This racing game-a genre I normally hold little interest in-looked and felt better than real-life.ĭrifting around giant swathes of American alpine and urban multi-lane highways (other worldly locales unlocked later) boosting into the side and rear-end of enemy cars shunting rivals into cars, pillars, trucks, barriers, buses, and blunt concrete faces. And I’m sure you can see where this is going: Barely post-pubescent bawling of “Wonderwall” whilst blistering car paint-jobs against blurring in-game walls.įiretrap, grunge, and other post-cool baggy clothed early Aughties aesthetic styling aside, my eyes melted into the deep tube TV in awe at the sheer feeling of speed, the intensity of colours, the sharp focus and soft edges. You see, 2004’s Burnout 3: Takedown, with it’s play-list of edgy alt indie rock tunes had this special feature whereby you could import your own mp3 songs. Teenage kicks, right through the night, indeed. The reason I beg two degrees of separation is this particular troupe were big into drinking lukewarm super stubbies, mugging their arms around each other’s shoulders, and chanting Oasis lyrics into the salted fish air of my coastal hometown. I lost my Burnout virginity at a friend of a friend of a friend’s house. There are others albums and video games that will be forever linked in my brain, but I will have to wait until they show up on the shuffle queue on my iPod to open the floodgates of nostalgia.Burnout 3: Takedown (Criterion/EA, PlayStation 2, 2004) You could also click here if you have no imagination. To get an idea of the kind of things that make me laugh, listen to the song in the video below, but think about stomping around as Isaac violently killing every monster in sight. For no reason other than my own amusement, I like to think the two songs are about the Sprawl featured in Dead Space 2, the space station where the majority of the game takes place. The other reason the two got oddly linked is there are two tracks on The Suburbs called Sprawl I and Sprawl II. Then I would head home, and play some more Dead Space 2. I would play Dead Space 2, go to sleep, head to work listening to The Suburbs on the way there, sit down at work promptly inserting my earbuds, and look over the assorted achievements and message boards discussing the game. Instead, it served as my soundtrack between my hours on the Sprawl. I didn't actually listen to The Suburbs while I was playing the game. Every time the song five corporations shuffles through on my iPod, I can't help but remember my time in Golden Sun.ĭead Space 2 and Arcade Fire are a little bit different than my previous entries. I remember exploring the world and collecting Djinn, all while my portable CD player's batteries drained away looping End Hits over and over and over. I was embarrassingly late when it came to discovering their music, but I was totally absorbed when I found them.
I was working my way through Golden Sun during a trip to visit family and friends, when Fugazi and End Hits was introduced to me. I have no idea what sort of music Paradise had, but for me it was Colors, and nothing else. I would drive around Paradise City looping the album, usually paying more attention to it than the game. It was still all I was listening to, and it continues to be one of my favorite albums to this day. Colors had released about five months prior to Paradise's release, but it didn't matter. The two couldn't be more dissimilar, but for some reason I will always relate them to one another, and I frequently forget that Crackdown's soundtrack wasn't by Radiohead.Įlectronic Arts is pretty good at feeding a plethora of popular and lesser-known bands and music into its racing and sports games, but when it came to Burnout Paradise, all I ever wanted to listen to was Colors by Between the Buried and Me. Listening to the rest of the album conjures images of homing rockets and throwing cars at thugs. The disc scratching effect sound of guitar feedback that sets Hail to the Thief in motion will forever summon images of Crackdown's loading screen. I had recently ripped Radiohead's Hail to the Thief to my Xbox 360 hard drive, and every single time I booted up the game, including the first time, I started up Hail to the Thief before the game had even completed loading. I couldn't tell you why, but for some reason I never gave Crackdown's soundtrack a chance. Because of this, there are a few albums that instantly remind me of very specific video games. It was never for games whose music was highly regarded, but more for games whose soundtracks were not particular groundbreaking or interesting. It's rare that I do it these days, but there have been a few specific occasions where I completely ignored a game's soundtrack in favor of a single album.
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