Nintendo's Play it Loud

I don't know what Nintendo was thinking with most of this, but I know what I'm thinking. "Why, dear God, why?" This isn't quite as bad as Sega's compilation CD, but it's not much better. This CD simply *screams* low quality. The inlet in the front of the case flops around when you open it, the plastic creaks, the CD scratches easily.

I suppose I should stick to the music. Well, personally, I don't think much of this is worthy of a soundtrack. It would be okay if it were with some other stuff. The F-Zero tracks are okay, one of them in particular is excellent, very much my style. Actually, two or three of them are. The Yoshi's Island stuff isn't bad. I sort of like it. I found the Griffy music to be very bad. It sounds almost as bad as some of the stuff on Final Fantasy Mix. I mean, it's barely music. Then comes the Zelda music. This, of course, is superb, but the recording quality is kinda bad. I mean, I made a better Zelda 3 sound track on my portable tape deck. They didn't really select the best music from each game, either. The Metroid music is all very good, and the recording quality seems acceptable. The Star Fox music is mostly sterling quality, although it screams Star Wars wannabe.

In retrospect, this CD is actually okay. All the Japanese music on it is good, but the American stuff (Griffy) stinks. The selection wasn't the best, another little Nintendo of America trait. If you like the music in at least, oh, three of the games on this CD, get it, but don't get it *just* for Metroid or Zelda. What's there is good, but if you ditch the crap this gets to be a short CD. Nintendo, why didn't you hire an orchestra with some talent and orchestrate the Metroid, F-Zero, Zelda and Star Fox music? *Then* it would be grand.

Nintendo may make great video games, but they certainly don't make good game music CDs. The soundtrack is composed of OSVs of many memorable Nintendo games ranging from F-Zero to Yoshi's Island. Some of the tracks are very well done like Ken Griffey Jr's Winning run, but the rest fall flat. The one thing that ticked me off the most about this CD was the presentation of the tracks. First off, Nintendo picked some of the worst tracks to include. They devoted way too much time to tracks that seem to repeat forever and to ones that have no variety in them like the "Baby Theme" from Yoshi's Island. There are a total of forty-one tracks that range in length from thirty-one seconds to over four minutes. Not very impressive. Some tracks loop only once, and others seem to loop forever.

Another thing that really annoyed me was that some of the tracks on the CD don't fade out; they simply stop all of a sudden. Also, one of the tracks was repeated on two separate tracks! What a waste of space! To top it all off, I believe that there were errors in the mastering of the CD. No matter which CD player I play it on, at certain points in one of the tracks, there is a momentary "pop". This occurs on track 40 at the 1:25 mark. Can anyone back me up here? Even having said all this, you may enjoy this soundtrack. If you're looking for OSVs of some classic Nintendo games, this CD might just be for you.

Now this is cool stuff! This CD contains forty-one tracks from some of Nintendo's most popular games, beginning with Yoshi's Island. Whimsical and energetic, it makes me feel like I'm running through the forest with Yoshi, or dancing with him, or rocking Baby Mario to sleep, or battling Baby Bowser and his cronies. I found myself moving to the beat of F-Zero's tunes; they made me feel like I was more in a dancing hall than a race track. The music to Ken Griffey Jr.'s Winning Run by Rare is, of course, exceptional. There are even voices like "No One Can Stop This!" or "Base!" popping up unexpectedly throughout the three tracks. Zelda's music is awesome, from that familiar Overworld theme to the dark, forboding tunes on Death Mountain. Super Metroid follows - mostly of the dark and creepy variety. We conclude with the totally awesome, Star Wars-ish space opera nebula wave of "Star Fox". The CD ends with a reprise of Star Fox's main theme and explodes into a climatic finale. Wow. A great way to end a totally rad CD.