Enter the Game Music Thunderdome

Crypt of the Necrodancer. A catchy melody, and yet the musician didn’t rest on it and decided to make it never boring. Really great.

Crypt of the Necrodancer and Mass Effect for me. The Deus Ex track is great, but the way that Mass Effect song mixes aspects of ST (DS9 mostly) and BSG 2003 in it kind of make it arrive at the finish line a couple hair lengths ahead.

Necrodancer and Mass Effect.

Crypt of the Necrodancer and Mass Effect.

Crypt of the Necrodancer and, to my surprise, Mass Effect!

Crypt of the Necrodancer and Deus Ex.

Another very hard round. These are all excellent!

Gods
Mass Effect

Another good bracket, and not a song I disliked among them. However I gotta pick two so…

Mass Effect The entire soundtrack was an ambience and atmospheric heavy one, perfectly suited to space opera. It sets the tone, and that tone is why it was my favorite entry in the series.

Gods Necrodancer nearly got the nod here, but this was a very 80’s song. In a good way.

Gah, this is tough. I know people tend to gravitate towards what they know, and I know Gods and Crypt of the Necrodancer very well, but I’m really impressed by Vigil from Mass Effect, a game I never played. It’s serene and expansive and evocative and just a sublime ambient piece. By far one of my favourite shorter tracks here and reminded me of some Fallout 3’s music, which is a fine thing.

I love Into The Wonderful from the Gods soundtrack and, having listened to the actual Nation XII (Ultravox’s John Foxx and Bomb the Bass’s Tim Simenon) version which was released some years later, I think the Amiga version is somehow better; rawer, tighter and more coherent.

The Deus Ex tracks grows on me a lot with each listen but I don’t think it’s enough to pip the others here. I can imagine it working very well in-game but I tried getting into Deus Ex numerous times and it never really clicked for some reason.

Disco Descent I nominated and it’s just a monster tune; Baranowsky in beast mode. Dance till you die!

So… Crypt of the Gods or Mass of the Necrodancer? Hmmm…

Crypt of the Gods. You just don’t hear much like Into The Wonderful in videogames. Vigil so very nearly bagged it though.

I considered it but, alas, compromises were made!

It was the same for most of the game itself and other music within. It was part of what drew me in while playing, serene yet with hints of the expansiveness of a galaxy you explore. It was such a major effort for a new IP by Bioware I’m amazed they took that gamble in a number of ways.

Necrodancer and Deus Ex

It is almost impossibly 80s. Which I also mean in a good way, but it’s amazing they crammed so much 80s into one song with that tech.

Mass Effect was fine, but I think I used up my ambient space-music vote on No Man’s Sky a couple days ago.

Into … the wonderful …

(and now all three of you are singing that in your head)

Crypt of the Necrodancer and GODS.

That GODS track is so frickin’ good. I would’ve listened to that over and over again. I’ll have to see if I can track down a Genesis copy of that game now!

It’s actually not that good, at least not on the Amiga. The best thing about it is that tune, the cover artwork and graphics/animation – it’s very much style over substance, and rock solid too!

Oh wow, this might explain a lot:

The Amiga version features multi-layered copy protection. The main part was cracked quickly, and produced what appeared to be a playable game. However, a second layer remained, which raised the difficulty level quickly, to the point where the first boss was impossible to beat. Unfortunately for the Bitmap Brothers, this hard work seemed to backfire, as many assumed that the cracked version they played was representative of the game’s difficulty, and the game’s reputation was hampered as a result.

Crypt of the Necrodancer and Mass Effect.

Group T: Gods, Deus Ex

Bitmap Brothers baby. Gameplay was sometimes better or worse, but the graphics never let you down.

Absolutely!

Mass Effect 1 - "Vigil"
and
Crypt of the Necrodancer - "Disco Descent"

for me, though Deux Ex was a close third.