Video game music favorites

This will have to be an ongoing thing; there's just TOO MUCH. Potential obvious point: it's really cool to me how earlier game music almost completely created the atmosphere that art directors of future installments used as a framework as graphics improved. I think people who say that current game music isn't as good are a little blinded by nostalgia, because there is some phenomenal fully orchestrated stuff coming out now. Back in the day there just wasn't as much to latch onto visually, so it makes sense that everybody gravitated toward the music as the main way to emotionally latch onto a game character. With the soundtrack playing along, your imagination fleshed things out. Now, like I find myself saying over and over, you just have to pay a little more attention with so much getting thrown at you visually. It's just different, but still beautiful and exciting to me at least.

METROID (NES) - Title Screen


SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS (PS2) - The Sunlit Earth


LEGEND OF ZELDA: OCARINA OF TIME (N64) - Ganon Final Battle


SHADOW OF THE COLUSSUS (PS2) - Creeping Shadow [kind of want to post the entire soundtrack to this game, but you can go find it]


CHRONO TRIGGER (SNES) - Corridors of Time


Man, there are so many more that are just as crucial! I'll be back.

le fantôme dans la musique

Somehow I'm always listening to Air's soundtrack to The Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola's 2000 film based on  Jeffrey Eugenides' novel. The book, film and soundtrack all captured something unnameable and pretty frightening. Horrifying, really. [Side note: the Latin horror has its root in 'veneration' or 'religious awe' -- the idea that something could be so powerful and/or inexplicably beautiful that it causes intense fright. Though, as I see it, not necessarily in a bad way, if that makes any sense.] It's kind of like looking in on this massive, gooey thing that's not quite of this planet, except when you get closer you can tell that all the ghostly little pieces that add up to the whole are pretty familiar.

Also the album artwork by Mike Mills (not the REM bassist, the other famous Mike Mills) might be my favorite ever.