@chazumaru yeah, wow, they really are trying to make final fantasy here! the game has gotten quite pricey lately, so I guess somebody (collectors) found a reason to care.
@autoNamed this is good! but doesn‘t fit the brief since as you say Advance Wars is not mediocre :o better served by the "let’s listen to some game music" thread or whatever it's called.
the rest of these are indeed definitely mediocre, though I think some people like Air Race (and I'm not sure about Hot Chase either... and I'm pretty sure Emergency Call Ambulance is a mess but legit). Still, good tracks here
Centre Court Tennis was a Hudson Soft game that released in PAL and JP only, so it‘s probably just obscure, not mediocre. But I definitely think the quality of Hayato Matsuo’s soundtrack is out of proportion:
I think a great example of this for me (sorry to move away from the older console soundtracks) is the game AirMech. It is a thoroughly … ok … mech tactical combat whatever game, but the soundtrack is amazing.
The soundtrack is entirely composed by one of my favourite industrial bands, Front Line Assembly. Here's the title screen music
It's a bit of a slow burn, but give it until at least 2m 05s if you cue it up.
..or just listen to the whole dang soundtrack. I love it.
Now that the pandora's box of modern stuff has been opened:
I suppose the purpose of this thread is to bring to light stuff which few have heard of, and everyone's heard of Akira Yamaoka. Hmmm. Still if you like me enjoy the A.Y. sound and have also like me never played Silent Hill Homecoming this may be for you.
Fudging the rules even further but this provides an opportunity to talk about one track from Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2:
The rest of the OST is pretty disappointing. The first LoS soundtrack teetered on the edge of Generic Lord of the Rings Ripoff but I felt it was able to get away with it most of the time. LoS2 on the other hand is pretty boring and falls into the WHOA DUDE EPIC sound more than its predecessor. “Titanic Struggle” starts off pretty Zimmer-like, but around 1:20 what I can't quite identify as arpeggios or runs start up in the violins, and a synth arpeggiator comes in around 2:10; from there I feel the juxtaposition of those elements makes for a satisfying listen. This track plays when you hover over the launch icon in the PS3 menu—when I really started disliking the game the more I played it I would stay on that menu longer and longer…
the only reason anyone should look at the game in 2021.
Deep Labyrinth, a quirky but not amazing DS game (adapted from a cell phone game), is most notable for having one of the better Yasunori Mitsuda soundtracks of the 2000s (and a surprisingly raw story by Masato Kato):
Speaking of 00s Mitsuda tracks - I would not exactly call the first two Xenosaga games “good” but the first one had Mitsuda composing for the London Philharmonic Orchestra (!!!) and the second one had Yuki Kajiura doing the cutscene music:
And another DS game scored by Squaresoft royalty: Heroes of Mana may have been all but literally broken as a game, but it had one of the GOAT Yoko Shimomura OSTs:
@connrrr I stumbled upon that first Opoona track you posted years ago as part of some Soundcloud mix and listening to it has become one of my most consistently joyful experiences since then. I actually went and bought a sealed copy of this game just so I could some day experience it in context, but the more I think about it the more I realize I might be ok just enjoying its understated beauty on its own.
It was around this same time that I discovered the OST for Musashi Samurai Legend, a game I know absolutely nothing about and confidently assume is mediocre. These two tracks, specifically, evoke that same wistful joy for me:
I think you could argue that most British game composers spent their entire 1980s careers doing amazing soundtracks for mediocre games.
I used to listen to David Whitaker’s Glider Rider soundtrack on pause and not play the, slightly boring, game.
Tim Follin seemed to be drawn to mediocre games. His Spectrum 1-bit music he did when he was 16 was remarkable. None of these games are up to much and really don’t deserve what he was doing with a tiny speaker and no sound chip.
100% on the early british computer games. that scene was fantastic for music and I feel like in some ways that‘s what keeps the games in people’s minds. I'd never heard this spectrum stuff he did, so thanks for that!
Midnight Resistance is a Data East joint, but given how popular the micro conversions were, I guess it can claim dual citizenship.
The Mega Drive port's audio was handled by Hitoshi Sakimoto, and one of the commonly-held untruths about the port in Japan is that it used a custom chip for enhanced audio, but it's just Sakimoto's custom "terpsichorean" sound driver (and, true to the topic of this thread, it was almost entirely wasted on thoroughly average games and conversions).
Thank you @NoJoTo and @exodus for introducing me to alpha, this is a real treasure trove of chill beats to work to on this fine Sunday morning! My previous go-to for this kind of playlist was SupraDarky’s excellent “Relaxin’ with SD”
@kory SupraDarky‘s cool, but tends to do stuff less obscure than alpha. (SupraDarky introduced me to Ridge Racer Type 4’s soundtrack, though, so that's not a complaint).
I see someone already covered Mystic Quest, so I've got another one to drop. This one is a bit interesting; X-Kaliber 2097, a side-scrolling action platformer for the SNES that is mid at best, with a very forgettable soundtrack.
However! In Japan it is known by the far more awesome title Sword Maniac and has music by none other than Hitoshi Sakimoto of FF Tactics fame and Hayato Matsuo who worked on many title including FF 12 and Shenmue.
Definitely worth a listen in my opinion, so pretty funky tracks in there!
dang, sword maniac is such a massively better name!!!
I guess I've shared this elsewhere and everybody knows it these days, but this game is pretty much the epitome of this. That music is pretty well unbeatable and shows why the SNES soundchip is incredibly powerful (samples!!)
It's pretty interesting comparing to the virtual boy version, which is basically like if the game were ported to the pc engine. check it out especially at 9:31 (I didn't timestamp it so you can check it all out):
the genesis version is completely different, and is pretty good on its own, but next to the SNES version it's really nowheresville
I swear some footage of the saturn prototype got released but I'll be danged if I can find it now. anyway, one of the all time great soundtracks on a game that I can't imagine anybody caring to play.
[edit:] the footage I was thinking of was from star wars... oops. no music in here, just sharing to close the loop.
AH, weird! I originally linked theirs without realizing it, then went back to this slower one because I was used to it. I guess this faster one is the official version!? hmmmmmm, I wonder if it's a pal vs ntsc thing.
