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Minibosses Rock Nostalgic
skia writes "Chock full of yummie old-school NES goodness and metal guitar/drum beats, The Minibosses play your favorite songs from Metroid, Castlevania, and even Contra!" I've been listening to this for the past hour or so, and it's very cool. They've been around for a while. My friend Erik says he heard of them on Zophar's Domain.
Want more video game beats?
Find Aphex Twins, "Pac man power pill" and
"tetris medley".
Knowing this guy he's probably done some more
video game inspired music but those are the only two I know of.
This is a good read.
For the people who weren't at the geek pride festival, they had a band there (called 'Everyone', IIRC) which played video game music. It was, in fact, the only band that went on twice. They played the nostalgic tunes (Some Mega Man, some DragonWarrior) as well as some more recent music (Chrono Trigger, and the ever-present Final Fantasy series). Very enjoyable stuff!
-Denor
It's called "Legend of Zelda" by The Rabbit Joint. MP3.com used to host it in their section dedicated to the Rabbit Joint, but it's gone now. (Maybe Nintendo saw a copyright violation?) Anyway, search on Napster for it -- you'll almost certainly find someone with it.
For more information, click here.
I agree... Have you ever heard any of the orchestral arrangements of some of the game tunes? I have some Zelda and Mario stuff, among others, and some of it is *simply amazing*
The Zelda theme is great, even in original form, and there's a lot that could be done with it. If only I had 3-4 more weeks for my Intro to Digital Music final project. (I have a pretty sucky re-arrangement for the Mario theme.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
If you follow the instructions in this guide , you can rip your own original music tracks from all those NES roms your *cough* friends *cough* have lying around on their computers. Why settle for a clean remix with proper instrumentation when you can relive the original cheesy 4-track goodness?
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Is there a way on Slashdot to find out who has moderated you up or down? If not,I think that it would be a cool feature to expand upon our interrealtionship on slashdot.
Biggy
... if I had continued work on my code until it was completed. As it is, it's only pre alpha.
:)
:)
I'm talking about the midi to guitar tab software I was writing around six months ago. You plug a midi in, and it outputs the guitar tab for any given midi track. Even drum.
It's command line GPL'd software, written in C, compiles with GCC. Just like it should be. This is the first time I've released this piece of software, so have at it, my friends.
Be sure to e-mail me any changes.
Midi To Tab converter
Last year, some friends and myself got together to perform Super Mario Brothers songs for the school talent show. We dressed up as the characters and did a medley, which included Hammer Brothers, Underground, The Castle Song From Mario 1, the water tune from smb3 and a few others. It was pretty obvious that a program like the one I've written would have been a great help.
Play your ass off.
If you thought minibosses were good, check out Nintendo Power. They have live mp3's and avi's of performances.
http://nintendopower.freeservers.com
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I've always loved game music, even back when it was the NES days and the songs weren't really complex - but I still loved them.
Especially nowadays, it's great to be a game music fan...there's so many great composers out there (Uematsu, Mitsuda, Sakuraba, etc) that it's hard to go wrong.
The best music seems to come from RPGs...mainly because the composers need to create epic themes to go along with the (generally) epic stories. Uematsu (composer of the Final Fantasy games) is usually the best known, and while his actual compositions are hardly matched, he's been using samples in his recent games (Final Fantasies VII and VIII) that don't really showcase the sound quality of the Playstation. If you have any interest in this sort of music, I HIGHLY recommend you pop over to GameMusic Online (http://www.gamemusic.com/) and check out some of their soundtracks - two of the best scores on the market are the Xenogears OSV and the Genso Suikoden soundtrack (the latter is one of the best overall soundtracks I've ever heard, for anything).
Then there's some of the other stuff...Falcom is highly regarded for its music, and some of their orchestrated albums are simply mind-blowing.
I highly recommend that you guys check out some of the music available - it's simply incredible what's being produced nowadays.
Tort
And anyone who's too lazy to do it himself can find plenty of mp3s available.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, B, A, select, start...
awwww yeah, 30 lives.
oh how I miss the good old days..
~Steve
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~Steve
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i loved the music from contra, and contra 2 even more. in fact, i wrote in to konami to ask if they had sheet music. i didn't get a reply. =(
best music from a video game, i think, would be ninja gaiden 2.
Doesn't the creepy Castlevania music remind you of those days when you would try and convince your mom that the 10 hours you just spent slashing zombies is actually improving your hand-eye coordination? Of coarse increased hand-eye coordination yeilds faster typing skills and that means you have more valuable 'job skills'. I would say anything if I thought it would keep that power cord from being locked away(I bought a spare though). ;)
When it comes to old skool stuff, nothing beats Commodore 64's SID tunes... Absolutely superior stuff.
Although your interpretation of my message was pretty funny it did nothing for your karma. Plus it probably turned off most of your gay friends. Sucks for you (oops, no pun intended)
Biggy
Bobby Prince is one of the nicest guys around as well. His Web site used to have loads of trivia about id, the making of Doom and what inpiration the different tracks had. He also had some white papers on music, atmosphere in games, sampling and composing. When I ordered the CD, I had to send cash because I was between credit cards. I couldn't get change for the exact amount so I sent him a bit more than the price. Lo and behold, I get *two* CDs for the price of just more than one - plus a nice personal letter from his wife. Made my day...
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Go here It's Bungle Fever. Mr Bungle is a band with Mike Patton (Faith No More's lead singer before they broke up!!) and buddies who play some ass kickin music. One of the videos on this site is a live cover of the Theme to Super Mario Bros. Excellent. You need vivo to play it though. There is a MP3 of the same song on the site too!!! Check them out.. leimy
The Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (also XMAME available) project includes sound emulation support for just about every classic arcade game that it emulates. Not to even mention that its sound cores seem to be the best ones available, for example the YM-2151 emulation is the most accurate sound simulation ever written.
Check out also Qplayer (For standalone playing of CPS2 system games' sounds and music) and NeoJukeBox (For standalone playing of Neo Geo music and sounds).
Unfortunately, most of the napster stuff is copyrighted and only sold in Japan and from expensive import websites.
Here are a few good links to sites that sells game soundtracks:
Game Music Online
SoundtrackCentral
synSONIQ
I haven't bought anything yet, but I consider buying a few ablums from Game Music Online.
Before I knew about these sites or napster, I downloaded MANY game midi files from the web. Believe me, they sound great with SBlive! if you have the right soundfonts installed.
Videogame Music Acrhive - more than 10.000 midifiles I think, PC, SNES, NES, Genesis, Commodore 64 - you name it!.
I'm glad to see people like Minibosses do some game music and make some of it free. Can't wait to here it (I'm a big fan of the Metroid soundtrack!).
Video game music grew out of a restricted environment--literally where only a few extremely simple instruments had to be chained together to create music compelling enough to encourage continued playing.
This is no small thing--if you've ever seen a scene out of a movie without music, you know how critical music is to setting an environment. And if you've ever heard any of the last boss music that Nobuo Uematsu has hacked together over the last decade, you know: Kick Ass Music Makes A Difference. And in my mind, unique melodies make the song.
Think about what you hum when you remember a tune. You ain't humming the beat, though the lyrics might stick in your head. It's the melody that grabs you. And, to be blunt, early video games didn't have the resources to have anything *but* melody. I think my favorite quote out of Nobuo lately is something along the lines of, "Sure I could spent a bunch of time looking through directories finding the perfect trumpet sample...or I could just create a new melody."
That's not to say, mind you, that orchestration is not a beautiful thing. I'm listening to the Minibosses' doing Castlevania, and I'm enjoying myself greatly. (Incidentally, the fact that they have a FAQ question on Mega Man 2 and no other game is awesome.) Considering Castlevania is probably one of the world's most remixed soundtracks(up there with Final Fantasy and Street Fighter 2), these guys have done a standup job.
Orchestration applied to a song with core melody that rocks rocks. Orchestration for the sake of orchestration alone(unfortunately, many film scores) is empty.
Then there's this ridiculous remix of Fithos Lusec from Final Fantasy 8. This is just in a whole 'nother category.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Oh how I remember the summer of '89 when i popped in final fantasy and beat that tough (I was 6...) rpg. Final Fantasy 1's music was probably the best NES music of all time, and has been the inspiration for most of the series songs. I like the updated orchestrated versions of classics because it shows what we could have done if we had the equipment back in the day, and it brings back the memories of the games we loved. The best thing about music back in that day was that because there wasn't enough memory to hold entire songs, it would use tricks to keep few minute songs doing different things after hours of play. Come on, how many of you popped in a game, refused to press start to see how fast mega man's beat would go if you left it going till midnight.
English: Fry's 30 day money back guarentee
Look, everybody, here's a legitimate use for Napster and Gnutella! Anyone who got these songs want to mirror/share them, 'cause I can't get them from the site!
:)
.WAV, using Nesticle, back when I ran DOS natively...) and converted it to an mp3. (hey, chill, I bought the game fair and square when it came out. :)
:|
:)
Now on to my rantings...
Boy, those games rule...
Anyone remember that the NES emulator from Japan for Windows ("PasoFami", I think) used MIDI for its output? It let you change the samples for the four channels, and at the time I also had a software midi synthesizer, so let's just say that Mario and Zelda sounded kinda funky, in a good, remixed way.
Later, I 'ripped' the intro music from Zelda (as a
Who can forget the music from Final Fantasy, especially seeing as how the "Battle Victory Music" hasn't really changed! I love those songs in all of their incarnations, but I think I have a soft spot for FF2. (FF4J for the purists, not NES, I know, I know...)
I saw that they had music from Castlevania, but what about Castlevania 2? That had some awesome music, especially for 'night-time'.
("WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A CURSE")
Also, yes, Metroid ("JUSTIN BAILEY") had some awesome music, and especially Super Metroid, although that doesn't count here.
Also, I loved Megaman 2, and I've heard some techno remixes from that and some of the others. (some *much* worse than others, but Flash Man was funky.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
www.pushove.com/song.mp3
A tribute to the 8 bit system of yesteryear performed by Dayeight (me on vox and coathanger on shopping cart) and Darth Omega backing vox and gee-tar) outside of wallmart. so-so quality.
I'm making a page for it soon, with lyrics and the like. Also got a great article on video game music from Electronic Musician to put up.
and check out my band, http://www.mp3.com/bratwurst for some spoken word core music, with a touch of digital hardcore.
when Push Comes to Shove
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