TnC GameMusic Selection: Tomb Raider theme

You are ready for some really hardcore gamepad bashing and you like the looks of Lara Croft, so you insert the CD-Rom in your PC and you listen to this in the main menu...
You calmed down a bit and want to start the game, or...not...
You cant resist the simple tune of flutes, harp and a male choir and listen to it until the end.
Then you start the game, refreshed and prepared...

Theme of tombraider 2 was also very good, it waz a sort of short version of the original with more instruments.

TnC GameMusic Selection: Trust Twist & Turn (level)

All songs are great. Simple electronic music. I should ask Jeffrey for the composers.

TnC GameMusic Selection: An Introduction

I always loved instrumental music, specially in games.
So I collected over the years a lot of GameMusic from mostly PC games I had bought.
Later I searched on the net for gamemusic composers and complete soundtracks.
So this GameMusic Collection will have mostly PC-games.
 
For MSX games with PSG music made John Hassink a great video, and he did it so well that
I could never make any addition to it.
But I made 1 tape with MSX-Music gamemusic from several MSX games.
The 2nd was never recorded, cause I ran out of tapes and had also not enough music
to record both sides.
Enough about MSX for now.

I started to collect GameMusic, when I discovered that a lot of PC games on CD-Rom
had real audio tracks hidden after the game-data.

After a while I recorded the best of these tracks on more than 20 pieces of C90 tapes,
totally random in music genre, only ordered by the tracknumber and the type of game.
There were tapes with Pinball GameMusic, Racing GameMusic and Other GameMusic.

I made those for use in my Sony Walkman, during traveling by foot, bus or train to my work and back home.One tape got lost, when my son tried to find the end of the tape...

I liked the tapes a lot, some more than others.
Times were changin, and when I got my first mp3-player, the Sony Walkman was never used before.
Still I preserved the tapes and stored them in a special box.
Then when we bought a new stereo-set so time ago, it could play a tape and
record it on a mp3-player via an USB connector at the same time.
So I recorded all of them (except 1) and burn it on DVDs and forgot it, until now.
 
In this series I want to post the GameMusic that really matters to me, even after all
these years...
And maybe I upload all these tapes with GameMusic, so you can listen to them too.

Some can be found at mixcloud mixmeister tnc or tnc tapes. 

The rest was never upload cause I had no free space left there.

TnC GameMusic Selection: Boogie Woogie Theme 1 (Pinball The Luxe)

Boogie woogie is some kind of simple rock n roll. In 1 pinball game I found a couple. The music was better than the game.

TnC mixes: TrackMania 2 Canyon 125 speedmix

When I am washing the dishes I like to have some music in the background. Over the years I collected many mashups, mixes, Xmas songs, game soundtracks, own CD-rips and more 
( maybe a bit illegal stuff ?).

So I put a DVD-R in my half-broken DVD-boombox ( remote control and display are broken) with some Lounge music and Virtual Audio Project (synthesizer music, see earlier Happy Halloween posts) and I was breathless by the instrumental techno sounds coming out of the speakers. I had to know what the music was and from who. It was labeled TrackMania 2 Canyon, so it was the OST of that game.
In total 8 tracks for 4 canyons and 2 menu music. I never want to buy the game itself, cause I bought a previous version called TrackMania United Forever and that game was good enough (or should I say difficult enough). Every TrackMania has almost everything a good race game should have, a track-editor, changeable car-skins, local and internet multiplayer, downloading new cars / car-skins, save replays, make screenshots, but no damage or guns.

Check out the 20k replay movie.

For this mix, I had 8 tracks, but 4 of them were almost the same. They even sounded a bit like the menu music. But I liked all of them. When I first hear all tracks from the DVD-R I assumed it was all 1 mix. When I looked on my computer on the DVD-R, there were 10 tracks with different titles. In the end, I used 9 in the mix instead of 10 tracks, cause 1 of the menu music sounded just 1 of other tracks and the mix sounded a bit too boring. 
I also cut a bit off the last track the menu music for a better fade out, hope you don't mind. 

When my mix was ready to be published on YouTube ( I was not sure I got issues with copyrights on mixcloud), I had the idea to create just a simple video with a visualizer, then my son (plays sometimes TrackMania United on Steam) told me it was less boring to watch if there were footage of the TrackMania 2 Canyon game. I agreed and start looking for footage with no watermarks or texts during the races. I found a long video of someone playing a couple of races of the Beta version and forgot to record the sound. 
So I cut and cut and pasted in the video I made with the visualizer, still, these footage .seemed not very interesting to watch. Then I tried to use the footage of all official trailers of Ubisoft of TrackMania 2 Canyon. But it felt wrong, the trailer had already good sounds, why re-use them for my simple Speedmix? I added an intro and an outtro to the vid with footage of the Beta version and decided to publish it on the net, first on Mixcloud, then YouTube.

I am sure if you search for TrackMania you get enough vids to watch for the rest of the week, so no more links about the game, well just one...

I forgot to tell I used the visualizer of WinAmp called Milkdrop from Nullsoft Inc & walter Gruess. It has very different styles of visuals and very nice color schema's. In the video I just used random visuals which turned out very well. Here is the download link.

One hour of the best racing gamemusic we could find

My son is a big fan off futuristic racjnggame like Scars Rollcage powerslideThrist Twisg n Turn, but also racing gameswhich ard not so realistic but have a sort of open  world like Burnout Paridise and The Crew and racing game with differrnt gamemodes where you can chosefrom like flatout and crashday. Some of these games have licensed music from groups others use special gamemusic composer to create a unique stylethat fits the game. When my son start playing GRId a remake of Rollcage with cars that can ride in any direction, he wasdisappointed  about the music in the game. So I let him hear some Cd audio tracks from my collection of old 90s racing games. He like some soundtracks more than others, so in the end he had collected a nice new soundtrack forvGRId instead of monotone dnb he could listen to old 90s funky techno rock house tracks. Strangely no one had compiledsuch a collection for Yt so I want to create it to save these simpel but great music for being forgotten. You will hear tracks from Excessive Speed, Wipe out 2097, Speedster, Rollcage, SCARS , Thurst Twist n Turn anf reVolt. Enjoy, every track was selectedby Jeffrey123454 my son. Maybe I will creat a part 2. I tried to mix in key so the music will notstop all at sudden, like in the original game itself. Note most of these musics were recorded much earlier by me on tapes. Later I converted these tapes to mp3 but not all tapes were in good shapes anymore even 1 was missinng....

I have to record all cds again, it will take a lot of time to start mixing.

TnC GameMusic Selection: Micro Machines 2 Turbo Tournament

Yesterday I listened to an very old cassettetape (converted to mp3), which was the first tape I made with CD-tracks from CD-ROMs (mostly games). I used tracks from an unknown Pinball game, a Kaleidoscope program and Micro Machines 2 Turbo Tournament. 

When the tape was ready, I didnt listen very often, cause a lot of tracks were clipping or should I say the recordings were too loud. However I liked the idea of creating tapes with the best CD-tracks of a lot of games I played, that I started recording the Pinball and Race Track tapes.

Back to that first tape, it was called "CD-Rom Noises 1", which was also the last one.
And the best tracks of that tape were the ones from Micro Machines 2 Turbo Tournament.

I used one track to start the tape and recorded all 5 of them. Why ?

It were the best instrumental rocksongs I ever heard with a great solo-guitarist.
He plays all the classic rock-tricks in his solo's, but when you hear those tracks 
you want to play this game or any other racegame.

Sometimes the tracks seems to repeat itself too often, but most races last longer than 
3 minutes, right ?

Check them our here

If you want to see the gameplay (with more good rock music in the menu's), go here
I always remember the game, cause the controls were very difficult to handle.
 

Auf Wiedersehen Monty (TnC Gamemusic Collection)

In my opinion is the title music of the MSX-1 game "Auf Wiedersehen Monty ",
one of the best PSG songs I ever heard. Great bassline, steady ritmes and a melody with some of the highest notes I ever heard the in-game music.  Still the original music was made for Commodore 64 and the MSX version was not more than a remake of the ZX Spectrum conversion of the original C64 game.

While I was searching on YouTube I found the Auf Wiedersehen Monty game was released for at least 8 different microcomputers including, for example, Amiga 500 and Atari ST ! With great disappointment, I must say the best title music was made for the original game on C64. Still, the MSX/ZX Spectrum version is very enjoyable although it is just the standard 3 PSG voices, melody, bass and drums.
The composers of the C64 are Ron Hubbard and Ben Anglish, however, the MSX version gave al the music credits to Ben. Both are famous in the C64 scene as SID music format composers,  the non-official standard music-format tor chiptunes.

Okay now back to the MSX part of this post. Auf Wiedersehen Monty was just 1 of the few European game-music titles that were remade on an MSX-computer itself (of course also some Konami, XAK, Aleste and other Japenese stuff). I found 2 different MSX remakes, 1 from FAC and 1 from Airborne, lucky for me FRANK DEMOS FOR YOU AND ME had already put the whole musicdisks (Synth Power 2 and Fading Away ) on YouTube. So I extracted the remakes from these videos. Then I discovered both MSX composers were lazy and didn't remake the whole song.The FAC compo stops (out of tracks) and the Airborne starts the loop after the 2nd bridge. Also, both have no intro. Despite these facts, I uploaded both versions to show the C64 world that MSX-2 can be much more than just another ZX Spectrum with a better video chip.

I search for the best remixes and this my editor picks:

- Dimitris Kouts 
(interesting choice of instruments, more spooky than the original)

- On Guitar
(it's Solknight remix with Ruvino playing live electric guitar, just the melodies)
- Die Gronkh Version, La La
(this is how the Amiga version should sound, no SID emulation needed)
- Metalmix
 ( by RBT, who that might be, but it's sometime metal, sometimes more rock)

- Oxygener(Ron Hubbard)  

 (early dnb from the master himself, great for halloween)

- makke root down
( rapping, movie samples, hiphop-beats, really an outstanding version)
- Rene-Berti's 
( first it started scary, then it goes to swinging big band music, amazing )
- MIDIbox SID
(it sounds like the C64 SID version, but with lots of effects it sounds fresh again)

Jeroen Tel suprised me with a live mix at Assembly 2012 including only remixes of famous computergames, like...Auf Wiedersehen Monty, featuring Ben Anglish on freestyle flute!

And I made me think back to a message I send to some MSX-BBS for help organizing The MSX GOES HOUSE project for some MSX House parties (like this at Assembly 2012).
I will tell you more about this in another post soon.

GameMusic Tapes: An Introduction

Well, instead I go on with the TnC GameMusic Collection I decided to introduce a slightly different series of Posts. Again with GameMusic, featuring tapes I made many years ago.

I was very fond of playing Pinball and Race games on my PC and noticed during playing by accident that the music I heard came from the CD-ROM directly, cause the CD-ROM kept spinning while playing the music. So I put a CD-ROM in my CD-player, skipped data track 1
and listen to the music tracks I never heard before. Then decided to check all the PC-games I had collected over years for CD-audio tracks, cause that is what they were called.

In the end I got so games with CD-audio, I started to record the best tracks on tapes so
I could listen to them on my Sony walkman. Yeah, it was before mp3 became famous.
I created 3 types of tapes with CD-audio, Race games, Pinball games and all other PC-games I could find. After recording more than 24 tapes I stopped, but still there were PC-games with great music but no CD-audio, so I ripped a lot or browsed the net to find those OSTs, converted to 1 format mp3 (192 kbps) and burned a lot of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs.
I believed I made more than 100 CD-Rs and 50 DVD-Rs. Don't worry I wont upload them all or post about every CD-R/DVD-R...

About the music you find on the tapes a very strange mix with different music-genres,
house, hard-rock, swing, rock n roll, boogie-woogie, techno, electronica, cross-over, disco, and plenty more. I always searched for a up-tempo track to start the tape and to reduce the switching of the CD-ROMs  in my CD-player I tried to record 2 tracks of the same game one after another.

I found an interesting website about (new) GameMusic, check this on: http://www.vgmonline.net/ or remixes of famous GameMusic, check: https://ocremix.org/
Lookinmg OSTs of older games, check here: http://downloads.khinsider.com/

Wanna see a strange shop where you still can purchase TDK tapes: https://www.duplication.ca/shop/TDK-SA-90.html  or a complete catalogue of manufacturers of compact cassettes: http://www.c-90.org/catalogue/tapes

MSX Xmas game: Penguin Adventure

When I think of Xmas and MSX games, the first name that I can recall is Konami's Penguin Adventure. It has snow and even Santa Clause. It's a really good but hard game to handle.
I made it once to stage 3, so you know my gaming skulls now...

So I search in my own MSX archive and found an old BCF demo, that seems to be forgotten on YouTube.

When I started the demo I knew why. It had 2 little animation demo's with the famous SNOUT humor   ,
a converted picture from the cartridge box, some credits, all location of the traders, santa claus and all warps and a slotmachine just like in the game.

Only the slotmachine had some music (stolen from the MSX-2 game Red Lights of Amsterdam) and some mostly annoying PSG sounds.
So instead of uploading a video of the demo to YouTube,
I decided to search for other YouTube videos about the game Penguin Adventure.

But here you can download that old 1989 demo of BCF:
Gavitex LZH and DSK or Mediafire LZH and DSK

BCF became more famous when they created some games and their DiscStations, but of course you knew that already.

And here some great video's I found about Penguin Adventure:
1. Penguin Adventure MSX Konami overview
* The review is very nice made by a none MSX-er, it gave me a new inside info 
about the game itself *
2. Soundtrack Penguin Adventure Konami MSX
* Not the real OST from Konami, but nicely arranged, better than any so called remixes *
3. Weird Video Games - Penguin Adventure (MSX) 
* Forget all that nonsense about speed and more, just listen from 11:30 to the Penguin Adventure Rap, hilarious !!! *