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Sunday, August 24, 2014

Song of the Week! 23 August 2014


Another arcade collaboration is in the air! A quick look back at one of the previous events with today's song sounds fitting in order to welcome this new event, doesn't it?

 Opa! Opa! RACER -GMT mashup- (オパ!オパ!RACER -GMT mashup-) COSIO (ZUNTATA/TAITO)
Version
Allx5 (145)x6 (232)x8 (460)x9 (682)
 Taiko 0 M
 172
 none
 ???


When it comes to rhythm game collaborations, we all know that Bandai Namco's Taiko franchise is very young, with only a song crossover event with Taito's Music Gun!Gun! 2 and this year's Game Music Triangle event, which ended up bringing six new Game Music tracks for all the latest arcade installments of Taiko, Groove Coaster and Maimai. However, since Taito has been the closest one to the Taiko tracklist in more than one way throughout the years, the first of the three 'GMT mashup' songs of the GMT collab we're going to look at in this feature is the one made by Taito composer Hirokazu Koshio (小塩広和).

Mostly known by his pseudonym 'COSIO', this composer from the Yamanashi Prefecture is one of the youngest members of Zuntata, Taito's official sound team. His first works were mostly aimed at portable console games, both for Nintendo DS (Arkanoid DS, Space Invaders Extreme 1 and 2) and iOS (Demons' Score, SPACE INVADERS INFINITY GENE). After several track arranges in many of Zuntata's CD albums being released in recent years and some of his previous Game Music tracks being featured in the two Music Gun!Gun! arcade models, he's one of the main composers from Taito behind the majority of Groove Coaster's original songs, together with Shohei Tsuchiya (土屋昇平).

For the Game Music Triangle event, COSIO made a remix of one of Taito series Densha de Go!'s most iconic tracks (which you can find in our Taito series feature) and the song mashup between the other two main Game Music tracks for the event: Shinji Hosoe's "Ridge Racer (Power Remix)" and Hiro's "Opa Opa! & Shopping" from Fantasy Zone. As a result, the patterns for all the modes go back and forth to selected bits of the Taiko notecharts of the two originary song, making this mashup a little bit harder than the two songs alone.