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OSVOSTOTY 2016 – Community Question Edition

January 11, 2017 | Shawn Sackenheim | 1 Comment Share this

With our staff posts out on the site we wanted to turn to you, the OSV community, to hear your own personal Original Soundtrack Of The Year picks for 2016. Let us know in the comments your selections for Soundtrack of the Year, Arrangement Album of the Year and any other unique categories you can dream up. Favorite Physical Release maybe? What about Vocal Performance of the Year or… Best use of a Piccolo?

If you need some refreshing on 2016 releases or if you missed our posts the first time around here’s a few links to catch you up: Shawn’s Picks, Brenna’s Picks, Michael’s Picks, Ryan’s Picks. There wasn’t a bit of overlap between our picks this year so don’t worry about conformity, go wild, these picks are all about you.
Featured, Game Music, Miscellaneous

Community Question: When Good Music Goes Bad

November 10, 2016 | Shawn Sackenheim | Comments Off on Community Question: When Good Music Goes Bad Share this

I’ve been playing a lot of Dragon Quest Builders lately and while the music is delightful — especially for fans of the series with loads of rearranged themes from previous titles — it’s kind of killing me. Most sandbox crafting/survival games follow in the Minecraft mold with minimal and atmospheric soundscapes, if they incorporate music at all. Spending hours meticulously placing blocks and scavenging for resources doesn’t require a galant fanfare or sugary melodies with short loops. Without the distraction of life-threatening combat these tunes have quickly invaded my consciousness and I find them banging around in my head for hours after I’ve stopped playing.

I know what you’re going to say, “Shawn, just turn the volume down”, and in any other game that would totally work. But, you see, for unfathomable reasons you can only turn the music in Dragon Quest Builders down, never off. It’s kind of become a sticking point for some of us on the game’s subreddit and the only consolation I can think of is to ask for similar stories from our dear readers here at OSV.

Are there any soundtracks that started out great but quickly got on your nerves? A town tune or shop music that sent you running for the overworld map? Maybe a main menu theme that you left idling for too long? Share your pain in the comments below.
Featured, Game Music, Miscellaneous

Community Question: Your Favorite Halloween Game Music

October 24, 2016 | Shawn Sackenheim | 5 Comments Share this
Happy Halloween (to those who subscribe to the holiday)! We’ve shared some of our personal favorites over the past weeks and years and now we want to hear some of your own. Truly terrifying or playfully macabre. Squirming out of ancient PC sound hardware or freshly ~~released~~ deceased. Or anywhere in between.

Share some of your favorite spooky game music in the comments below and if you need a little inspiration here are a few of our recent and popular Halloween themed features:
Game Music, Miscellaneous

Community Question: What was Your first Game Music Album?

May 4, 2016 | Shawn Sackenheim | 15 Comments Share this

For the next installment of the Community Question we want to take things back a ways. How far back? All the way. Back to your first video game music soundtrack purchase or acquisition, if it happened to be a gift or maybe a “steal”. We’re not judging. For the sake of this one we’ll put aside homemade recordings or rips; that’ll make for a nice follow up question down the line. Let us know what your first game music album was (and if you still have it) in the comments while I get things started.

I’d forgotten the details behind how I got my first official album and had to do some quick Googling just now. It turns out that Sonic the Hedgehog Boom was my very first game music album and pre-order bonus. By clipping a coupon from the ad above (scan courtesy of Dinosaur Dracula) and heading to Toys ”R” Us you could put $10 down on Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and get a copy of the album when the game launched on February 2nd, 1994. I’m not sure why the coupon was necessary but I’d do whatever it took to grab a legitimate video game soundtrack released to the US. It didn’t hurt that I was already going to get Sonic 3.

The album itself is both noteworthy and a little strange. For a Sonic 3 pre-order bonus you’d think it might contain at least one song from the game but the tracklist features 23 songs from Sonic CD and Sonic Spinball instead. These aren’t just ripped right from the source and slapped on a disc either. The first 19 tracks include some extended versions of Sonic CD’s US soundtrack and the music from Sonic Spinball is completely rearranged. I’m happy to say that unlike a lot of games I’ve owned, I still have every soundtrack I ever bought, including this one. The case is pretty worn after years of shoving it into storage racks and taking it on drives but it’s still intact and surprisingly unmarred by scratches.

What about you? What was your first game music album and do you still have it? Let us know below.
Game Music, Miscellaneous

OSVOSTOTY 2015 – Community Question Edition

January 14, 2016 | Shawn Sackenheim | 4 Comments Share this
Now that most of us have had our chance to call out some favorites from 2015, it’s your turn. This time around we narrowed down our categories to:
- Game Soundtrack of the Year
- Artist/Composer of the Year
- Arrangement Album of the Year
Let us know your top picks in the comments and feel free to throw in any special categories or mentions of your own. If you need some inspiration or missed them the first time around you can always check out our OSVOSTOTY picks for 2015: Michael, Brenna, Patrick, Ryan and Shawn.
Game Music, Miscellaneous

Community Question: What Are Your Burnout Songs?

December 6, 2015 | Shawn Sackenheim | Comments Off on Community Question: What Are Your Burnout Songs? Share this

My day job has exploded into a whirlwind of spreadsheets and Word docs as everyone scrambles to do everything before the holidays. On the bright side, that means I’ve got more time than I’ve ever had at a job to listen to music. Not in the analytical, write-a-review way, more in the “know what I haven’t heard in a long time” way. I copied my entire game music collection onto a flash drive and while it is in no way complete, it’s full of soundtracks I love. Or as I would quickly come to realize: used to love.

For this installment of the Community Question we want to hear about your burnout songs. Those soundtracks you used to love listening to that aren’t in heavy rotation nowadays. The ones that send your finger flying for the Skip button that you used to insist on repeating at least two times in a row.

My go-to answer for this question is maybe a little controversial: it’s Super Mario Bros. There was a time in the early 2000’s when I loved hearing every marching band and high school choir turn in their rendition of the original game’s legendary themes. I grabbed remixes and arrangements, orchestrations and crappy band covers. But after thirty years with these songs there aren’t many treatments left that I don’t outright skip these days. It’s classic, iconic music without a doubt, I just don’t need to hear it very frequently anymore.

Less blasphemous are a lot of guitar rock and techno soundtracks from the mid-to-late 90’s. The early Need for Speed entries, Guilty Gear, GoldenEye, MDK2, Destruction Derby and many others were the soundtrack to my daily life back then. Today they typically generate only a nostalgic smirk before I proclaim “Next!” and hit the button.

Your turn! Let us know some of your old favorite songs or soundtracks you just aren’t that into in the comments.
Game Music, Miscellaneous

Community Question: What Game has the Most Music?

September 5, 2015 | Shawn Sackenheim | 3 Comments Share this

It just popped into my head the other day as I was (still, forever) cleaning up my music collection: what single game has the most music. The few that sprang to my mind were Final Fantasy games with their multi-disc soundtracks and Ocarina of Time that squeezes 82 songs onto a single disc. But that’s just in my own personal experience and I knew there had to be gargantuan soundtracks out there I was completely oblivious too. So I did what inquisitive minds have done for eons when a question exceeds their realm of understanding; I asked reddit. And, boy, did the r/gamemusic subreddit respond in kind. This is by no means comprehensive or scientific but here are some of the games that got thrown my way.

Runescape is a name I’ve heard for quite a while (14 years it turns out) but I’ve never known anyone into it or gone looking for myself. In the process of writing this post I finally did look it up and, oh, it’s an MMO. That explains why I’ve never gotten into it. Anyways, according to the Runescape Wikia there are 1,055 music tracks available in the game as of August 24th, 2015. Potentially more astounding, I’ve seen it mentioned that much of the music is presented in triplicate with new versions arranged for the Runescape 2 and 3 upgrades of the game.

Also out of my wheelhouse is Blizzard’s perpetual MMO, World of Warcraft. The closest thing I could find for confirmation is this YouTube playlist consisting of 547 tracks. As it was last updated in September 2014 it doesn’t include the 53 tracks from the Warlords of Draenor expansion which would bring it to an even 600. Blizzard also announced another expansion at GamesCom this year, Legion, which will surely add even more music.

Continuing the trend of games I’ve heard of but am mostly clueless about is EVE Online. It may not have the most individual tracks for a game but its base soundtrack of 74 songs is nearly seven hours long. Add in an extra 26 from the expansions and another 20+ tracks of mission-specific music and it’s another juggernaut of a soundtrack.

Finally, something I know. Well, I know most of the source material from Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, if not the spastic fighting game itself. You could argue against it as it’s basically a huge compilation of existing music but I’m throwing it in. Encompassing a huge swath of Nintendo’s history, and an increasing range of third-party properties, the current Smash’s soundtrack weighs in at over 450 tracks.

To round things up I also got mentions of this eight hour playlist from the original version of The Sims (with expansions), a link to Bayonetta’s ridiculous 5-disc, 150-song soundtrack and a great comment about the biggest soundtracks for the Commodore 64 and NES. Lastly, a few people pointed out that the most technically correct answer would be games with randomly or procedurally generated music. Proteus, Spore, Peggle 2, and Fez all use scripting to build a score based on what is happening to the player at the moment. These could result in thousands, maybe even millions, of different musical combinations that would never be repeated. It’s an accurate point but I don’t think it falls in line with the spirit of my original question. By the way, neither do games with licensed soundtracks like Rock Band which, at one point, was up to 1,692 tracks.

So, dear OSV readers, what do you think? Which individual game (expansions or not, it’s up to you) has the most music? Ring in with your own thoughts and suggestions in the comments and maybe we’ll get a little closer to a definitive answer.