Videogame Music Thread

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A little over an hour, looped:

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For my inaugural SB post, here’s some great Megadrive strings. Reminds me a bit of Lagrange point for the Famicom.

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Power Serve 3D Tennis (PS1) has a nice mix of New Age, 3D Platfomer Music, and goofball.

Jump to 15:58 for the goofball.

this song is so good it motivated me to make a thread just for it recently. I just adore the harmony that enters at about the 25 second mark. I’d call it the loveliest Game Boy song i’ve ever heard, except…

as a kid i remember putting headphones in my Game Boy Color and just standing around listening to this track loop over and over. It might even be the first piece of game music that honest to goodness touched me emotionally. Just fantastic.

in a game full of amazing standout music this is somehow always the one i come back to as a favorite. it is minimal and beautiful. that background synth just epitomizes “warmth” in music. Never heard another game track like it.

This is the track that plays over the “THE END” screen, the one that loops over and over until you turn the game off. It is perhaps the greatest song ever composed for that purpose. there is something so alluring about this music. it is one of the few tracks in the game that doesn’t use a leitmotif or reference any other music on the soundtrack. To me it has a real feeling of both conclusiveness and never-ending persistence.

Beyond Good and Evil is possibly the most overrated underrated game ever, but i loved it back when it came out and i still have a lot of time for it today. The soundtrack is a consistent delight, and this peaceful piano-driven overworld tune is simply exquisite.

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i heard this again for the first time in awhile and aaaaaaaa

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i keep coming back to this song, months later.
does anything else like this exist?

Strange Journey’s battle theme can be divided in 3 parts:

  1. Beginning fanfare (0 to 10 seconds)
  2. Mumbling/ weird chant (10 to 50 seconds)
  3. Very loud, grand finale that remixes Strange Journey’s main theme (last 20 seconds)

Since this is an JRPG, the first two parts of the song will be engraved upon the player’s memory forever until they become mundane.

What’s really clever about that theme is that the third part brings a massive tonal shift but is not actually heard very often:

  • it’s very far into the song
  • Strange Journey’s battles are over relatively quicky.

In truth, you only hear the third part if you’re in a difficult random encounter - most likely you have severy underestimated your enemy, half your team is dead, and you need to make actual life or death choices. It’s only then that you get to listen to the third part of the song: the violins come en masse, the main theme comes in, you are both panicking and in awe, and the beginning of the song is recontextualized as a build up to that moment again.

The best part about this is how unexpected it feels, everytime! Everytime I’m caught off guard.
I don’t know if all of that was intentional, but it’s genius

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I haven’t checked deeper but I’ve felt that in a few JRPGs. There’s that great bit when the fife comes in at – youtube confirms it’s :55 in the FFVII battle theme (and my god how much music carries in that game).

this reminds me of the bugged Mario Kart 64 results theme that switches up after 64 loops for a single loop and then goes back. it was widely believed to be an easter egg, but it now appears to be a buffer overflow (or some similar shit, i’m not a programmer)

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The R4 soundtrack is one of my favorites. The game lets you pick whatever music you want as the race is starting (newer RR games did this too, not sure if older ones did?) R4 also marks the point where I stopped caring about Ridge Racer games. Being released toward the end of the console’s run, the game just squeezed everything that was left out of Playstation hardware. It plays extremely well, has unmatched UI design, and the story mode (where you choose between 4 racing teams) is adorable and I don’t think Namco ever bothered with anything like it later (apart from that weird “R Racing Revolution” spin-off game). There is also a giant car shaped like Pac Man that you can eventually unlock, and when you do you get an extra song made with Pac Man SFX in it that is actually good and mostly fits in with the rest of the soundtrack.

I still have a soft spot for the original Ridge Racer, with its bright colors and its happy 90’s dance soundtrack–it so happens R4 came with a special 60 fps version of that game as its second disc. It’s too bad the original RR didn’t feel as nice as Daytona USA, but that double disc R4 package was just amazing no matter how you slice it.

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aw man, ridge racer is some dank shit

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replaying Earthbound lately, here’s some more underrated EB hot trax

This game is probs 90% responsible for my love of dreampop/shoegaze/chill/vaporwave

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@mothmanspirit: nothing to add to what @B_coma said, really. Almost a shame that Microsoft did a better “remember that one”?-RR moment that namco did for the last 10ish years(?):

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i wish there was a tome on 90’s arrangement album culture in japan

Is there any place I can nab the entire soundtrack to Namachuukei 68?

BTW, here’s my fave cut…

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