BIGFAKE

"Summer Connection" by Taeko Ohnuki

She came up in the 70s as one of the best and most influential city pop singers of the time. She worked with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Haruomi Hosono, and Tatsuro Yamashita pretty regularly (that song up there had Sakamoto on keys (and he wrote the arrangement) and Yamashita on background vocals). She also did a cover of the Mother 3 love theme for the Mother 3+ album and a reinterpretation of the GameCube Animal Crossing theme for the AC movie I keep forgetting they did. I had no idea about this!! These songs are really good!!! Here they are, along with one of the best city pop songs ever made that you might've heard before

We miss you ~Theme of Love~ from Mother 3

森へ行こう (Let's Go To The Forest) from the Animal Crossing movie

4:00 A.M. from her album Mignonne (1978)

It's always interesting to me when Nintendo links up with popular musicians to make songs. American musicians'll do commercials (never forget Beyoncé playing Rhythm Heaven), but I don't think there's been a time where one wrote new music for Nintendo. It's happened a few times over in Japan, though... They had rap trio Scha Dara Parr retool their song "Game Boys" into the funny dancing Zelda ad. They got DAOKO to do like the whole soundtrack for Dragalia Lost, with a mix of pre-existing songs and new ones including a strange rap cover of the Fire Emblem theme (also incidentally featuring Scha Dara Parr). Just recently, they had pop singer Gen Hoshino make a whole song for Mario's 35th anniversary. The closest America ever got was when RZA let them use a beat he had laying around and wasn't doing anything with for a Super Game Boy commercial that the networks refused to air. I'm honestly shocked they didn't get a big pop star to make any songs for the Mario movie.

Though now that I think about it... They did do a whole thing for Pokémon with Ed Sheeran, Post Malone, and Katy Perry. And even back in the day, I had the soundtrack for Pokémon: The First Movie with NSYNC, Britney Spears, and Christina Aguilera. That's different though, Pokémon's kinda its own thing. I did always like the Christina Aguilera song and the NSYNC song the most on the soundtrack because they're 90s slow ballads and I love that shit... I listened to it a lot on cassette at my cousin's house and on CD in my mom's car

Also while writing this post I learned that the kanji for "forest" (森) looks like a forest. That's cute as hell

i loved doom 2016 so much. so so much.

i quit out of doom eternal after the first like three hours and went back and played every single retro Doom game I could find (1, 64, 2, a bunch of wads). doom eternal felt like an embarrassment. one of the worst sequels in modern history

Okay, so it wasn't just me who played like four levels of this game and realized that it was gonna be an utter slog of a character action game pretending to be a retro first-person shooter throwback and never picked the game back up, cool.

Unrelated, but why did the game have a throw grenade button and a swap grenade button? You only have two types of grenades! Just give each its own button! Don't make me think I have one type equipped and toss a grenade in the middle of a pitched firefight only to realize I had the other grenade type selected at the time, that sucks!

At the same time it felt completely backwards that they give you a chainsaw as your "get out of jail free" card, and then later give you a sword, which functions almost identically to the chainsaw, except it has its own dedicated ammo and own dedicated button

Doom Eternal is a freight train of ideas and all their solutions are about as blunt as being hit by one

I've never played a DOOM game in my life but Fuck DOOM Eternal because Bethesda/Zenimax fucked over its composer Mick Gordon bad. He wrote a whole post on Medium about it that's worth reading but the gist is that Bethesda (mainly the game's executive producer Marty Stratton) didn't communicate with him good at all about the game or the music, set a production schedule that forced him to crunch for two years straight and told him to go fuck himself when he said it wouldn't work, didn't pay him for literally more than half the music in the game, announced a soundtrack version with his name on it without talking to him about it then handed the audio files he made for the game to a guy named Chad who completely butchered it and fucked it up, and wrote a big public Reddit post calling him a moron for saying that all that sucks

"Pollyanna (I Believe In You)" from Mother, composed by Keiichi Suzuki and performed by The 8-Bit Big Band (feat. Alan H. Green)

Curator's Note: This just dropped today and I can't stop listening to it

One of my personal guidelines for the Song of Today account is that I can't post the same song/arrangement again until a year has passed. That said: I really wanted to post this today lol it still hits!! This is my personal favorite rendition of the song