“Face the Cupcakes” is a minimalistic track permeated by muted tone colors by instruments such as a harp, woodwinds and strings (with a fair amount of pizzicato). One can imagine the violins performing the action of marching on the clouds, signified by the fluffy timbre of the harp. “March in the Clouds” begins with bouncy notes played by the harp, followed by a bold and confident entrance by violins, forming an interesting contrast with the gentle tone of a harp. Woodwinds and strings would join in eventually, carrying short melodic phrases with notable pauses between them, as if signifying Vella’s drowsy state as she wavers between waking up and continue napping. The soundtrack opens with “Vella Wakes”, a track that begins with a mandolin playing a sparse melody above an open chord sustained by the violins, evoking the image of a gradual sunrise. Vella comes from a rustic village surrounded by lush nature whereas Shay stays on a spaceship controlled by supercomputers, and the contrast of the environments is reflected in the music as well.

Broken Age follows the story of two teenagers, Vella and Shay, who inhabits two completely different worlds. To make the musical sound for Broken Age as lively as possible, McConnell opted for a live score recorded by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and a small ensemble of San Francisco musicians. Let us now take a look at the score that McConnell had created for the whimsical world of Broken Age. The complete soundtrack, which is the subject of this review, with additional tracks from Act 2 was not released until April 2015. As the game was planned to be released in two acts separately, the incomplete soundtrack with only Act 1’s music was released earlier in January 2014. The Broken Age Original Soundtrack is composed by Peter McConnell, longtime collaborator of Schafer and also the composer of Grim Fandango. The immense success of Broken Age triggered what the Kickstarter dubbed the “Blockbuster Effects”, bringing in more backers and attracting more gaming projects to the crowdfunding platform. Ultimately the project amassed $3.3 million from over 87,000 backers in about a month’s time. Amazingly, the goal was reached in 9 hours and the funding surpassed $1 million within 24 hours. Instead, Schafer launched a Kickstarter campaign for Broken Age and set the goal at $400,000. The genre has long been considered commercially niche, and funding for the project would have been hard to come by from the publishers, according to Schafer. It marks Tim Schafer’s first return to the adventure game genre since the critically acclaimed Grim Fandango, released in 1998. All told, the combined broken arrows of the United States and Russia have left several dozen nuclear warheads lost at sea.Broken Age is a significant game to the gaming industry for several reasons. The Soviet Union experienced a similar disaster two years later, when the nuclear submarine K-8 went down in the Bay of Biscay. In 1968, the submarine Scorpion mysteriously sank with all 99 hands-and two nuclear-tipped torpedoes-off the coast of the Azores. During the Vietnam War, a plane carrying a nuclear bomb slid off the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga and disappeared in the Pacific. Similar fail-safe measures have ensured that no broken arrow has ever resulted in a nuclear blast, but there have been a few incidents in which a weapon was lost and never found.

All that prevented one of them from detonating was a single low-voltage safety switch. The plane broke apart and released two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs. Another famous near-disaster came in 1961, when a B-52 bomber suffered a fuel leak and exploded over Goldsboro, North Carolina.

Luckily, the nuclear payload did not blow. The bomb’s non-nuclear conventional explosives detonated upon impact, killing a grazing cow and leaving behind a crater 12 feet deep. In 1957, a 42,000-pound hydrogen bomb accidentally fell through the bomb bay doors of a B-36 bomber as it flew over New Mexico. With so many planes in the air, a few experienced mishaps that led to crashes and unplanned bomb drops. Risks were particularly high during the Cold War, when bombers armed with thermonuclear weapons patrolled the skies around the clock. That might seem like a rare phenomenon, but records show that the United States has experienced more than 30 such close calls since the beginning of the nuclear age. The military uses the term “broken arrow” to describe any incident in which a nuclear weapon is lost, stolen or inadvertently detonated.

Broken age bomb