Just learned about a PlayStation platformer starring Kyoro-chan, the mascot of ChocoBalls, a brand of chocolate-coated peanut sweets.
More importantly though is this game's soundtrack, filled with melodic hip-hop and touches of acid, techno and breakbeat throughout. It fucking rules.
this soundtrack is the work of Kenji Yamazaki, a composer and sound designer who has the misfortune of being best known for handling the audio for Mega Man II/Rockman World 2 (Game Boy)—unlike the other NES-derivative MM Game Boy games, which adapted existing music from their source games, MMII's soundtrack is virtually all-original, but most of the tunes are riddled with high-pitch notes and jarring note clashes that primarily seem to be caused by raw input error on Yamazaki's part; the tunes have been rearranged and "fixed" by fans, of course, but there's no undoing the official release. (Yamazaki has stated that he wasn't especially familiar with games at the time and had no knowledge of or reverence for Rockman, hence why he had no compunctions about ignoring all the original tunes and bashing out his own under extreme, and evidently detrimental, time constraints).
All that said, he's produced a lot of interesting and ambitious game soundtracks, such as:
- what I presume to be the SFC/SNES' only 1hr+-long ambient club mix
- a SFC/SNES racing game soundtrack that flirts with hardcore techno (and was allegedly a lot harder-edged at one point, but dialled back because someone in charge didn't Get It)
- an arcade-to-SFC conversion that, for no particular reason, eschewed the original music for a mixture of fake surf guitar and breakbeat:
- an enjoyably bleak soundtrack for a wretched IP-based PS fighting game
- ...and for the FM junkies out there, he worked on that one Genesis Superman game that's full of house tunes for no particular reason:
His SFC work in particular warrants more attention IMO, and I have a hunch it'll find a bigger audience in the not-too-distant future...
