Mageslayer Soundtrack (New)

[S-Priest]

Mageslayer is a game developed in 1997 by Raven Software, more or less concurrently with Hexen II. Based on the in-house Vampire engine, which is really curious. It's a full-3D-space engine with 2D sprites, solving the eternal camera angle alignment problem in an original fashion: it's top-down.

It's been described as a Gauntlet clone, but really it's more like an overhead Heretic game. Warlock, the original player class (there're 4), looks a lot like Corvus in Heretic. Mageslayer is even more like Heretic than Heretic II, as there're proper health artifacts.

The idea behind Vampire/Mageslayer makes a lot of sense, as it allows hand-drawn sprites for enemies (which back then, and still are more artistic in some ways than 3D models), much lower limits on enemy counts (rendering mobs with sprites is a lot lighter load than rendering mobs with 3D models), combined with full 3D space - allowing ramps and meshes running over first storeys (the levels make beautiful use of that).

So here's a new take on the Mageslayer soundtrack - these are different mixes, unlike the original bleak and doomy soundtrack. These are my own mixes, made in 2013, with new soft synths and samples.

There're as few low-res samples (44/16) as possible, the only low-res instruments are some "real" strings, choir, and halo pad.

Again, this is very different to the original CD soundtrack, there's a more of an "arcade game" feel.

Some demos can be listened to here.

The whole soundtrack is downloadable here.

[Da Werecat]

S-Priest said:

hand-drawn sprites for enemies (which back then, and still are more artistic in some ways than 3D models)

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but many sprites in Mageslayer (including playable characters) were actually rendered from 3D models - a common practice in that time.

Well, at least you didn't call them pixel art. :)

[S-Priest]

They do look a lot like old Heretic sprites though.

[S-Priest]

And, they look better than models in Quake or Hexen II, which were rather low-poly... Which is the point really.

[Da Werecat]

Heretic and Hexen have some model renders too, but not a lot of them.

On topic: you wrote in the readme that this soundtrack can be burned onto a CD for using with the game, but I'm not sure that the track ordering is the same. It appears to me that track 2 on the original CD (first music track) is Sewer 1 rather than Vault. Also, there are 19 tracks on the CD.

[S-Priest]

There is a CD version, it will be uploaded later.

There're 20 tracks in all on the CD, including leading silence (track 1, instead of data on the original CD).

[S-Priest]

Here is the CD version. It's a .bin/.cue pair, so something like Virtual Clonedrive or Daemon Tools is required to mount it as a virtual CD. Mageslayer will read audio off the first CD drive, so the virtual drive letter has to be lower than the real CD drive letter with the original Mageslayer CD in it.

It could also be burned on a physical CD, of course.

A couple notes though...

1. This is a beta-test of a new sampler and some mixing techniques more than anything.

2. This was made for private listening. Curiously it came out right, and in fact it plays better over the game's sounds than the original soundtrack CD, but it was always intended to be played as 96/24 FLAC on fairly accurate speakers (and headphones).