I missed the entire setup for this Thunderdome. Boo.
Also, I missed the chance to vote for Super Hexagon, which is sooooooper good :(
I should re-install it on my phone.
As a quick aside…B’z are great! You know how a big part of the Japanese aesthetic is to take a single thing and refine repeatedly until it approaches to a platonic ideal of that thing? Well, that applies to Rock music too. The entire J-Rock genre is full of songs that seem to be pulled directly out of the best of 80’s rock fests. It’s fantastic.
Jesper Kyd has done a ton of OST work. You’ve probably played a game other than Freedom Fighters where you really enjoyed the music and it was done by him.
His work on the Sega Genesis was tremendous. He came from the demo scene.
Aw yeah!
Okay so Freedom Fighters, like FFXIV, was such a great mix of sounds. Powerful percussion, coarse electronic flourishes, it was the ominous melody carried by the vocal choir though that really elevated the piece for me.
Yeah, I fear the same!
I’m not entirely sure whether I’m a fan of synthwave. I like the immaculately produced and drenched sonic quality of it but after a while I find it starts to wash over me in a hazy blur. Maybe that’s the point, I dunno. I’ve listened to a fair bit of Perturbator so I thought I’d be a lot more enthusiastic about You’re Mine but I just found it very… busy, and outstayed its welcome perhaps? Like, there are few ups and downs here; it’s just full-on, pedal-to-the-metal right from the get-go and never really lets up. Solo Nobre I wasn’t wild about at first but it never stopped growing on me so maybe I’ll warm to this one too. This is a lot more dense and putting up a fight. Dat bass line tho. It slaps like E Honda.
Frog’s theme did very little for me, even after a few listens. It sounded quite shrill but I’ll definitely give the CD version a spin.
There were a lot of tracks I could have selected from Sword & Sworcery EP but The Prettiest Weed has a great structure with that crystalline piano intro, the explosive drums and some delicious synths. It doesn’t mess about either.
I think he also Christopher Lennertz wrote the music for the Wild West-themed game GUN.There’s a plain in the geography of the game where the buffalo roam, and when you the player see it, a gorgeous music cue comes up that is the equal of anything from a classic movie Western.
Yeah, the orchestral versions of the music from Chrono Trigger are so good.
It’s one of the reasons I’m excited for a potential Remix Thunderdome. Tons of awesome SNES-era music gets elevated when you replace the MIDI stuff with real instruments.
Some really good interpretations of Frog’s theme out there.
Also, voting needs to be based on the original, not remixes like this, but I wanted to share.
Group D
@Nightgaunt: Curse of Monkey Island - A Pirate I Was Meant to Be (It’s interactive!)
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0 voters
@Otagan: BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger - Lust SIN (by Daisuke Ishiwatari)
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0 voters
https://imgur.com/Yn9Byhh
@lordkosc: Offworld Trading Company - Red Planet Nocturne (Composed by Christopher Tin)
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0 voters
@enidigm: Emperor: Battle for Dune - Defenders of Arrakis (by David Arkenstone)
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0 voters
That’s the thing with these older tunes where the limitations of the tech perhaps don’t quite do the composition justice: I’m trying to see past that but it can be difficult sometimes.
@JonRowe Ah, The Blake Robinson Synthetic Orchestra! He did the music for The Stanley Parable and the theme for mine and my friend’s Side by Side YouTube series. Seamless plug!
Oh man, yeah, that version’s a lot more pleasing to my ears, and fuller. I really like Meine Meinung and this version I thought was really sweet:
Yeah, I liked everything in Group C, but Furi was kinda next-level.
I briefly had it as one of my tracks but kept swapping it in and out with a few others, then @ArmandoPenblade wanted to post a Carpenter Brut track but his original pick was licensed so I’d thought I’d give him the chance to take it.
An ongoing problem for me. That’s why I haven’t nominated, for example, Kenneth Arnold’s music for Ultima III and Ultima IV (C64 version – I dunno if there’s like a Mockingboard version floating around somewhere, or something), which are compositionally brilliant and among my favorite game music ever. They don’t exploit early sound chips in the ways that Rob Hubbard or Jereon Tel so superbly do. Nor are they designed to: they are straight tunes meant for simple arrangements, and would not be helped by fast arpeggiation or whirling synth solos or white-noise percussion breaks.
I try to limit my chiptune nominations to music I think is still sonically awesome and can in its way stand up to anything at all – just as a Chopin Ballade on a single piano concedes nothing in aural splendor to a full symphony orchestra.
Group C Results:
Tough group, with three tracks that scored well enough that they would have won Group A outright.
Furi: 4.41
Sword & Sworcery: 4.18
Freedom Fighters: 3.83
Chrono Trigger: 3.09
I REALLY liked the Offworld Trading Company piece up there. Fantastic.
I would certainly hope a Christopher Tin main theme would be that good.
It’s interesting: I am a die-hard lover of the OTC soundtrack, but I found that title tune so bland, so predictable, that I always wondered what it was doing in the game. It really feels out of place.
Pistols at dawn, sir!
Oh, I am sorry, did that piece of metal in your back hurt!
Haha! I’m glad people seem to be liking it. It’s obviously musically limited, but there are so many lyrical bits that make me giggle, I just had to (once I remembered it even existed!–I was going to nominate Curse’s version of the main theme). I particularly love when Guybrush jumps in with a wry line.