The month of December is over and the winner of Y’s Ark of Napishtim and the strategy guide is:
SPac316!
Congratulations my man! Hopefully the smooth gooey goodness of Y’s will keep you warm these cold and frigid Winter months.
Now for the January Free Play, we’re giving away a game near and dear to our hearts: Wario World for the Nintendo Gamecube. In a departure from his beloved Wario Ware Inc., Wario beats, slams, and pile drives his enemies in a quest to get his hands on that glimmering gold. Not only is the game play flat out fun, the soundtrack is also amazing. Composed by Norio Hanzawa and Minako Hamano, it fits hand in hand with the on screen mayhem.
On the subject of great soundtracks, for this month’s contest, we want to know what your favorite video game soundtrack is and why. Or if you’ve got more than one favorite, just pick one. One of my personal favorite video game soundtracks is Galaxy Force II. I can remember playing the game in the arcades for the first time. I strapped myself into the full size sit down machine and clunked in two quarters. As the game started, I was greeted by this song.
(Make sure to click the HD button for the high quality stereo mix and slap some decent headphones on while you’re at it!)
Composed by Koichi Namiki, this is a classic soundtrack from start to finish. The driving multi-layered almost jazz like synth melodies with that sweet underlying thumping bass made it pop and shine. To be honest, sometimes I boot the game up not for the game play, but for the music. Those melodies will be stuck in my brain forever. And would you believe it, those same funk bass lines present in this soundtrack were early licks and runs I mastered when learning the bass guitar years ago. To this day it’s been a musical influence on my personal style.
So that’s it, tell us your personal favorite video soundtrack, and you’re entered in the contest. The deadline for entry is January 31st at 11:59 P.M. CST. We’re even playing around with the idea of posting the winning soundtrack on the site to download for free (more details on that as they come). I’ll be posting the video up on YouTube soon to give you and extra chance to enter, but since you fine folks visited our website, you get first crack at it.
Thanks again and best of luck to you!
Favorite game soundtrack… I’ll say that Sonic games have always been my favorite overall, but I’m gonna say Sonic 3 & Knuckles.
Ice Cap Zone and Death Egg are amazing, along with most of the other tracks (hold Sandopolis, god I can’t stand that music). And of course there’s a fan remix of the soundtrack called Project Chaos which really is amazing, Google that shit if you haven’t listened to it.
I love the soundtrack of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. I favorite track is Heart of Fire!
Wow, I won the last Free play? Cool! Let’s see if luck will have it for this one…
I have far to many game soundtracks to name, but here’s one thta I’ll pick and it Final Fantasy 6! One of my favorite tracks from it would be the Doma Castle theme. It was quite epic. I also liked Dancing Mad.
Favorite soundtrack is Final Fantasy VIII. Uematsu did such an amazing job on this CD and with the help of Faye Wong vocalizing on the song Eyes On Me. Actually it did such a good job that it was the first song in video game history to win an award at the 14th Annual Japan Gold Disc Awards.
Little tid bit for the fantasy nerds out there. =)
Anyways to be more specific though, i love the piano collections of FFVIII. Easy listening and could easily fool anyone else listening, they would have no idea that this is actually from a video game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUXvoF4KVmU
Ignore the last reply, the link is to someone else playing the piano rather than whats actually on the OST. I linked it before watching it. Sorry…
No prob man. I fixed the link to what I think is the song from the OST, though I could be wrong. Great song either way.
BTW: You’re right, it’s hard finding the real version of the song and not some version done by a random dude.
metal gear solid 1-4
they all fit in so good in where they put it and the ending music are always epic
Errrgh One soundtrack? You are a CRUEL man! A CRUEL man! I had to narrow it down between Kid Icarus and Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland. Two very different games, I know, but I love both of their soundtracks.
Although Tony Hawk has at least twice the number of tracks, I’m going to have to go with Kid Icarus. Quality over Quantity. 8-Bit music is just amazing, especially considering the limitations all the composers of that era had to work with.
Metal gear solid 1-2-3-4
Killer Instict
super street fighter 2
I’d have to say my favorite video game soundtrack would be from the Resident Evil series but to be more specific it would be the soundtrack to Resident Evil One/Resident Evil(REmake). Capcom definitely knew how to make you feel scared and uneasy not just in the game but in the soundtrack as well. But, the one song that stood out to me the most was Piece of Mind(Save Room by the staircase). The song just had an eerily calm, soothing yet creepy vibe that just gives you a feeling of dread and a tiny sense of hope that you’ll make out this mansion alive.
Resident Evil (Save Room Music):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8no8YlwLRKc
I would have to definately say the Killer Instinct Main Theme… I love it!
Hey there, its deathsceane from youtube doubling my chances. Anywho the soundtrack thats stuck with me is MegaMan 2. The first tune sets the tone by giving a soft beat and climaxing to what is often now used as MegaMan’s own theme. Through out the 90’s the music has always stuck with me, and after pondering for a while I think I figured why. Most of the music seems to have a memorable melody that kicks in after you get familiar with the beat. The stages in which they’re presented in fit perfectly in my opinion. I sometimes found myself humming the tunes in school when I was a kid, and if I saw anything that I looked something I saw in the background that stages theme would instantly play in my head. One of the best themes that sounded best in the Rock mix album has to be the Wily Castle stage 1 theme. Hearing the guitar shred is enough to make me want that album. Its like I said earlier they all fit the stages sence it seems to go with the atmosphere of it all. While a good number of games has themes that I enjoyed, this is the only one where I enjoyed every single theme.
Gotta go with Jet Set Radio. This soundtrack just gets you really in the mood for what the game is all about. It’s ecclectic as hell, using all kinds of crazy samples and runs the gamut from poppy Japanese rock to weird electronic tunes. Any track can play on any stage, since it matches the crazy asthetic nature of the game. Too bad they had to shoehorn in ‘Dragula’ in the American version, but at least Jurassic 5 made its way in there.
Seriously, listen to ‘Sweet Soul Brother’, one of the best tracks in JSR. The rest of the soundtrack is just as good.
Ah, so many great soundtracks, but I think I have to go with a soundtrack that doesn’t get name dropped like I think it should, it’s Donkey Kong 64. I absolutely love this soundtrack, it’s a pleasure to listen to, and it goes along perfectly with how the game changes I think. First when you look at this game it’s all happy cheery, but the farther you get in, the darker it gets (I can’t be the only one to ever get nightmares from Mad Jack). When you first hear the soundtrack for the first two levels, you think that it’s going to be happy cheery, but then the farther you get in, the tracks get darker as well. Even the tracks that aren’t necessarily supposed to be creepy have this somber tone behind them, like if you walk around the island enough, eventually you start hearing a certain sad mood in the DK Isle theme. If you think about it, this game has more sad or creepy music than not, and that’s why this soundtrack always stuck with me.
Also, if the track in question isn’t sad or menacing, then chances are it has interesting uses of instruments that rarely see use in a video game soundtrack, like great integration of the guiro (the instrument where you scrape the ridges) into tracks so you don’t even notice it until you pay attention to the music. This game also has a great brass section in those same tracks. If it isn’t somber or creepy, it’s still interesting and holds your attention with a certain jazzy feel these tracks have.
Overall I think the soundtrack is just very interesting and not mentioned enough.
I have to say my favorite video game soundtrack would have to be the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney soundtrack. They have so many memorable themes and music they just add much much more tension to the game as you interrogate the witness or suspect or it makes a light mood seem even lighter with bouncy tunes. (note I’m known as striderserge on youtube.com)
There are so many great video game soundtracks out there, and I can’t really pick one favorite. One that comes to mind, though, is the soundtrack for Final Fantasy VI. The music pushed the SNES to its limits and always set the right mood for each scene.
It’s a tough call, but I’ll go with Starfox64. It perfectly transformed what could have been typical space battles into epic space battles!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5ZBu3nHJkM