Make a Fine Fight
I took a break from posting for a while because I caught whatever the blogging equivalent of writer's block is. Everything I tried to type was so awful I decided not to inflict it on other people and went to play games for a few days. I have a 75% complete post on my picks of E3 that I'll finish sometime this week. I might have been posting that now but instead I want to post about how I struck gold on Friday night and found a bunch of game soundtracks I've been after for years. This was most of my most-wanted game OSTs found all at once.
Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold was the last revision of Street Fighter Alpha 2. Like any fighting game revision it had a bunch of subtle changes but the most important one to me was the music, which was apparently re-arranged from regular SFA2. There are at least three version of the OST (arcade mix, with the bass and sound effects turned up loud enough to vibrate you off the floor and so unsuitable for home listening, regular SFA2 and SFA2 Gold) and this is the rarest and hardest to find. The instrument balance isn't exactly the same as I remember from playing the game on the Saturn years ago but it's close enough. Most of the characters who started in SF2 and appeared here have some of my favourite official versions of their themes, except Cammy, who lost her SF2 theme and gained an amazing new one instead. I can't describe how much that theme floored me when I first heard it. The thought of having it on file has kept me wanting this soundtrack for years. I never got round to playing SF Alpha 3 but I sampled the music and found it underwhelming compared to SFA2G and only kept a few tracks.
The next one is another Capcom fighter, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. The physical OST is apparently super-ultra-rare limited and the unpopularity of the game (or the license in general) has kept it obscure even though it has some really great tracks. It's not as good as I expected on the whole because it's a little uneven. It has lots of grandiose but similar-sounding incidental tracks in blaring arcade synth but some amazingly hard rocking themes for the heroes and the villain. These standout tracks justify the whole soundtrack for me. The bad thing is the OST is only for the first version of the game so it didn't have the themes for the characters that appeared in the update (Hol Horse, Mariah, Pet Shop, Anubis Polnareff and whoever I'm forgetting).
Castlevania: The New Generation (most people reading this would know it as Bloodlines) is another I've wanted for a while but actually getting it wasn't the thrill I expected. Castlevania reprises themes a lot and most of the tracks from it had been done better in later games. The exception is Calling from Heaven which I think I remembered quite fondly and mythologised as the great lost wonder of Castlevania music over the years but after Curse of Darkness and Order of Ecclesia the music of New Generation doesn't rank quite as highly for me. But Calling from Heaven has never been reprised in another game to my knowledge and I'd still like to see it again sometime.
Sonic Rush Adventure isn't something I've wanted for as long as the others because I only played it last year but that just meant the memories brought up by the music were all fresh. Still the best Sonic game ever.
I also added the music of SaGa Frontier, which isn't something I've searched after for years but I had some samples in my playlist and I liked them so I took the opportunity to get the whole thing. I did actually play this game years ago but I found it very confusing and never got very far.
Also last week GameFAQs Best Game Ever 2009 came to an end. I didn't care that much about it after my bracket made a ton of mistakes from the very beginning and I assumed that meant I would never make it on the leaderboard (and even less after I saw Super Metroid only staying ahead of Super Mario Kart by a margin of about a hundred votes) but whenever I checked my score I was usually around the 80th percentile (i.e. scoring better than 4/5 of the other brackets). My final score was 455 which scored at the 92.95 percentile but I think it was 96 point something on the day of the finals. The highest scoring entry was 653. Very disparate results. Bring on the safe ol' predictable character contest...
Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold was the last revision of Street Fighter Alpha 2. Like any fighting game revision it had a bunch of subtle changes but the most important one to me was the music, which was apparently re-arranged from regular SFA2. There are at least three version of the OST (arcade mix, with the bass and sound effects turned up loud enough to vibrate you off the floor and so unsuitable for home listening, regular SFA2 and SFA2 Gold) and this is the rarest and hardest to find. The instrument balance isn't exactly the same as I remember from playing the game on the Saturn years ago but it's close enough. Most of the characters who started in SF2 and appeared here have some of my favourite official versions of their themes, except Cammy, who lost her SF2 theme and gained an amazing new one instead. I can't describe how much that theme floored me when I first heard it. The thought of having it on file has kept me wanting this soundtrack for years. I never got round to playing SF Alpha 3 but I sampled the music and found it underwhelming compared to SFA2G and only kept a few tracks.
The next one is another Capcom fighter, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. The physical OST is apparently super-ultra-rare limited and the unpopularity of the game (or the license in general) has kept it obscure even though it has some really great tracks. It's not as good as I expected on the whole because it's a little uneven. It has lots of grandiose but similar-sounding incidental tracks in blaring arcade synth but some amazingly hard rocking themes for the heroes and the villain. These standout tracks justify the whole soundtrack for me. The bad thing is the OST is only for the first version of the game so it didn't have the themes for the characters that appeared in the update (Hol Horse, Mariah, Pet Shop, Anubis Polnareff and whoever I'm forgetting).
Castlevania: The New Generation (most people reading this would know it as Bloodlines) is another I've wanted for a while but actually getting it wasn't the thrill I expected. Castlevania reprises themes a lot and most of the tracks from it had been done better in later games. The exception is Calling from Heaven which I think I remembered quite fondly and mythologised as the great lost wonder of Castlevania music over the years but after Curse of Darkness and Order of Ecclesia the music of New Generation doesn't rank quite as highly for me. But Calling from Heaven has never been reprised in another game to my knowledge and I'd still like to see it again sometime.
Sonic Rush Adventure isn't something I've wanted for as long as the others because I only played it last year but that just meant the memories brought up by the music were all fresh. Still the best Sonic game ever.
I also added the music of SaGa Frontier, which isn't something I've searched after for years but I had some samples in my playlist and I liked them so I took the opportunity to get the whole thing. I did actually play this game years ago but I found it very confusing and never got very far.
Also last week GameFAQs Best Game Ever 2009 came to an end. I didn't care that much about it after my bracket made a ton of mistakes from the very beginning and I assumed that meant I would never make it on the leaderboard (and even less after I saw Super Metroid only staying ahead of Super Mario Kart by a margin of about a hundred votes) but whenever I checked my score I was usually around the 80th percentile (i.e. scoring better than 4/5 of the other brackets). My final score was 455 which scored at the 92.95 percentile but I think it was 96 point something on the day of the finals. The highest scoring entry was 653. Very disparate results. Bring on the safe ol' predictable character contest...