New track - Cerium

Fallout 3 Main Theme / Inon Zur

Ranking up there as a comparable Pavlovian response as the Tetris theme, Fallout 3's amazingly varied soundtrack, starting with the opening theme hits all the right notes. The score builds slowly to the first climax, which coincides nicely with the point where the menu screen comes in and works precisely because it fits in with the rest of the game. For a title that is all about a post nuclear apocalypse, a grim prospect of survival and destruction, and there's plenty of comic and outright silly things out in the wasteland to enjoy to counterbalance it. Looking back to the score, the main theme from Inon Zur presents the game as neither a completely terrible place or completely lighthearted - there's just enough menace in the trumpets to say that there is danger out there but some things have survived and there are opportunities out there.

Lemmings - 10 Green Bottles

One of the biggest successes of DMA (now Rockstar) before the Grand Theft Auto series was the addictive puzzler Lemmings, published by Psygnosis (who became Sony Liverpool, RIP guys!) which has since been ported to every platform under the sun in an attempt to get as much revenue as possible out of it.

Android Synthesisers

A few months ago I took a look at mobile music apps on iOS and Android and lamented that high latency on Android’s operating system (at least at the time of writing) was to blame for the lack of decent music apps on the app store. However, the Heat Synthesiser did pave the way forward in this regard and highlighted that with a bit of programming know-how, it is possible to play a decent Android software synthesizer.

It’s now Summer 2013 and the Google Play store has been steadily building up a number of music apps for download, both free and paid-for. In this post, I’m going to cover a few of the free options that are available and will highlight some of the best (and worst) the platform currently has to offer.

New track - Yttrium