Nerd Wisdom

For certain genres of computer games, such as grand strategy games, the music can make a huge difference in the experience. One of the reasons that Civilization IV has been such a great hit is its wonderful music, particularly composer Christopher Tin‘s beautiful menu track “Baba Yetu” and opening track “Coronation.”

This music has attracted considerable notice; the picture above, taken from Tin’s website, is of the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington Master Chorale performing “Baba Yetu” at the Kennedy Center. Tin makes “Baba Yetu” and “Coronation” (actually remixed versions slightly different from the computer game versions) available for download at his samples page, along with other samples of his work. (To download, just right-click and “save link” instead of left-clicking.) If you’re curious, the lyrics for “Baba Yetu” are actually a version of the Lord’s Prayer in Swahili.

My son Adam really enjoys playing the historical grand strategy games produced by Paradox Entertainment (Europa Universalis II, Victoria, Crusader Kings, and right now especially Europa Universalis III.) These games also have excellent music, but there are some tracks that he prefers more than others, and the music sometimes gets too repetitive in Europa Universalis III because there’s not as many tracks as he’d like. Adam also told me would play Crusader Kings mostly for its excellent music, and he would read the “Civilopedia” in Civ IV because it would let him listen to “Baba Yetu.”

Well, to give him a little more control, we made a playlist in iTunes, and put in only the tracks he likes from the games we own, and now he’s completely set. He just turns off the game music and uses his iTunes playlist instead. Speaking of iTunes on Windows, this is a funny quote from Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs a couple months back:

And speaking of running Windows on an Intel iMac using Bootcamp, which is what we do to run Windows-only games, this is a very funny link, but it’s not really accurate. Honestly our iMac running Windows (we actually run Windows XP instead of Vista because it runs games better, and is more stable) is easily the fastest and most stable Windows machine I’ve ever seen, probably largely because it’s missing all the bloat that normally comes on a PC (and because I’m very careful about what gets installed on it.) Walt Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal also reports that an iMac running Vista is the best Vista machine he’s seen.