Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse

Year: 1989
By: Konami Kukeiha Club (Hidenori Maezawa, Jun Funahashi, Yukie Morimoto)

The Castlevania series is noteworthy for its baroque-infused tunes. The third major entry in the series for the Famicom went a step further by making use of the VRC6 soundchip, right into the game cartridge. This allowed for deeper saw bass and complex harmonies thanks to the extra audio channels. Unfortunately, this is only true of the Japanese version — the NES counterpart had to be cut down significantly, but still retains some charm thanks to the strong original compositions shining through, as well as some clever adaptation tricks and choices.

Comparisons between the two versions would be worthy of an entire blog post, but for the sake of this selection, I’ll only feature the original Famicom soundtrack here.

By the way, this is not the only time you’ll hear about Castlevania in this thread…

Best picks

Beginning
Clockwork
Mad Forest
Aquarius

Full soundtrack

on Chiptune.app
on Archive.org (mp3)

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game

Year: 2010
By: Anamanaguchi

Serving as a tie-in for the movie adaptation by Edgar Wright, the game was a decent beat’em up by Ubisoft, very fun with 4 players, but plagued by its slightly grindy XP mechanics. It made up for it with its pixel art style, closer to the comics, and of course, its music.

At the core of this half-joyous half-banging soundtrack, Anamanaguchi are a bunch of hipster nerds from New York, fusing tight NES chiptune with pop-punk rock. Think Weezer meets the NES DuckTales soundtrack. This breakthrough release allowed the band to reach even bigger levels of fame, opening for Hatsune Miku shows in the US, and much later, scoring parts of the newer Scott Pilgrim anime series on Netflix.

Best picks

Another Winter
Suburban Tram
Rock Club
Gideon Wrath, Pt. I
The Dark One

Full soundtrack

on streaming services

Ils/elles reconditionnent sous #Linux, plus léger que Windows, des PCs ainsi sauvés de la benne. Ces PCs équipent familles de lycéens en fracture numérique avec #Linuxmint et écoles primaires.
Une salle % #logicielslibres flexible, ergonomique, adaptée PMR avec 3 bureaux électriques, et conviviale avec un coût logiciel nul ou presque :
- Pcs reconditionnés intégrés au réseau pédagogique (#Linux, #Firefox, #libreoffice, #Python, etc.)
- Zone Multimédia (#VLC, OBS, Kdenlive etC.)
#chiptune

The in-game version is truly faithful to the original composition!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=15lmtYh6yAY

I wonder who did the chiptune. Jean-Louis Valero himself? (or Philippe Ulrich?)

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