Ah, WCII. Blasting furballs is always more fun with an epic soundtrack, and Origin studios did not let us down. This music is designed for a space symphony, and gives you a great sense of being a major player in a cosmic war even if you're just plodding down the street with your earbuds. This is the music that gave humanity our edge over the Kilrathi Empire, with great synthetics and piano work blending atop military-style drums. I recommend listening to this with the old Roland soundfont if you can manage it to get the authentic experience, or a better modern day soundfont that really gives you a sense of the work put into this music. It's highly recommended if you love having an orchestra tell you how awesome you are, or just want to treat your ears.

Enough gushing. One big problem with the archive is that none of the songs are named. They all have numbers, such as 'wc2-02'. This isn't really a problem for the casual listener, but if you're one of those folks who likes to hear a certain tune whenever it pops into your head you will be searching through fifty-two different tracks. This is really a bummer, because the original game had different names for its songs, from 'Scrambling' to 'Ejecting!' or 'Observation Deck'. WCII actually adjusted the music depending on how you were doing, so each song had a name and a condition it was played under. Again, the music is wonderfully ripped and I tip my hat to Mirsoft as I recommend you check these songs out, and I cannot know how difficult it was to extract these from the game's core files. Many songs also have their titles embedded in the MIDI data, but it would have been a great boon if they had been so labeled in the filenames.

Bottom line, this is a great archive of awesome songs. If you remember the glory days with a flightstick in hand and the glow of a monitor reflecting off your sleep-deprived eyes, you'll get flashbacks. If you've never chalked up a furball and don't understand half of what I just wrote, you'll still love this music!

10/10

honkstar82