Bubsy (1993)

    Hello and welcome to Soundtrack Abuse.  Since this is the first post, let me try to explain how this is going to work.  Each week or so, I'll look at a different video game and how it uses its music.  Why?  Well, I've had a long-standing fascination with not only video game music, but how it's used, and how it fits into the action of the game.  There aren't really any requirements for what I pick besides "it's a video game" and "it has music".  I'll mostly be looking at old games, though, as they tend to be what I know best.
     To start, I'll be looking at Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind.  That title hurts, doesn't it?

    Why Bubsy?  After all, there's nothing really special about how it uses its music.  It does, however, contain a couple of prime examples of poor music allocation.  (Not to mention poor game design, but that's not really what we're here to talk about.)  This is a shame, because Bubsy has some pretty damn good music.  Check it out!  (Links are to the SNES version of the game's soundtrack, which is far superior to the Sega Genesis version.)  Plus, it's on my mind right now for some reason, so let's dive in.
     The first problem is pretty minor, but it stands out to me.  Like a lot of games, Bubsy has but a single music track (well, two in the wild west world) for each world, a world being three levels long, and a level being about three minutes or longer.  This means that for each world you'll be listening to the same minute-or-so-long music track for about ten minutes each.  Probably longer, since the game is notoriously difficult and you'll likely die and have to replay each level quite a bit.
     That alone isn't too bad.  It's repetitious, sure, but it's tolerable.  Unfortunately, the music is interrupted constantly for one reason or another.  You beat a level, the music resets.  You die, the music resets.  You get an invincibility or invisiblity power-up, the music resets.  Those are all pretty common in games, but keep in mind each time the music resets, it's the same music track until you move on to a new world.

    The worst thing of all, however, is the water slides.  Dear god, the water slides.  They're everywhere in some levels, and every time you go down one, this irritating track plays.  And once it's done, guess what?  The usual background music starts over from the beginning once again.  Thankfully, they're absent in many levels, and in most other levels an effort can be made to avoid them.  In other words, you're mostly safe from their annoyance for the first three worlds, with a few exceptions in World 1.
    Then you get to the riverbank levels, and suddenly they're all over the place.  And the worst part is, they're often the least painful way of traversing the stage.  This means, if you're intent on using them, expect the bouncy bluegrass track playing in the background to be stopped and restarted constantly.  You may never even hear it as far as the part where the bass comes in.  Because why put a two-minute piece of background music in a game and actually let the player hear any more than thirty seconds of it, right?!
     Somewhat unusually for a platform game of this sort, the game has a different music track for each boss battle, of which there's one at the end of each world.  This seems like something of a waste of music to me, since you only hear each boss theme once (sometimes never, as the game has a bizarre tendency to glitch and just not even play the boss theme, instead continuing to play the usual level music) and the actual boss fights tend to be very short.  In a way this makes the bosses the complete opposite of the levels musically, but it's just as unfortunate a misuse of music.  Even more unusually, most of the boss themes don't even really sound like boss battle music.  Be honest with me, does this sound like a final battle theme to you?
     So that's Bubsy.  Average game, surprisingly good music, poor usage.  Join me next time and I'll look at something else.  Exactly what I haven't decided, but believe me, I have a lot of games I want to eventually cover.  Bye-bye for now!