Pixelated Audio

Pixelated Audio is back from this year's Persona themed MAGWest. In honor of the theme we threw together a quick show about the music of the mainline Persona games from Persona 1-5 with a little bit of early Megami Tensei history. We're also joined by co-host and our good friend AJ aka "rayjkayj" of the VGMPorium podcast. It's a light show with fun musical examples spanning the decades of the Persona series and we hope you enjoy it!

Track list

0:00:00 (Bedding) Convenience Store - Revelations: Persona - Kenichi Tsuchiya

0:09:30 1st & 2nd Ward Shopping District (West Entrance) - Revelations: Persona - Hidehito Aoki

0:14:25 Ayase's Theme - Revelations: Persona - Kenichi Tsuchiya

0:20:50 Sumaru City Map - Persona 2: Innocent Sin - Toshiko Tasaki

0:22:55 Battle - Persona 2: Innocent Sin - Kenichi Tsuchiya

0:28:39 Maya's Theme - Persona 2: Eternal Punishment - Kenichi Tsuchiya

0:31:00 Maya's Theme - Persona 2: Innocent Sin - Kenichi Tsuchiya

0:35:31 Theme of Tartarus (Arqa Block) - Persona 3 - Shoji Meguro

0:37:49 Burn My Dread - Persona 3 - Shoji Meguro

Singer: Yumi Kawamura

Lyrics: Shigeo Komori, Yoshihiro Komori

0:47:06 Pursuing My True Self - Persona 4 - Shoji Meguro

Singer: Reiko Tanaka

Lyrics: Yu Namba, RyoRca

0:48:48 Signs of Love - Persona 4 - Shoji Meguro

Singer: Shihoko Hirata

Lyrics: Reiko Tanaka

0:54:43 Last Surprise - Persona 5 - Shoji Meguro

Singer: Lyn

Lyricist: Benjamin Franklin

0:59:24 Life Goes On - Persona 5 - Shoji Meguro

1:09:34 Satomi Tadashi Pharmacy's Theme - Revelations: Persona - Misaki Okibe

Additional things mentioned during the talk

Bi Score Band albums

Is This Persona? - songs from Shin Megami Tensei 1-5

This Is Persona - songs from Persona 1-5

Lotus Juice - Rapper from Persona 3 onwards

Lacey Johnson - Another great musician with lots of awesome Persona covers

VGMPorium Podcast - AJ's VGM podcast

Shop Themes IV - Persona (VGMPorium episode)

Tom Miller

Sue Kasper, it's a name you might know by memory but if you grew up PC gaming in the 90s you're definitely familiar with her work. Sue was the lead composer on SimFarm and the international sensation SimCity 2000! Both games were developed by Maxis, a studio known for producing simulation games since the 80s including SimCity, The Sims, Spore and many others.

Sue's eclectic tunes have been ingrained in the hearts and minds of simulation game players the world over, and there's no doubt that her work on SimCity 2000 inspired a great many other composers trying to capture that iconic simulation game sound. She's a lifelong musician and guitarist that's been playing gigs in a number of bands around California since the 70s. While we weren't able to speak to Sue directly on mic, we had an excellent conversation with Michelle sitting in as proxy for Sue to answer our collective questions about her work on SimCity 2K and SimFarm. It was a ton of fun hearing her experiences rocking out, and her work with companies like Maxis, Guitar Player magazine, and Avid/Digidesign.

Music composed by Sue Kasper unless otherwise stated

0:00:00 Dawn of City (Sim City 2000)

0:06:44 Dancing Megalopolis

0:11:06 The SIM Magic: Experience Mode

0:15:04 Skycrapers

0:22:00 Tax & Money

0:28:35 (Excerpts) Tax & Money, Work Work Work! [with MIDI transcription issues]

0:31:18 Title Theme (Sim Farm)

0:34:13 Dead Farm / Debt Farm

0:39:15 Home Improvement (aka COWMAN)

0:41:53 Work Work Work (Sim City 2000)

0:48:25 Ultimate City

0:52:50 Key of Success

1:01:35 (Bedding) General Farm

1:04:12 Work Work Work!

Composed by Sue Kasper

Arranged by Ryuichi Katsumata for Sim-Melody from SimCity 2000

Other things mentioned:

MAGWest 2024 (Sep 27-29)

MAGWest 2023 - George Sanger Pool Party set

ROCKRGRL Magazine wiki

Bonus link: Small World - Juliet Slip tribute video

All songs using Roland SC-55, thank you to Valley Bell for providing the stellar recordings!

Pixelated Audio is back for the third annual Masters of VGM (@MastersofVGM), which happens every June. Various podcasts come together to highlight game composers with the theme this year focusing on the amazing women in the industry. We decided to take a more narrow focus on some of the lesser known composers at Capcom and picked 4 to talk about today going from the company's earliest days through the 2000s.

Check out some of the other participating shows in Masters of VGM and discover some new VGM podcast favorites! As always, we hope you enjoy the show!

Track List:

00:00 Main Theme - SonSon (Arcade, 1984) by Ayako Mori

03:56 Stage 1 & 2 - Ghosts 'n Goblins / Makaimura (Arcade, 1985) by Ayako Mori

07:24 Stage 3 - Trojan / Tatakai no Banka (Arcade, 1986) by Ayako Mori

10:44 Crystal Snail - Mega Man X2 (SNES, 1994) by Yuki Iwai

15:17 City Zone B ~ Night - Tech Romancer (Arcade, 1998) by Yuki Iwai

20:48 Tenguman - Rockman & Forte / Mega Man & Bass (SNES, 1998) by Akari Kaida

32:40 No!! - Tricky Sliders / Trick'N Snowboarder (PS1, 1999) by Akari Kaida

36:14 Blast Speed (Blast Man's Stage) - Mega Man Battle Network 6 (GBA, 2005) by Yoshino Aoki

41:12 Now Study! (Libra Scales' Stage) - Mega Man Star Force (DS, 2006) by Yoshino Aoki

48:28 Kaze yo Tsutaete (Game version) ~ROLL Special Ending~ - Rockman Battle & Chase (PS1, 1997)

composition and arrangement by Yoshinori Ono and performance by Yoshino Aoki

Other links

Ayako Mori - Capcom Wiki

Yuki Iwai - Capcom Wiki

Akari Kaida - Capcom Wiki, Wikipedia

Yoshino Aoki - Capcom Wiki, Wikipedia

Pixelated Audio is back from a wonderful weekend at VGMCon in Minnesota! Gene was slated to represent us but along the way drummed up a party including Pernell from Rhythm and Pixels, Carlos from Heroes Three, and Thomas Kresge head of the Game Brass (check out their new album Barrel Brassed)!

When in Minnesota do as the Minnesotans do, as the saying goes. We had a fun time talking about all manner of VGM related to the Midwest; the region itself, games about the area and made there, as well as composers from the area.

Getting more specific we cover pinball and edutainment in some level of depth before the panel devolves into talking about Shrek, cheese, and endless trips cross country. It's a fun journey through a diverse range of VGM and we hope you enjoy the show we put together. Pardon the noise in the background, it was the best we could do with a portable recorder.

Track list

0:00:00 (Bedding) "The Creek" WolfQuest (Minnesota Zoo & Eduweb 2007) by Tim Buzza, additional music by Ben Woolman

0:14:52 (Excerpt) Suzanne Ciani Creates the Soundtrack for a Pinball Machine YouTube

0:15:51 (Excerpt) Xenon gameplay (Bally 1980) all audio by Suzanne Ciani (video courtesy of London Pinball)

0:18:19 "Main Theme" Pin-Bot (Williams 1986) by Chris Granner

0:22:24 "Speak Softly, Love" feat. Slash from The Godfather Pinball (Jersey Jack Pinball 2023) by Thomas Kresge

0:26:38 "New York City (Action)" X-Men Legends (Raven Software 2004) by Rik Schaffer

0:33:34 "Title Theme" Oregon Trail Deluxe (MECC 1993) by Lon Koenig and Larry Phenow

0:36:47 "Gimme Mo' Torque" Vigilante 8: 2nd Offense (DC version, 1999 Luxoflux) by Christian A. Salyer, Eric Klein, Javier Marquez

0:40:26 "Tracking Trouble" Puzzle Agent (Telltale Games 2010) by Disasterpeace / Richard Vreeland)

0:47:04 "Granny Cream's Hot Butter Ice Cream" Hypnospace Outlaw (Tendershoot 2019) by Hot Dad / Erik Helwig / "Chowder Man"

0:49:11 "Kitchen Music" I Am Bread (Bossa Studios 2014) by Black Heron (Leo Chilcott and Murugan Thiruchelvam)

0:54:48 "Protector's Enclave" Neverwinter (Cryptic Studios 2013) by Kevin Manthei

0:58:44 “Let's Break Physics (Main Theme)” Unstable Scientific (Studio Castle Soodalkov TBD) by Super Marcato Bros

1:04:29 "Exploration" WolfQuest by Tim Buzza

1:21:09 "The Creek" WolfQuest by Tim Buzza

Additional things mentioned during the talk

Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC)

The Story of The Oregon Trail - Gaming Historian YouTube

Trailheads: The Oregon Trail’s Origins - Twin Cities PBS

Ben Hanson travels the roguelike Oregon Trail - Video Game History Foundation

R. Philip Bouchard (lead designer of the 1985 Oregon Trail)

Personal website | died-of-dysentery.com | Died of Dysentery book, history of the game

Minnesota things!

Level with Emily Reese podcast home | PA episode with Emily

VGMCon

Games Done Quick

Other things mentioned

Airport CEO - game | soundtrack

Fight'N Rage - game | soundtrack

SML Podcast

Kamen Rider Agito & Kuuga Wild Battle [仮面ライダーアギト＆クウガ ワイルドバトル] is a 2001 game for the Sega Pico developed by Arc System Works and published by Bandai. It is based on the Kamen Rider superhero license property which started in the 1970s.

To keep it brief, the Sega Pico is less a console and more a children's toy. Imagine the guts of a Sega Genesis / Mega Drive (minus the FM) stuffed into a colorful laptop / digital storybook for pre-school age children. For the Sega Pico, Kamen Rider is surprisingly involved and game-like compared to most of the educational software the system was built for. It features a basic 1-on-1 fighting game, a racing game, and a lightgun style shooting game.

On the audio hardware side, the Pico contains the Sega Master System's SN76489 (3 square waves, 1 noise channel) and a sample channel used mostly for voice clips. Unfortunately we don't have information on the composer / arranger for the Pico version, but some of the tracks are based on the original Kamen Rider music composed by Toshihiko Sahashi. It's an unexpectedly cool soundtrack for an obscure system even by VGM standards, and we hope you enjoy it!

Based on original compositions by Toshihiko Sahashi, no credits available for the Pico arrangement

00:07 Title Screen

04:02 Agito Page

10:19 Character Select

14:51 Battle BGM

21:27 Agito Game

23:09 Kuuga Page

28:24 Kuuga Game

Thanks to marklincadet of VGMRips for creating the pack!

Ultimate Brain Games is a board game collection released for PS1 in 2003 developed by cosmigo and published by Telegames. There's not much to say about the board games themselves; things like dominoes, chess, backgammon and the like, but the soundtrack written by Zbigniew Siatecki is great! Cosmigo was a very small German developer responsible for a ton of board and card game collections from around 2000 to 2015. They still exist today, mostly as the developer on a pixel art graphic software called "Pro Motion".

Zbigniew Siatecki's story is a somewhat familiar one around this timeframe. He's a Polish musician and graphic artist that got his start in the demoscene in the 90s / early 2000s (working under the pseudonym Siatek) whose music made its way into a few games from 2003-2007. Since his work on Ultimate Brain Games, and the related soundtracks for Ultimate Card Games and Solitaire Overload, he's mostly moved onto 3D graphics working on titles like Hard Reset, Shadow Warrior 1 & 2 (the 2010s series), Dark Souls: Remastered, and Cyberpunk 2077. His music is warm and nostalgic with all of the charming turn of the millennium demoscene vibes you can handle. While we couldn't get him on the show, we're still big fans of his work and we hope everyone enjoys it as much as we do.

All songs composed by Zbigniew Siatecki

00:00 Alice - Ultimate Brain Games (PS1)

03:51 Twilight

15:51 Blossom Time

23:04 Maya

31:40 Winter Morning - Ultimate Card Games (GBA)

36:37 Winter Morning (Excerpt) - Solitaire Overload (DS)

38:31 Dolphin Play - Solitaire Overload (DS)

41:59 Dolphin Play (Excerpt) - Ultimate Card Games (GBA)

48:02 "i love you" filename Syfonia.it

also Starlight in Ultimate Brain Games (PS1)

GunMaster is a December 1994 arcade exclusive game developed by Metro Corporation. It's a single or two-player boss rush action game that's part fighting game and part platformer; think a dash of Gunstar Heroes with a Neo Geo art style. The game uses a well-established combo of soundchips: the OKIM6295 for 4 channels of ADPCM and the YM2151 for 8 channels of FM audio.

Metro Corporation was best known in the 90s for their Bust a Groove / Bust a Move series. More recently they've been a contract developer for Nintendo working on several Pokemon games and the Switch re-release of the Another Code / Trace Memory games.

The soundtrack was composed by a trio under the pseudonyms Famishin, MAZ, and Shadow although our information about them is limited. What we do know is that Famishin continues to work in the game industry with their company Yuzusoft, with game releases as recently as 2022. MAZ was last seen as composer for Metro Corporation's PS1 game BursTrick: Wake Boarding!!, and Shadow is as elusive as Totsukurzwell (from our show on Dangerous Seed). As always, we hope you enjoy this boss music heavy soundtrack.

All songs composed by Famishin, MAZ, and Shadow

00:00 Opening

01:52 Soldier Ore, Aries

09:39 Pearl, Onyx & Gemini

13:09 Leo

20:02 Turquoise

22:50 Tourmaline, Virgo

24:56 Aquarius, Taurus

28:11 Cancer, Red Amber

30:55 Capricornus

40:48 Queen Dia

45:45 Ending

Thanks to 2ch-H of VGMRips for creating the pack!

Gigandes (ギガンデス) is an arcade game developed by East Technology in 1989 and released in February of 1990. It's a horizontal shmup in the style of R-Type featuring all of the bio-mechanical tropes common to the era. It was designed for the Taito X System hardware which used a YM2610, the same audio configuration used in the Neo Geo, and was composed by Akira Inoue and Takaro Nozaki.

East Technology was a small developer based in Shinjuku that mostly worked on arcade games. The company was founded in 1987 and operated until around the mid-1990s. East Technology only produced around 10 games; their most notable were Double Dragon III: The Rosetta Stone published by Technos, and Operation Wolf 3 and Silent Dragon published by Taito.

The soundtrack to Gigandes is eccentric and in some ways ahead of its time. Full of weird and off-putting samples, the tonal whiplash is at times abrasive and at others catchy, but always compelling. Relative unknowns Akira Inoue and Takaro Nozaki put together a one-of-a-kind soundtrack that is worth the time to explore and we hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we did.

All songs composed by Akira Inoue and Takaro Nozaki

00:00 Brain Dump (Stage Start)

00:10 Speshul Atak Younit (Chapter 1: Round-37 Takes Off!)

06:23 Climax Without Foreplay (Chapter 2: The Rival Arrives)

09:04 Propagandasm (Stage 2 Boss)

14:27 Populism Answer (Chapter 3: Mesopotamian Nightmare)

17:37 Behold! This Face (Stage 3 Boss)

23:36 New Order (Chapter 4: Save the Colony Part 1)

27:21 Vertigo Factory (Chapter 5: Save the Colony Part 2)

33:09 Aquarium Island (Chapter 6: Showdown at Tatarajima)

36:14 Fight Fire with Fire (Stage 6 Boss)

41:40 It Ain't a Plot (Chapter 7: The Underground Kingdom of Larzan)

45:15 5-Count (Last Chapter: Sleep Quietly, My Friend)

49:12 Unused 4

52:29 Exposure Over (Last Boss)

54:49 Loving as Much as a Wound That Heals (Name Entry 1)

59:07 The Warrior and the Official (Name Entry 2)

59:46 5.67 Billion Years of Solitude (Game Over)

Thanks to The Golden Horse of VGMRips for the pack!

We’ve got a really fun soundtrack to dive into this episode from a Jaleco arcade title released in 1989 called Plus Alpha, composed by Tsukasa Tawada. 

It’s an overhead shooter similar to Twinbee, Raiden, or 1942 and was re-released on the Nintendo Switch in 2020 under the Arcade Archives series published by HAMSTER Corporation.

This is one of Tsukasa Tawada's earliest soundtracks, a composer still active in the 2020s with work on Pokemon and Harvest Moon titles. He brings lots of variety in this soundtrack, which is a ton of fun and also hits all the marks for an awesome arcade experience.

 

Tracklist:

All tracks composed by Tsukasa Tawada

00:04 Triumphal Return Overture (Title)

03:26 Wind Dancer (Stage 1 Wind Country)

08:25 Into Blue (Stage 2 Sea Colony)

09:39 Bird Island (Stage 3 Flower Town)

14:20 Sun Colors (Stage 4 Snow Country)

16:08 Last Heart (Stage 5 Sand City)

19:54 Neo Baroque (Stage 7 Eden)

21:11 Boss Stage

22:06 Harmonica for Peace (Unused)

26:47 Ending Theme

Thanks to ctr from VGMRips for creating the pack!

In this latest mini episode we're talking about Solstice: The Quest for the Staff of Demnos, a childhood favorite on the NES composed by Tim Follin.

Solstice released on the NES in the US and UK in mid 1990. It was developed by Software Creations and published by various companies in different regions. It's a challenging isometric puzzle platformer in the vein of games like Knight Lore and Lumo. Solstice only released on NES, but it did have a sequel on the SNES called Equinox.

Tim Follin is a VGM composer that hardly needs an introduction. Master of VGM folk and prog rock and putting way more effort into game soundtracks than they usually deserved, Tim worked on games like Bionic Commando and Ghouls'n Ghosts for C64, Plok for SNES, Ecco the Dolphin for Dreamcast and a tons more games. More recently he's moved into game development with games like Contradiction: Spot the Liar.

For more info about the illustrator of the box art, check out Michael Winterbauer's website.

Tracklist:

All tracks composed by Tim Follin

00:05 Title Screen

06:47 Introduction

07:10 Main Theme

18:50 Game Over

19:00 Credit ~ Continue

26:22 Ending

Thanks to Gnome from VGMRips for creating the pack!