Just missed it but my vote wouldn’t have changed much!
Love the Streets of Rage 2 tune. It’s got such a sweet upbeat house tinged sound. I’m not overly familiar with the full soundtrack but what I have heard has been consistently brilliant, whether it’s Go Straight, Dreamer or Under Logic.
This Vice article is worth a read and handily links to the various tracks being talked about:
Will look into those videos @DaveLong, cheers for sharing.
I was never wild about Quake compared to Doom but the NIN ambient industrial soundtrack was just perfect. This piece I remember well, particularly that high pitched whine. It’s only in recent years I’ve got into ambient so the last half of this track I appreciate even more these days. Hard to believe it’s 22 years old. Good stuff.
The NMS track was such a gentle builder and a lovely slice of post-rock. 65daysofstatic are actually from my neck of the woods in Sheffield, which is unusual and cool. It’s funny because I actually thought there was some super low noise on the recording or device/headphones/cable, but then I realised the noise was part of the track as it slowly got louder and folded into the rest of the music.
I’m not sure what to say about the Shogun 2 piece. It’s totally Total War. It sounds so powerful with those drums and the deep brass. I enjoyed the Japanese guitar (koto? shamisen?) too but the string section towards the end felt weak compared to the rest so I don’t think the pay-off was really there.
Red Bull Music Academy is a must visit site for anyone into music. There is so much there for people to glom onto it’s kinda ridiculous. That Diggin’ in the Carts series specifically… well, I can’t say enough about it. I want another twenty hours of that. It’s so incredibly well produced. I love the visuals from all over Japan that help you truly understand why their video games are made the way they are.
For me, it really shows why the games that were produced there in the arcade, 8 and 16-bit era were so definitive of gaming from that time. They weren’t slapping together products. Well, some were, but there were a lot of people who were true auteurs of the time working on their piece of these incredible products that are so highly regarded today. It wasn’t magical to them, but the results are magical to those of us that lived it. To them it was a job they just took really seriously while having a lot of fun doing it in many cases.
There are some complimentary videos with Yoko Shimomura (Street Fighter, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Xenoblade…) that tell some amazing stories of development too. Again, it’s so amazing to hear them tell us in their own language that every time I go back to it I just wish there were a whole ton more.
I couldn’t even finish NieR: Automata. I’m sorry, I tried. And if I never hear another crap-Jazz-bar sounding track from FF13 again, I’ll be a happy man. That music makes me think it’s FF13: The Soap Opera. It give me an overdone feel good music vibe, and this is the third track like that.
Did we come through this entire round with 0 Castlevania tracks? Simply inexcusable. The piano and gothic opera feel of the Gabriel Knight theme hit similar buttons, though.
Maybe it’s all this Streets of Rage talk, but the driving Nex Machina beat worked for me today.
I like a lot of the NearTomato music that’s popped up in my work playlists, but this one didn’t grab me. I think I like the less vocal based compositions more.
I kind of wish I knew what any of those words mean (acid, jungle, etc). They’ve been explained to me before, I’m just real bad at attributing properties to music in my head.
Gabriel Knight is one of my favorites from long ago, and I considered making it one of my four submissions. A varied and memorable melody.
I preferred Nex to Nier, though I can see (without having played the game) how Amusement Park could be an effective background track to a desolate post-apoc setting.
Yeah, it’s weird – I think Masashi Hamauzu’s work on the FF13 soundtrack is phenomenal, but none of the nominations here did much for me. My standouts are mostly the location and battle themes.
Gabriel Knight’s main theme isn’t played during the game if I remember, but that introduction helps to set the mood perfectly. I remember also that the daily bell toll that opens each day was so gloomy, it turned in my mind this adventure game into the best computer Lovecraftian game — although there is zero cosmic horror in it! I guess it is just the atmosphere of the whole game, and the soundtrack as a whole, and including this track, helped to set it.
Nex Machina is the best substitute for the Mass Effect 2 tracks arranged by Jimmy Henson I didn’t put forward because of my silly chiptune proselytism. I really wished my computer could run the actual game properly, now!