With gaming often bringing me into a really depressive headspace sometimes with how the markets are developing, whats a game you can always go to and just be lost in, or just be happy with?
Personally i would go for advance wars 1 and 2 on the gba (there is no remake and never will be)
the artstyle, the music, the game-play is just simple, yet effective, a sublime experience of very fun times.
Whats yours?
A great deal of SNES games do this for me. Super Mario RPG, Mega Man X, Donkey Kong Country 1 and 2, Chrono Trigger, even the Mario All-Star games to a point. It’s all likely because it’s such a great system and developers really hit their stride with what they could do with 16-bit gaming on that console.
Chrono Trigger was the first game I owned and to this day triggers crazy strong nostalgia in me.
Chronotrigger is amazing. The music… have you heard the jazz fusion album yasunori mitsuda released back in the 90s called ‘chrono trigger: the brink of time’ it’s just so good.
I owned a physical copy of that album for awhile! Not sure where it went, though :/
Wow. I’ve gotten mitsuda’s works through… other means… but i’d buy it in a flash if I came across it. It’s one of my favorite albums. I’m also a fan of caseopea. Are you familiar with them? Their work really puts a lot of videogame music into perspective. It seems like the Japanese have a different, and i’d say more healthy, sense of borrowing/honoring other artist’s works. You can definitely hear how they influenced a lot of, particularly kondo’s works. I could talk about/listen to videogame music for days.
Fantastic recommendation on Casiopeia, and yeah - jazz fusion ended up having quite a large influence on VGM. I was amazed when a buddy of mine started pointing out some of the connections. T-SQUARE is also worth a listen, for anyone wanting more music in this style.
Oh yes. They did a couple albums together (the band members overlap over time) and the number of musicians makes it complicated in a really great way. I particularly like the percussion with both drummers going at it.
The band behind Mint Jams? Yes! They’re something else. Can’t say I’ve listened to Caseopea’s other works but that album is a hell of a vibe.
Mint jams is great. I also particularly like eyes of the mind and crosspoint. Did you recognize any game tunes in mint jams? There are a couple tracks that inspired some.
Off the top of my head, no. Any tracks in particular I should listen to?
Mitsuda might just rank as my favorite video game composer of all time, and it’s largely due to his work in Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. As time goes on and I discover more games he’s had a hand in, my opinion really only grows stronger.
What a legend.
Hard yes. There’s just so much there. I’ve listened to ochestral versions and all sorts of newer takes (poo poo fart and smooth mcgroove have some particularly good ones), and I keep going back to the soundtrack directly from the game. It’s just so good.
Another one that’s great right on the original hardware is the soundtrack from vectorman. So energetic, and the texture is just amazing. I guess by great I mean has a lot of artistic merit, because obviously they’re all enjoyable the way they were in the games, but some of them are on just another level.