Favorite Prerecorded Game Soundtracks?

Often whenever I do any sort of work (which I've been getting a lot as of recent because spring break is coming up), as with many people, I like to listen to music, except unlike most people, it's almost always a video game soundtrack (because I'm a weirdo). One thing I thought about though, is that while I like a lot of PSG, FM, and even sample based video game music, there are only a handful of games from the PS1 and onward (excluding the N64) where I find the music good enough to be memorable. I don't know quite what it is, but the music just feels a lot "weaker", and I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. There are, however, a few game soundtracks that do stand out to me as really good:

Super Monkey Ball 1-2; the electronic instruments really sell me; it's so delightfully funky, but also kind of atmospheric somehow.

F-Zero X; it's an N64 game, but if I'm not mistaken, the music is actually prerecorded (the music being mono would certainly suggest this). I think F-Zero GX is the better game overall, but the instrumentation can be pretty bad. (Like, wtf is this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObJePb8A53E#t=0m46s)

Super Smash Bros Melee; I don't typically like "orchestrated" music, but it's just done really well here. I think the synth and guitars are what do it for me.

Splatoon (1); I could do without the garbled nonsense, but it's surprisingly hardcore; enough so that many of the songs lend themselves well to metal-covers (one of the songs is even called Metalopod). Splatoon 2's soundtrack, on the other hand, is a dumpster fire. Much like the rest of the game, lol.

Honorable mention to Burnout (1); It's of the most stress-inducing things you could ever listen to, whilst sounding cheesy as all hell.

Warcraft II had a great CD-Audio soundtrack, along with Lemmings CD-ROM versions.

I totally forgot about CD ROM versions of preexisting songs, although I can't think of a single one where it beats the original music. Everybody likes to gush over the 3DO version of Street Fighter II's music, but I think the original CPS1 version's music is easily better than anything after it.

I really liked the Castlevania: Rondo of Blood CD audio soundtrack, even though it's clearly just a recording of Mikio Saitou with some expensive synthesizers.

Panzer Dragoon. Please get it and listen to it.

There is of course a plethora of CD-ROM games, like the Turbo/PCE-CD, Sega CD, and the occasional great FM-Towns soundtrack.

I also reviewed some misc. game CDs here: http://www.chrismcovell.com/musiccds.html

Any of the Ys games on PC Engine CD / TurboGrafx CD / TurboDuo -- but Ys 3 is unmatched. (Glad to see ccovell shares my sentiments ;-) )

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PS/PSX).

Sexy Parodius (PS/PSX).

Katamari Damacy (PS2), We Love Katamari (PS2), and Beautiful Katamari (Xbox 360) in discussions like this. These aren't literal Redbook/CDDA or XA-based audio from CD, but, well, too bad -- I'm including them anyway. :P

I always liked Battle Arena Toshinden's music, specially Mondo's theme.

It doesn't surprise me that none of the games listed by anyone here but me are any older than the 90's.


I forgot about the FM-Towns; I actually kind of like the remixed music in the port of Raiden, although I still prefer the original arcade music.

If you were smirkingly hoping for more from the 2000s, then you need to say newer than the '90s. In that case, Shadow of the Colossus has an amazing soundtrack. I don't usually go for the overdone orchestral soundtracks that blight 21st-century gaming.

If, on the other hand, you were hoping for CDs from the '80s, then as we said, TurboCD is for you, as well as others in the link that I posted. Ys I-II, Monster Lair, Valis II -- these are from the '80s and are pretty good.

Not hoping; I was just making an observation, and yeah, I meant newer but wasn't thinking correctly.


If you even get that; it seems increasingly common to find games with virtually no music at all.

By the time we got out of the 90s, uncompressed red book audio ceased to really be a thing—CPUs got fast enough for more sophisticated audio decompression to be practical, at the same time as storage switched to formats that didn't tend to encode audio as raw PCM either.

(At the very least, I assumed "CD audio" meant you were specifically asking about instances of using Red Book audio)

By now, I'm under the impression that the majority of games use fully pre-mastered recordings now than any kind of synth—although obviously someone with actual industry experience could correct me. Most Gamecube games seem to have used a softsynth, but a significant number of Wii games stored audio in "brstm" files.

I do like the "soft piano Kirby covers" that're present on Kirby's Epic Yarn.

I always liked this music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocVRCl9Kcus

I think it's better than Daft Punk!

@lidnariq I just removed it from the title. I wasn't thinking that people would take that to mean only soundtracks on CD based systems. Where did you find that most GameCube games actually mix the music? Most PS1 games didn't go through this effort, and they were only half the size. The GameCube even has 16MB of ram that was likely meant for storing music, as it's too slow for anything else.

For me, the first one I found compelling was Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure for PC

Also check out Bakumatsu Roman / Last Blade Arranged Soundtrax


Do you actually own these? Specifically the Red Arremer soundtrack?

The Gamecube DVD drive did support streaming ADPCM-compressed audio direct from disc—supposedly in so-called "ADP" files—but I didn't find a list where someone had already done the research as to how many games used prerecorded soundtracks and which ones didn't. Using dolphin to look for soundtracks in my own discs, roughly half seem to use pre-recorded audio and half don't.

The GameCube hardware is claimed to support mixing 64 audio channels simultaneously, so I misspoke when I said softsynth. It's more like the SNES, PS1, and PS2.

—

If we're including indie games, I really enjoyed the Closure, Expand, and Valdis Story soundtracks.

Super Smash Bros. Melee is definitely streamed.

That's what I was thinking of when lidnariq claimed most GameCube music was generated in realtime. Not that Melee represents the whole GameCube library though.


Looking at them in Dolphin, Super Monkey Ball 1, 2, and F-Zero GX all use prerendered audio.


I was always under the impression that everything after the PS1 didn't have dedicated sound hardware, like the N64 or the GBA (if you exclude the original GB sound channels), outside of a channel for each speaker. With how fast CPUs got, I wouldn't have thought hardware developers would bother. 64 channels is overkill for any scenario I can think of, (how could anyone differentiate that many sounds?) but proportional to the SNES's 8 channels and the PS1's 24 channels, it would actually be the weakest part of the system by far.

If modern systems (or at least the GameCube) still have dedicated sound hardware, what's the point in having all the audio being prerendered? You can't do much if there are vocals, but most modern game music does not. While some games are actually performed by an orchestra and recorded, I can't imagine they make up the majority. I also imagine the sound hardware is powerful enough to where you can use any kind of effect that you want to, so that's not a reason either. Convenience seems like it would be the main reason, as you don't have to program a music engine, although I'm sure an SDK would include this.

Chuck Rock II had a pretty sweet CD soundtrack. (Was on Sega CD and Amiga CD32.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Iaq80cesVM

That and you'd be DUMB not to use what's available.

I'm pretty certain the PS2 had two of the PS1 sound units, for 48-voice polyphony. (Look for PSF2 files)

Xbox (original) also apparently had 64 voice hardware mixing, also as part of the GPU. (Audio DSP isn't so different from dealing with 2d textures.)

The biggest advantage to moving audio processing off your main CPU is keeping your cache for things where speed and latency matter. If you can keep the whole audio engine out of contention with the GPU (for textures) or CPU (for game state or code) it makes the rest that much easier.

That's true regardless of whether it's a hardsynth or just a streamed soundtrack.

It's harder to master a MIDI than a fixed recording.

Total Annihilation. All hail Jeremy Soule.

Xenoblade Chronicles is up there too. I think it's telling that my two favourite games of all time also have two of my favourite soundtracks of all time.

Yes.

Jealous.

Those 16 extra channels make all the difference though.


What does "master" mean in this context? I wouldn't think games would use a generic MIDI engine, but more akin to the SNES where only the instruments that are needed are used, at least on older systems; if I'm not mistaken, the Roland SC-55 uses a 4MB rom chip to store all the samples, which isn't insignificant.


I'm like that too. At least for me, I think it's because I've played each game so much that I've been forced to like it.

Basically, mixing, again. Per-channel EQ, compression, expansion, sidechaining, &c.

The amount of effort it'd take to get the console-built-in hardware synth to do the same as the audio mix software is just not a great investment of resources, in comparison to just rendering the desired result.

A fixed 4MB sample bank is pretty small nowadays.

I assume you mean development resource? Actual system resource should be pennies worth. It would be great if modern games weren't 60GB though.


I actually just found out that it's 8MB, not that that really makes much of a difference. It's a bit bizarre that it's using a rom twice the size of Donkey Kong Country just for sound samples, although I don't know how many there are.

Yeah, development resources. Translating mixing instructions from whatever DAW your composer/musician/recording engineer favors to whatever the platform library supports is harder than not bothering, and modern audio codecs aren't enough less space efficient than sample bank + sequence data.

Came here to drop those two. The PC Engine CD library is a gold mine of early 90's synthetic Japanese game music from an era where they were just transitioning from purely FM sounds to redbook audio and weren't completely sure of what to do with all the extra fidelty, so they just went all in, combining sweet FM synthesizers with electric guitars and whatnot, while still keeping production completely electronic as no video game developer could afford fully orchestrated recording sessions.

A few more great example from less legendary games:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYfP680gQEc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-IuvOoXB_g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3RS0SGhCjk
The MegaCD was in on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaAVsZgvIOM

For modern games, I'd say some games that really stand out are the Jet Set Radio ones, employing pop style music to help underline the fresh, contemporary style of the games. The original soundtracks by Sega's own Hideki Naganuma is amazing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbdDr3sK96I

And in the opposite ballpark, Dragon Quest 8 stood out by being the only game in the main series to actually have an ingame orchestrated soundtrack for its western release (something that was actually omitted in the Japanese release).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg236zrHA40
I think this is really interesting, considering all the music in the series, even since the very first NES game, was obviously created with a symphonic orchestration in mind, and usually translated very poorly to synthetic video game instruments, losing many of their amazing subtleties in the process. While especially egregious on the NES, even the modern remakes on the DS don't really sound too good compared to the amazing symphonic recordings that have always accompanied the series.



Only have the Saturn version of that, but as far as I recall, it's just recorded straight off the arcade board, isn't it?
Oshaberi Parodius got a complete overhaul for its PS1/Saturn incarnation though, including new soundtracks:
The Goemon stage particularly stands out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMrEX0H5Pes
And of course the hidden (activated using a code) vocal version of the Tokimeki Memorial song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkzzrm-dq9c

I own the PS/PSX version, and I also owned the arcade PCB up until late last year (yes really!). AFAIK the soundtrack is identical between the two systems, but -- and I'm being incredibly pedantic here (word-wise), so feel free to slap me -- I don't think the PS/PSX version is just "a recording of the arcade version", as the audio quality is very clear/crisp. It's more likely that it's a recording from whatever the true/original sound source was.

I played the Saturn version back in the mid-90s and I remember it being on par with the PS/PSX (soundtrack and quality-wise).

Which reminds me: Gradius Deluxe Pack (PS/PSX, Saturn) also has a great soundtrack, but it's Gradius and Gradius II from the arcade, so I don't know if it really counts with regards to this thread subject. I will say that the audio between the PS/Saturn release and the arcade differs -- it's in stereo on the former systems, the spoken voice samples are higher quality, the sound effects (enemy deaths, etc.) seem different, and some of the music just sounds different (sounds like it's played at a slightly different frequency base). But I'm nitpicking and don't wanna get off-topic.

Glad to learn that 48-24=16.
You also have to know that not all those channels are dedicated to music, but also sound effects during gameplay, and that modern games tends to play lots of sound effects. So yeah, even though it's rare it can still happen that the 24 channels in the PS1 aren't enough.


Even I who am more fond of older games, I completely disagree with this. Many more modern games have amazing soundtracks and they are not a single bit weaker than soundtrack from older games. Of course you could find games with bad music but that's true for any console generation.

That's funny, because while I've never owned a Sexy Parodius board, I do have the first two Parodius arcade games, and especially on Gokujou Parodius, I could tell a clear difference in the sound of the music when I plugged in the PCB, compared to the Saturn version on Parodius Deluxe Pack - the arcade PCB just sounded much, much clearer, with the sound coming directly from the sound chip. I believe it's based on sample playback, though, similar to the SNES chip.

I guess it depends on how many pieces in a score share samples. A sample bank can also be compressed, such as BRR (Super NES), IMA (Nintendo DS), the sample compression modes in XM and IT, and MO3. I envision a format similar to OpenMPT's MPTM except using Opus-compressed samples.

Another wrinkle is on systems with limited RAM. The samples used by a piece might be more challenging to keep in RAM than a second's worth of compressed audio and 100 ms of decompressed audio.

It's not that the sample bank + sequence data isn't smaller ... it's that an hour of 128kbit/s MP3s is only 1 GB58MB.

Also I can't math. An hour of 128kbit MP3 is 58MB.

What do you mean an hour of MP3s is 1GB? Not even 1 hour of uncompressed CD quality PCM audio is 1GB... 1 hour of MP3s is more like 50~60MB.

EDIT: Oh, OK.

If the player is on the verge of deleting a game from his low-end phone, 58 MB could still mean the difference between the victim being your game and it being someone else's. Consider that downloadable Wii games were limited to about 40 MB.

A cheap phone with a paucity of storage won't necessarily have the computational might to run a good-sounding softsynth in the background either.

Arguing about whether an hour of MP3 is problematic is assuming it's a significant percentage of the size of the game.

(I admit those exist. But games where it is a significant percentage are going to be explicitly music-centered and probably can't afford to use sequence data instead of prerendered tracks)

I was actually referring to how the GameCube and Xbox have 16 more sound channels (64-48=16) than the PS2. Because the sound hardware was not based on anything made previously, unlike the PS2, they could choose whatever number they wanted to within reason.


You think? My cheap smartphone only has 8GB of storage, but it's never given me any trouble computationally. I don't do anything particularly intensive on it though; YouTube is probably the most computationally expensive thing I use it for.