“Confusion” by Michael Nyman

While Enemy Zero has its flaws, it does have an amazing soundtrack by minimalist composer Michael Nyman. As I learned the hard way last week, however, it’d be better to just acquire the soundtrack and listen to it than play through this mess of a Saturn game waiting for short samples of digitized orchestral brilliance— too often a track from the soundtrack fades in during a tense cutscene only to stop almost immediately (and abruptly) seconds later when gameplay resumes.

I should mention that a big part of what got me on this Kenji Eno kick is that Ray Barnholt included this track in an episode of his awesome new video game music podcast “Sound Test” a few weeks ago and the following day when I was in a local used video game store I saw a copy of Enemy Zero, a game I hadn’t seen in stores in the past year or two that I’ve been paying attention to Sega Saturn games now that more and more of them are getting rare, which seemed like too much of a coincidence not to purchase. It doesn’t look like this game is particularly hard to find, at least if eBay prices are any indication, and that might have something to do with its awkward mechanics and lack of clear communication about the game’s plot and objectives, but there is something oddly charming about the game and it seems that it may be interesting to fans of Data East’s Silent Debuggers for the TurboGrafx-16 (which is on Virtual Console) in that it brings some similar mechanics into 3D.

—Casey