It might be cheating to spotlight Jonathan Mak’s Everyday Shooter in our OST feature. After all, Mak’s guitar instrumentals aren’t used to provide color and tone to Everyday Shooter’s gameplay; they are the gameplay. Yes, Everyday Shooter is a twin-stick shooting game in the tradition of Smash TV and Geometry Wars but it is also, as Mak puts it, an album. Each of the eight songs is a distinct composition the player influences by their actions, whether in success or failure. Survival brings evolving melody while death brings a dissonant clang. The sweet melancholy of “Porco in the Sky”, the vicious roar of “Bits of Fury”; Everyday Shooters' songs endure in the mind beyond play but listening to them, engaging the music itself, demands play. While Mak’s game is often compared to Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s games Rez and Lumines, Mizuguchi’s brand of synesthesetics is still rooted more in gameplay tropes than in musical traditions. Thanks to its structure and adherence to form, Shooter creates a musical expression unique to both games and pop music.
Hit the jump for a listen and look at "Porco in the Sky", the fourth track on Everyday Shooter.
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