Novastorm PC Game Rip
I never played Novastorm. I’ve been familiar with some of it’s music for years though, via the French magazine game music CD I posted a while back. Having re-listened to it recently, I decided to finally seek the complete soundtrack for it, convinced from the quality that I would find a CD-DA redbook easily. Mistake ! Turns out the game’s audio is embedded into some complex compression system and that there’s no way to easily rip or even record it ! Player One Magazine must have received master tracks from Psygnosis themselves when they made that CD in 1994.
Anyway, searching around on the web, you soon notice that this soundtrack left a strong impression on those who played it. Youtube gameplay videos are full of music requests and lamentations over the lack of an official soundtrack. Among these, I noticed a person called Bobske who was claiming he actually recorded the game audio and could send it to anyone wanting it. And he did ! This is his work I am sharing here.
Sadly, I soon noticed the recording contained many skips and clicks. When I asked him about it, here was his answer:
“Yeah, that’s the problem with running old games on new hardware. Had to use DOSBOX to run the game. It works, but it isn’t perfect. The game had some slight delays and little distortions. I edited out most of the audible distortions but unfortunately, I couldn’t fix them all.”
So that’s it ! This version is pretty much the best it can get, unless someone goes through the trouble of running the game on an old ’94 PC, or the master tracks are finally released by Psygnosis and Rik Ede, the composer.
Anyway, great music. Techno-ish sci-fi atmospheres, both epic and hypnotic, quite typical of the old European game music scene. Level 4 Stage 1 remains one of my favourites. Really too bad they didn’t choose CD-DA support !
Many thanks again to Bobske, and enjoy the music ~
!!! edit: Dricks has since then completed a high quality game rip ! Get it >> here <<
August 21st, 2012 at 10:07 am
thanks to Bobske and dricks for their hard work, I still have the original novastorm CD but never got around to ripping the stuff myself ;)
anyway – I remember finding this site a while back and downloading the first rips, but I totally missed out on the FLAC versions and would love to listen to them (this is excellent background music for work ^^). any chance someone still has the final FLAC rip and could upload it again? the links posted here don’t work anymore. I would really appreciate some help finding them again.