Playstation Portable Archives

#WeeklyGameMusic: To Catch an Owl (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)

Posted on December 21, 2020 by Taro Omiya

Welp, this writer didn’t have a festive tune in their backlog of video game music, but this #WeeklyGameMusic, composed by James Hannigan comes close enough. To Catch an Owl is a video-game-original track for the book-to-movie-to-game adaptation, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, developed by EA UK. It’s a magical and celebratory tune fitting of the upcoming holidays, and manages to capture the movie soundtrack’s spirit.

Note: this writer does acknowledge the author of the Harry Potter series is notoriously transphobic. While the composer of this track is completely unrelated to J.K. Rowling, it should be stated that transphobia is immoral and wrong. This writer does not intend to promote such a position.

Within a few chapters of the fifth entry in the seven book (or eight movie) series, titular character Harry Potter and his non-magical cousin Dudley get attacked by the depression-inducing Dementors, well outside of the wizarding realm and within our realistic one. Thus setting the tone for what’s going to be a dark entry amongst the series, Harry uses magical spells Dudley can’t perceive to ward off the Dementors in self-defense. The problem? It’s illegal for an underage wizard student (which Harry himself is just into the fifth year of a seven year long career) to use magic in front of muggles, or normies by wizard lingo. This immediately kicks off a number of lawsuits Harry is forced to navigate, and while the ruling manages to fall into his favor, puts Harry into a legally precarious position as he enters Hogwarts wizarding school for the fifth year.

While story-wise, the video game adaptation of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix doesn’t stray from this story, it’s gameplay takes a much more interesting approach to the politically oppressive atmosphere the book presents. In short, Order of the Phoenix is an open-world game where players utilizes gestures on the right-stick of the controller to cast various spells. Said spells are used to handle various tasks given by minigames, or simple environmental puzzles to unlock new secrets in the labyrinthine Hogwarts. Exploration is key to both progressing the story and unlocking new abilities and upgrade to our hero as he navigates this magically dangerous place.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was released for the (wait for it…) Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, Wii, Nintendo DS, Game Boy Advance, PlayStation Portable, PC, and Mac (phew!)

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Heavenly Star (Lumines II)

Posted on September 14, 2020 by Taro Omiya

The next #WeeklyGameMusic is a popular track that has appeared in quite a lot of games, ranging from No More Heroes to Child of Eden. As far as this writer can tell, though, it originated from Q? Entertainment’s block-based puzzle game, Lumines II. Sung by Genki Rockets, it tells a story of “an artificial space girl” and her rather optimistic understanding of what Earth (which, in lore, she has yet to visit) is like.

Lumines II is the second game in the Lumines series: a color-block-based puzzle game where one drops blocks to create a 2×2 same-colored square to score points. The innovation comes from how the game calculates combos: the 2×2 same-colored squares doesn’t get eliminated until after the Time Line — a vertical line which swipes from the left of the screen to the right in regular intervals — passes over it. In other words, clever players can rapidly drop a ton of blocks to create more 2×2 squares before the Time Line makes a full pass over their formation, thus aggregating to a larger score.

While the basic premise of Lumines is simple, the game excels on presentation, and in particular, it’s dynamic music generation. Much like Tetris Effect, each and every action the player takes creates a sound effect and instrumental that affects both the background music and visuals. As a consequence, playing Lumines often feels like sketching music on the fly, just as much as thinking through the puzzle that you’ve created for yourself.

Lumines II was originally released on the Playstation Portable. While this sequel is no longer in print, its predecessor, Lumines Remastered is available for PC on Steam and Microsoft Store.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: 陽の当たる場所 (水平線まで何マイル? -Deep Blue Sky & Pure White Wings-)

Posted on February 14, 2015 by Taro Omiya

#WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music.

Cover Art — Cover art from https://vndb.org/v972

Note: sadly, the music file has been taken down, and I’m unable to locate another source yet.

With love up in the air, I had to look for something special. And now, I’ve found it…in a obscure Japanese visual novel called Suiheisen Made Nan Mile? – Deep Blue Sky & Pure White Wings –!? Regardless of its hentai origins, this week’s music is incredibly catchy. I’ll forgive you if the moment you’ve played Where the Sun Shines, a lovely tune by Yasuhisa Watanabe, you started dancing.

So, forgive me for the scarce information, but this is what I can gather about Suiheisen Made Nan Mile? through a few Google searches. The game is a regular visual novel that focuses on a simple slice-of-life of an average Japanese high school club. You play as Sorata, an average student and a member in astronomy club. As it turns out, the student council deems the club unworthy (which, unfortunately for the lazy club members, is a logical conclusion), forcing the members to come up with a ridiculous plan to redeem themselves: compete with the aviation club to pilot electric gliders for a world competition. And so, their flight begins…

Unfortunately, I was not able to gather what kind of visual novel Suiheisen Made Nan Mile? is. That is, typically, visual novels can be divided into one of the two categories: choose-your-own-adventure like Katawa Shoujo, or stat building like Long Live the Queen and Hatoful Boyfriend. Given the (very) few reviews out there that mentions that honing in on which girl (and a guy) to date tends to be easy lends me to believe it’s the former type of game, but I can’t be too sure. What I can confirm is that, yes, this is another erotic Japanese game (unlike Long Live the Queen and Hatoful Boyfriend), though a tame one at that. Much like Katawa Shoujo, sex scenes are treated as an end reward rather than a pornographic journey. Additionally, since the settings is set firmly in a non-magical world, there aren’t any tentacle monsters or other bizarre fetishes. Lastly, replaying the game with the same starting choices actually leads to new branches in the story as well, increasing the replay value. This does, yes, include more sex scenes.

Suiheisen Made Nan Mile? – Deep Blue Sky & Pure White Wings – was released on the Playstation Portable and PC. It is, as far as I can tell, a Japan-only game.

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