Rez - 2001, 2008

Rez is an audio-based shooter, where the combat is about rhythm. When it came along in 2001, rhythm games were still mostly a rarity, not the heavily established genre they are today. Sure, there were a few, but nothing like Rez. Hell, there hasn't been much like Rez before or since.

Rez was the brainchild of Tetsuya Mizuguchi, who would go on to make other fantastic games as Lumines and Space Channel 5. Mizuguchi started working at Sega building arcade machines like Sega Rally, but eventually he founded United Game Artists, who were created to make more experimental fare. Space Channel 5 was the first game from that group, and it was a dancing game with trippy space age visuals. From that, came the idea of Rez.

At its core, Rez is simply an on-rails shooter, a kind of game that's been around for a long, long, long, long time. The "on-rails shooter," for those of you less familiar with videogames, is a shooting game where you only have a limited amount of mobility, and have to concentrate more on shooting things out of the skies than you do avoiding things (although avoiding things is also important) because you aren't choosing the general path - it's on a rail, like a ride at an amusement park.

But that's where the similarities end, because Rez is more interested in the experience than it is being an overwhelming challenge. See, all the sound effects in Rez make music. You heard me. The game itself becomes a form of music creation, and somewhere along the line, your senses start to blur. You start killing enemies to a rhythm, which in turn, generally makes you play better. You are, for all intents and purposes, riding a groove. Each playthrough will sound similar, but different. You are, after all, playing a game and making music at the same time.

Also, each area in Rez has music put together by a different artist, with Area 5, the last, big world before the boss fights, featuring music from Adam Freeland, a track called "Mind Killer," which has become a staple in my workout mixes and fast driving mixes. From here, I turned into a Freeland fan, and at some point, I'll probably write about his music.


The game's graphics, as you can see, have a visual style unlike pretty much anything else in videogames. It's inspired by the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, and has a very unique look - empty polygons, neon lines, flat backgrounds - you will get an experience that is singular in games.

When Rez came out, it didn't sell that well. However, the game because the classic "sleeper hit" as people found the game in rental places, bargain bins and through word of mouth. Eventually, copies of Rez were going for as much as a couple hundred bucks on Ebay, and the game was reprinted, something that is extremely rare in the world of videogames after a title goes out of print. Years later, the team remastered the game for HD and it went on sale on Xbox Live Arcade, where you can still get it, and absolutely should.

Rez got a sequel/prequel of sorts called "Child Of Eden" that was good, but I think the marketing leaned too heavily on the game's support of the Kinect/Move, which, at the time, were still very much fringe products. It's still out there, though, and if you like Rez, you should pick up Child of Eden as well.

Sadly, Mizuguchi has reportedly turned mostly to development and isn't really directing games any more, but we can all hope he'll come back and bring us another amazing musical experiment at some point in the future. Until then, go and find the cult hit that is Rez.

Wipeout XL (soundtrack) - 1996

The way we get exposed to new music has changed a lot over the years. Back when I was a wee youngin', there was the radio and there was MTV. If you were really brave, you could try and listen to the college radio station and see what was being played there to find something new. When I got to college, we had the college radio, which was a good start, and there were a lot of places selling music that were always playing CDs they'd been sent, and on top of that, I was working for the college newspaper at the time, so I was writing music reviews every so often, which meant I was also getting sent free CDs, a lot of which were terrible, but a few of which were good to great.. I also started getting a magazine called CMJ New Music Monthly, which I found a ton of bands from as well. But you know where I discovered a handful of bands? From a videogame called Wipeout XL.

Wipeout XL, or Wipeout 2097 as it was called overseas, was the second game in the Wipeout series. My roommate had gotten a Playstation and we'd spent some serious time with the original Wipeout, so when the sequel came out, he picked up a copy. Needless to say, we were pretty excited, but I don't think we were quite prepared for just how much we were going to play the game, because we played the ever living shit out of it.

The Wipeout series is a sci-fi racing game, where players pilot hovering cars that look more like low-flying shuttles, and strap weapons to them, trying to outrace and obliterate their opponents. Basically, it's a cyberpunk version of Mario Kart. But here's the thing - Playstation games were released on CDs. They were jet black CDs, but they were CDs nonetheless. So one day, on a lark, I decided to take  the game CD and pop it into a CD player. The first track was nothing but noise, but when I skipped to the second track, lo and behold, there was the game soundtrack. Which brings me to the reason I'm talking about the game.

In terms of touchstones, the Wipeout XL soundtrack introduced me, for all intents and purposes, to techno. From this game alone, I found: Future Sound of London, The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Fluke and Underworld. It was almost like someone had decided "Let's get all the great techno artists we can and slap them on one game," and got away with it. When the soundtrack came out on a retail CD later, I was initially going to pass, but saw it had a few other people on it, including Orbital and Leftfield. From this initial springboard, I also jumped to people like Propellerheads, who were on the Wipeout 3 soundtrack, coincidentally enough.

The Wipeout franchise has, sadly, run aground. There was a PSN downloadable game, which was actually a pretty good entry, but it didn't do well enough, and last I had heard, the studio had been shuttered, as so many great videogame studios have been in recent years.

Hilariously enough, Wipeout XL also had a sponsor - RedBull. At the time, I remember thinking that RedBull was a weird name for a fictional company inside of a videogame. (Seriously, I didn't think they were real. I don't know that any of us did.) Little did I know what a force they would be in only a few years time. To me, the soundtrack reminds me that incidental music can very much affect people, and that the music people put in movies, tv, videogames, etc., should be chosen with care, but also with an intent for discovery and diversity. You never know when you could be just ahead of the curve.