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Best 100 NES themes as voted by the Shizz


OceansAndrew
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Those friendly and industrious Shizzies spent a TON of time voting on a whole slew of nominated NES tracks (1700+) in the quest to find the best one. Votes were tallied, and then tracks were revealed a few at a time for a month or so.

You can preview each chiptune in a embedded player, and download either the individual chiptune or the whole game's chiptune. Overall it's really well laid out.

Contained in the list, there are some obvious favorites, and a ton of hidden gems, so fans of NES music should definitely check it out!

http://bestnestracks.captaintortilla.com/results/index.php

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List looks okay though, but why isn't
in top 10? :mrgreen:
There's been a lot of comments of that sort showing up. Personally I'm disappointed by the lack of TMNT III, which in my mind is a stellar soundtrack the entire way through.

Despite the effort put in to reduce nostalgia bias and cover some of the more overlooked titles, you can see that there's still quite a few entries from the popular titles (the Mega Man and Castlevania series in particular.) I'm not surprised by this, and I can't deny how great the soundtracks are, but I would have liked to see more dark horse titles show up. For example, Shizzie Auriplane pointed out this great track from a really obscure game (Tantei Jinguuji Saburou 4? Has anyone here ever heard of that before?).

That said, I'm really happy to see that Silver Surfer track near the top of the list. Such an impressive track, for technical AND musical reasons. Can you believe that drum sound is composed entirely of the triangle wave and noise channel, and DOESN'T use samples?

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There doesn't appear to be a single zip of the top 100/115 (as nsfs/nsfes). If there is one, would someone kindly point it out?

I might go through this whole project eventually, but I'd definitely go through all of it over the next few days if there were a single zip.

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Not a bad list, but a little too much love of Megaman and Castlevania. I would have preferred to see some of the 70-115 entries from those franchises replaced.

There's a lot of material that wasn't covered, but four omissions really stand out to me:

1) No Uematsu track at all, really? I'm not normally a crazy FF fan or anything, but his lyrical stuff for FF2/3 Famicom deserves a mention -- perhaps "Eternal Wind" from FF3?

2) No Dragon Warrior opening fanfare. Nothing else on NES gets trumpets the way that the fanfare does.

3) No Power Blade track -- those games are really gems, listen to them!

4) Lastly, I'm extremely surprised to not find anything from SMB3 on the list -- quality candidates being 1-2, airship, World 3, World 6, among others.

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There doesn't appear to be a single zip of the top 100/115 (as nsfs/nsfes). If there is one, would someone kindly point it out?

I might go through this whole project eventually, but I'd definitely go through all of it over the next few days if there were a single zip.

http://kngi.org/opencircuit/misc/Top100NES-NSFE.zip

http://kngi.org/opencircuit/misc/Top100NES-MP3.zip

Tada!

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Out of boredom, I took a look at the list - a bit saturated by a few games when there's a lot of other awesome NES music out there. For example, this song (by David Wise!) got overlooked:

. Wizards & Warriors had some nice stuff too.

How could they omit Kirby also?

,
,
,
,

And a severe lack of anything from Super Mario Bros. 3 (who doesn't love Athletic from SMB 3?

). I'm sure that's only scratching the surface.

I was happy to see that Gremlins 2 song though - pretty awesome song.

I wonder what do people think about trying to compile a similar list here? I posit we have people who listen to a broader spectrum of music here and could come up with a broader list of songs.

(I would like to listen to other NES songs I may have never heard before that I'm sure is missing from a list like this)

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(I would like to listen to other NES songs I may have never heard before that I'm sure is missing from a list like this)

I never pass up the opportunity to spread the love for Yuzo Koshiro's Legacy of the Wizard (AKA Dragon Slayer IV: The Drasle Family) soundtrack. It looked like theshizz awarded lots of points for innovative composition, especially from a technical standpoint. This might not push a lot of envelopes in that regard, but these tunes are melodic and energetic, and I find myself humming them regularly no matter how many years it's been since I last played the game.

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