Cyber Cross – “Theme of Cyber Cross (Instrumental)” (arr. Howard Killy)

I know practically nothing about this game, and I kind of want it to stay that way. Stuff like this finds its way onto Slightly Dark, especially for the ’20 years ago today’ posts. It’s kind of cool to see everything that came out and when, though you have to take the bad with the good. I guess Cyber Cross is a PCE game that managed to find its own practically worthless Wikipedia page (since when did Wikipedia become a repository for game lists?). In this case, Google serves better (looks like a pretty crappy beat ’em up in a genre that was pretty popular in Japan around that time). Anyway, the soundtrack is pretty lame (the original version sounds terrible), but the main theme isn’t too bad (and in fact may be about the only salvageable piece of music on the album). I suppose this goes to show that usually you’ll find something at least halfway good on an album. But honestly, what do you expect from a soundtrack that has a Power Ranger on the cover?

Cyber Cross – “Theme of Cyber Cross (Instrumental)” (arr. Howard Killy)

This is a pretty mid-road anime-style theme for Cyber Cross (whch ). It’s got a fun guitar line with a nice hummable melody. Slick ’70s guitar jingles and cheesy synth lines make this a blast from the past. The percussion here is also nice and cheesy – a good, driving bass line with what sounds like a koto and cowbell. There’s actually a lyrical version of this song on the album (as well as karaoke), but I’ll save you the pain of having to listen to those (the singer sounds off-key, the lyrics pretty lame). It’s kind of interesting though because the album contains two copies of the same song in the first and last track (in addition to the karaoke and instrumental versions!). I suppose they did that to provide symmetry.

The original composer, Kenichi Kamio,  has a fairly empty/poorly documented history. It looks like he’s composed a lot of other PC Engine games, including the PCE version of Valis II. He’s still composing today (Countdown Vampires, 2000)