What are the most musically ambitious 8-bit game songs?

Post by **Exhuminator** » Fri Aug 26, 2016 10:56 am

Post by **Tanooki** » Fri Aug 26, 2016 11:07 am

Not a bad list, obviously Sunsoft in there.

Crisis Force now that's a more due to being famicom only obscure one. I own this cart and the music and sound effects on them are as impressive as the graphics you wouldn't think the NES would even pull off in places. A game ahead of its time and hardware the way it handles itself.

Post by **Sarge** » Fri Aug 26, 2016 11:42 am

The Guardian Legend is one of the best games on the system. Graphically, aurally, gameplay, the whole shooting match. It deserved to be an absolute classic.

Post by **J T** » Fri Aug 26, 2016 6:33 pm

Damn, these are some ambitious posts about ambitious music. Thanks for the megaposts Exhuminator and President Leever!

I'm also glad to see Tim Follin getting a lot of love. I was aware of the great Silver Surfer OST. Too bad the same praise can't be given to the game. I had not heard Chronos before, but it's amazing he was doing that on a Spectrum. Wow!

I love Tim Follin's music. My only complaint is that his talents were often wasted on crappy games, and that he doesn't always write to make music that fits the game, but rather to just create something awesome. Like, did he really need to push the envelope of 8-bit music for the title theme to Pictionary? :lol:

Post by **J T** » Sun Oct 16, 2016 6:17 pm

I just found out about the music for the game Gordian Tomb on the Commodore 64. The music was composed by Thomas Detert. It is very ambitious for trying to do so much with the little C64 SID chip and the main game theme is probably the longest running tune from that generation at 32 minutes run time. There are a lot of musical ideas that run throughout the piece and it sounds a bit like some sort of concept album you might hear from Yellow Magic Orchestra or Tangerine Dream. The game was sort of a sidescrolling metroidvania, so having one long running track worked for the exploration in the gameplay.

Here is a video of the song with oscilloscope readouts for each of the three audio channels that the Commodore 64's SID chip could produce. You can see how he would move between square, sawtooth, and triangle waves within channels, which is a feature that made the C64 easier to write for than the NES where the wave forms were preset for each channel. He also uses this to squeeze in white noise percussion between notes on his bassline channel or melody line channel, thus making it seem like he had 4 channels to work with instead of just 3.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a6ZfxpWwEVw

Here is a site where you can download MP3s that are ripped from different variants of the SID chip.
http://se2a1.bigbox.info/soasc/index.ph ... id=2&#did0

HLTB · Post by **Xeogred** » Sun Oct 16, 2016 8:48 pm

I always feel weird about Tim Follin. His stuff is just downright insane and really fun to listen to outside of the games (thankfully so in many cases, as JT mentioned some of them are terrible games), but do you guys ever think he gets a bit too Yngwie Malmsteen? A bit showy perhaps. And I think he blatantly just composed music for the sake of creating music, without really putting any thought into the actual game and tone. Though it sometimes worked out. Also based off the Pixel Tunes podcast, he supposedly hated the limitations of the trackers. He really taxed them out more than most though, so that's interesting.

I might just have an underlying bias for Japanese chiptune music with its emphasis on more melody, usually dipping into traditional rock and heavy metal. For the Euro guys, I'd say I personally like Chris Huelsbeck more than Tim Follin.

Time Trax is probably my favorite. Wish he did more on the Genesis.

Not sure if I should ask here, but Pixel Tunes' recent podcast episode was about Castlevania 3 NES vs the Famicom version... I had always heard about there being some differences, but was shocked it had 3 extra channels with its additional chip. I thought stuff like Zelda, Metroid, etc only had one extra channel? The difference was really crazy and was like SNES/Genesis level dense at times. I still think some of the NES tracks work better, but it was extremely cool as well and makes me wonder, were there other older games that had an additional chip or something that allowed it to accomplish more with the music?

Post by **marurun** » Sun Oct 16, 2016 8:53 pm

Here's a list from Nesdev.

https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Lis ... sion_audio

Post by **J T** » Sun Oct 16, 2016 8:55 pm

Off the top of my head I think Mr. Gimmick had an extra FM chip, and I think several other Konami games did. I will look more into this later as I am also interested in the answer.

HLTB · Post by **Xeogred** » Sun Oct 16, 2016 8:59 pm

marurun wrote:Here's a list from Nesdev.

https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Lis ... sion_audio

Sweet... so did all of these games have an NES release too? So there's two versions to compare, that could be fun.

Post by **Tanooki** » Sun Oct 16, 2016 9:02 pm

Not by a long shot, but your best bet would be the Nintendo FDS games which are the obvious stuff. Then of course you have Rolling Thunder out of Namco and Castlevania 3 VRC6(Konami.) In a way I think it's fair to say in the trying for the best audio possible department we got the shaft. Oddly Castlevania III for MMC5 isn't on that list, but perhaps it just used the powerful chip for anything but in that case.

racketboy.com

What are the most musically ambitious 8-bit game songs?

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