Babylon 5 Extended CD

Babylon 5 Extended Music CD

If you buy the Official Guide to Babylon 5 CD-ROM for anything, buy it for this.

The choice of music in this CD gives it deservingly the title of 'Best of Babylon 5.' Unfortunately, I found that the Best of Babylon 5 music included the episodic CDs I already own, that is, Z'ha'dum and Severed Dreams. Six of the seventeen tracks, in fact, are from those two CDs alone. The main titles of Season 2 to 4 (what, no Season 5? Ah well) add a further three. The excellent Geometry of Shadows series give a further 3 tracks to the CD. Tracks from 3 further miscellaneous CDs bring the total up to fifteen.

[Read the 'Music of Best of Babylon 5' review]

So, what are the last two tracks? The themes from the Sierra Game, of course. Even if you own every single one of the tracks except these two, I'd still recommend it to you. Frankly, even if the Sierra game is terrible, I'll still buy it just for the music (something which I believe is probably in the minds of Sierra as well).

However, I don't think the Sierra Game is in any trouble of being a flop at the moment, from what I've seen on the Extended CD's preview. Admittedly, most of the preview simply shows clips from various battles in Babylon 5, but there are a few dozen seconds of clips from the actual game. These clips show the game to be up to the graphical standard of Babylon 5 itself, as you can see here. They move pretty quickly, but I'm told these clips aren't from the game itself, they're only 'Work in progress.'

There aren't many interviews, less that ten in total, and they all discuss Sierra's game. JMS seems pretty enthusiastic of the graphics in the game, and thinks that TV and Interactive Entertainment will be converging soon. He also 'claims' that he has spent many hours playing Sierra games. Now, unless these are Starcraft or maybe Outpost, either JMS has got really bad taste in games or he's just lying. I know this is blasphemous, but it's probably the latter.

The most notable interview of the CD is of Peter Jurasik, Londo Mollari himself. This was the first time I've seen Peter Jurasik out of costume, but you can immediately tell it's him by his voice. He hopes to star in the game, not as himself, but maybe as a human, or a Narn.

A few miscellaneous items: when playing the tracks using the custom B5 CD player, you get some pretty nice pictures from B5 which you've probably seen floating about on the Internet recently.

This CD is a perfect introduction to Babylon 5 music, and the only reason I wasn't ecstatic about it was that I realised that I could have just bought this CD alone instead of buying the two episodic CDs.

(1/8/99)