Manabu Namiki's music in Death Smiles

Thanks to Hitoshi Sakimoto's move to form the company Basiscape, several growing composers began to make a name for themselves. One of these is Manabu Namiki, whom is responsible mostly for shoot-em-up soundtracks for arcade games such as Battle Garegga, Armed Police Batrider, Ketsui, Mushihime-Sama and so on. His style of music is usually some pulse-pounding Techno or grinding Rock. He quickly became one of Cave's favorite for-hire composers, having scored the majority of their games since Ketsui in 2002.

More recently he scored Cave's latest game "Death Smiles", a horizontal-scrolling shoot-em-up arcade game which has a nice mix of fantasy and gothic horror setting. It is supported by some of the best rock and electronic based music Namiki has cooked up in a while. The Boss theme has been noted to being similar in style to Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black".

Given the current console explosion since the PlayStation and N64, arcades have pretty much faded into nothing in the US and Canada at least. Yet, even after all these years, arcades continue to thrive nicely in Japan, in which Cave has quickly become a well-known and respected game developper there.

On to the good stuff, feast your eyes (and ears) on these two Youtube videos of stage 2 and 4. Even with all the noise, it is possible to make out some of the music. Good ol' game music, am I right ? ;)

Stage 2

Stage 4

On a final and somewhat humorous note... HOLY BULLET SPAM BATMAN !

(Sorry, I had to :p)