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Beggars Canyon chase from Star Wars Shadows of the Empire
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timppu: My point is that if I had also had only a Soundblaster or Adlib to get only OPL-2 FM music from my PC games, I probably wouldn't have cared about it either, and I wouldn't be naming any "best PC game music" from that pre-Playstation era (besides maybe Dune 1 and 688 Attack Sub Sim).

Moving from Amiga games' music to PC's Adlib/Soundblaster FM synthesis music was a definite downgrade in quality for me. Quite frankly, in my opinion 99% of Adlib/SB music in PC games simply sucked (with the exception of some games that used Amiga-like MOD tracker/sampler music with Soundblaster, like Pinball Fantasies, Jazz the Jackrabbit etc.), mostly due to poor quality of the underlying hardware. You can't make great symphonies with a fipple flute.
I don't care about how realistic the synthesized instruments sound. I was going by the music itself. The NES has some pretty crappy synthesis, but it still had a lot of really excellent music.
Pretty much everything from old Lucasarts and Sierra adventure games.

The music did exceptionally well at catching the tone of the scenes they were in and their themes did equally well at capturing the tone of the game you were about to play.
Why has nobody posted Guilty Gear X2 #Reload yet! It has awesome music!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuIEW5rX6z0
Post edited June 03, 2013 by ggf162
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MobiusArcher: I don't care about how realistic the synthesized instruments sound. I was going by the music itself. The NES has some pretty crappy synthesis, but it still had a lot of really excellent music.
I think both matter. You simply can't make a great symphony with one fipple flute, even though you might be able to make some funny warble with it. But then again if you don't know what to do with a complete symphony orchestra, that doesn't help either.

Anyway, the likes of Sierra etc. had professional composers making music for Roland sound cards etc. And that may be one of the main things, not the technological things, why I overall preferred PC/Roland music to e.g. most Amiga game music. Even though the Amiga game music was technically often quite good, using sampled instruments and all, it sounded most of the time like some amateur dabbling with a sampler.
Post edited June 04, 2013 by timppu