Death Ray Manta: A Fish Like No Other
Perhaps surprisingly, I have few regrets from my time in videogames over the years. Sure there’s the odd bit of me behaving like a nob here and there that were I to do over, I would try not to be such a nob and there’s a few choices every now and then but nothing spectacular or noteworthy.
With the exception of precisely one thing! The soundtrack to DRM 2 having to lie abandoned for the most part.
It’s a long story of how and why but in a nutshell, it’s “this was the part my life started going into free fall” and so Death Ray Manta 2 has never happened. I’m not so sad about not getting the game done and out there, I think after a while in games you kind of get used to not being able to finish some things. No, instead, it’s that had I managed to get the game out, even if the game turned out tremendously awful, it would have had one of the best soundtracks in videogames by a long chalk.
It really is an absolutely tremendous piece of work! There’s a small sample on the trailer for the Switch release of DRM:SE.
Now, maybe one day my life will be comfortable enough again to consider revisiting the game (that time seems a fair way off at the moment, admittedly) or maybe one day Andy at Thalamus can convince someone who isn’t me to make their own DRM2 (I would love to see what someone else could come up with!) but in the meantime I’m so glad that Thalamus Digital have rescued the OST from the darkest depths of internet obscurity and rereleased it on Itch.
I may have failed to write the arena shooter you can sing along to in the end, but you can still play any arena shooter you fancy and sing along to Oh Stevie’s incredible tunes and give Mike and Jenny some money for their songs.
Death Ray Manta: The Original Version
With huge thanks to Thalamus Digital, the original – not SE – version of Death Ray Manta is available again on Itch.
It’s kind of a halfway point between SYNSO 2 and DRM:SE, it’s a little bit different looking and plays a little differently to the SE version also. To be honest, it’s been so long now I couldn’t possibly give you an authoritative list of differences (I’ve slept since then), I’m just glad to see it’s back out there somehow.
With the caveat that it is a game from 2013 so you may run into compatibility problems. It definitely works on Window 10 tho. I think most of the real trouble would come from trying to get anything pre-Windows 8 of mine running these days.
This was also the version that my good chum Jeff used to make an iPod (kids, ask your grandad) version from! You know, back when you could sell videogames without people showing you graphs every ten minutes on social media. And it were all fields too.