How Is Your SNES Gaming Going?

[SNESdrunk]

Just now I was trying to think of where I'd rank Secret of Mana's soundtrack among its peers on the Super Nintendo... and I realized it is freaking impossible to do so. How do you rank the soundtracks of Super Metroid, Final Fantasy IV and VI, Chrono Trigger, Super Castlevania IV, Mega Man X, the DKC games, Terranigma... you could put any of those in any order and I couldn't argue.

Have I mentioned I love SNES game music?

[Luke]

Just now I was trying to think of where I'd rank Secret of Mana's soundtrack among its peers on the Super Nintendo... and I realized it is freaking impossible to do so. How do you rank the soundtracks of Super Metroid, Final Fantasy IV and VI, Chrono Trigger, Super Castlevania IV, Mega Man X, the DKC games, Terranigma... you could put any of those in any order and I couldn't argue.

Have I mentioned I love SNES game music?

SimCity
Super Ghouls n Ghosts
Final Fight
Super R*Type
Gradius III
The entire Super Star Wars trilogy
Super Mario World
Donkey Kong Country
The music from the Super scope six games

...come to think of it, even Madden '94 had stellar music.

[Xeogred]

Just now I was trying to think of where I'd rank Secret of Mana's soundtrack among its peers on the Super Nintendo... and I realized it is freaking impossible to do so. How do you rank the soundtracks of Super Metroid, Final Fantasy IV and VI, Chrono Trigger, Super Castlevania IV, Mega Man X, the DKC games, Terranigma... you could put any of those in any order and I couldn't argue.

Have I mentioned I love SNES game music?

Heck yeah, I'm always really impressed with long songs that don't repeat much.

Seiken Densetsu 3's intro is a perfect example.


Anyone else got some other long examples like this? Outside of Dancing Mad of course.

You guys might like this guys channel, dude making music with the SNES soundfont or whatever:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrCOtk ... FajTI8XJ1A

This Super Metroid one is probably my favorite, it sounds totally legit.


Secret of Mana



Alcahest (this game has amazing music if you haven't played or heard it)


etc

[Tanooki]

Wow people Secret of Mana -- I always forget how damn good that soundtrack really was until I hear it again. As much as some of the other work from Square gets so much credit, there just wasn't as much rich and moving audio in one place aside from SOM on the whole. Years ago I imported the audio CD from Japan for that game and played the hell out of it, wish I knew where it went. The game is the epitome of the best top view action/rpg type games on the system right up there with Zelda and perhaps surpasses it since it felt far more 'original' at at that point to people. The music is stunning in SOM. Back in the 90s I used to track XM music and did quite a few of them from this game.

The opening of that game with the highres looking tree and effects with that opening music (Fear of the Heavens) that starts out with what probably is recoded whale song when it says Squaresoft just captures you before you're even doing anything with the controller. The amazing use of sound samples for music in this one was just insane from the pipe organs, strings, and the rest.

soundtrack-

[Hobie-wan]

*various SoM music things*

I'm partial to Ceremony.

[Xeogred]

Nothing quite as creepy or weird as that one in SD3.

I love how chaotic the boss theme is. Fittingly so with how high the difficulty can be with some of the bosses.

[Tanooki]

Ceremony how did I forget that one. That is one of the most unique pieces of music out there on the SNES and the chimes sound so real and eerie. It makes me wonder why more people didn't go nuts with such high quality sound, but I guess a lot liked to do lazy ports between systems.

[RCBH928]

retro games had a unique "sound" to them , its not like musical instruments. I think its called midi?

Sorry I know 0 in music, all I know there used to be .mid files on WIndows machines and they sounded very similar to SNES/Genesis games. Its abandoned now I think

[Tanooki]

Midi is more generic unless you start getting into sound synthesizers that replace the MIDI like sounds with real samples. There used to be a great software one of those from Yamaha I had that was free on the original FF7 release for Windows 9X back in the day.

The Genesis is a sound synth chip too, just not as rich as it has more of a buzzy arcade tone to it, almost metallic with some of the audio. The SNES uses an odd sound chip that takes stored sound samples like a wave table would do to generate audio when the sounds are queued up from the cart through the chip. It's why some games people say sound far better on there or better on the Genesis, it kind of plays to the roots of the original title. Usually arcade games tended to have a closer to correct audio on Sega, but people going for more 'real' instrument music would just knock it out of the park on the SNES.

[MrPopo]

retro games had a unique "sound" to them , its not like musical instruments. I think its called midi?

Sorry I know 0 in music, all I know there used to be .mid files on WIndows machines and they sounded very similar to SNES/Genesis games. Its abandoned now I think

Midi is essentially sheet music. It combines with a sound font to generate music. A sound font consists of a bunch of sounds that correspond with notes, so one sound font might sound like a violin while another sounds like a full brass band.