. So grab that. But it doesn’t end there.
Super Space Club is free through May 8:
Super Space Club – Epic Games Store
https://www.grahamoflegend.com/superspaceclub
But that soundtrack. Damn. “It’s really nice to be in space.”
The songs are anthems. You’ll be singing along.
And it’s a perfect fusion of gameplay and score here. The game has all of its thrills of Asteroid, but completely chilled. I think I’ve never felt so calm dying in a game and yet also wanted to improve and make it through more waves at the same time. Jamaican game developer GrahamOfLegend made an absolute gem, and it’d be a crime not to remind you to go get it from Epic or buy it any way you can.
This may be the first action arcade game and soundtrack to lower your blood pressure instead of raise it – without slowing the action at all.
Super Space Club is for Windows, but I’ve been playing comfortably on a MacBook Pro with M1 Max running Parallels Desktop for Mac. (That’s a separate story: the ARM version of Windows 11 runs seamlessly now. Not everything works equally – was just watching some glitchy footage of Mass Effect – so I’ll be testing, partly out of curiosity.) CDM is a Parallels affiliate, so we may earn a commission.
Defunct Games loves it, too. (That’s a guilty pleasure for me, I expect partly because I am of the print magazine-reading age.)
But there’s more great game music from Fat Bard.
Without being derivative in any way, the score for Jet Lancer draws on some of the greatest Japanese scores, complete with modal harmonies and complex phrase structures and rock riffs. You’d swear this was a long-lost soundtrack from that era, yet it’s not – and still manages to be fresh and current.
Like the Super Space Club score, it’s one you can happily stick on repeat, and dare I say, study/work to, as well.
There are so many bullet hell shooter games out there, but Jet Lancer is so unique, from art direction to gameplay to interaction.
There are other reviews out there but – this one, for the title (and other hilarious comments). This one’s on pretty much every platform, too – including macOS native, in case you don’t want to bother with virtualization.
Oh, sure, I should be saving my money for extra Eurorack patch cables at SuperBooth or something, and yet I just grabbed this thing. This is a reminder of why AI won’t be used for games. Games will be crafted like this out of someone’s actual soul. They will defy logic or physics because they will speak directly to the part of your brain that makes you fall in love.
And Fat Bard does it all – sound design and music – the duo of Patrick Crecelius and Zach Fendelman. Holy. Crap. They have a resume.
Let’s just pick some great albums here more or less at random – needle dropping this library works perfectly well:
Look, plenty of people can slap some katakana chaos onto track titles; only a handful of people can channel classic Capcom and Sonic through their teeth.
This album could replace sugar and caffeine:
Exhibit B. This will also make generative AI algorithms cry themselves to sleep:
Check their sizzle reel, too – though this is like Nintendo Direct-dream-level of making you want to covet more time to play games, fair warning: