LogFAQs > #972982749

FoolFantastic posted...

Maybe even a video game soundtrack - when are we gonna tackle Streets of Rage 2?

I've thought about trying a game soundtrack a few times, but it's been rather difficult to find anything that would work well here. I'd need to find an album that

A: Didn't have way too many tracks. Most games from the past few generations of a decent length have MASSIVE soundtracks... like Octopath Traveler 1 has 85 tracks and it's not really an outlier; games with 50 to 100 tracks aren't exactly rare. Even a smaller, indie game like "Super Lesiban Animal RPG" seems to somehow have 74 tracks (?!) so I feel like I'd need to limit the search to retro games that didn't have room for an infinite number of songs or very small indie games.

B: Isn't filled with too many <40 second incidental tracks that we'd need to skip. Having a list of 10 to 20 "don't rank these songs" would just be tedious; from your standpoint of having to tell everyone to not include them & the rankers having to skip so many.

C: Is readily available to listen to in a good quality that is easy to find & not in danger of being removed for copyright reasons.

C2: And available in a format where the tracks aren't set up to loop repeatedly. I know with NES tracks one or two of the main people uploading them tend to extend every single song to last three minutes, regardless of how many times it must loop to reach that point.

[Arguably we could identify the points that each song loops and tell everyone they can stop at that point. All it'd take is examining each song, documenting all the loop points, and for every single participant to pay attention to the runtime of every track to know when to stop! This is not a solution, please do not take this seriously.]

D: Has enough songs that I like that I'd consider it worth nominating

E: Be popular enough that someone else would consider supporting the nomination.

F: And as a counterpoint to A, the album must not have too few tracks. If you go with games too retro, then you wind up with only four or five tracks & something that short could feel like a bit of a wasted nomination.

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Thus far, I haven't found anything that could plausibly hit every criteria. Even your example of Streets of Rage 2 has 23 tracks (+2 <40 second songs that don't count) which feels like it might be pushing things a bit... though I suppose Hamilton did have 46 tracks, so I'm probably overthinking the number of tracks. I've been trying not to go over 20.

So... I'm certainly open to the idea of getting some game music in here, it's just been easier to nominate more traditional albums.