Sing us a song, we don’t care if it’s wrong

If there's been an album of the year for me so far, it's been Vinyl Fantasy 7.

Well, I don't think it's the best album of the year. It's just the one I've listened to the most probably. I do like legitimate music, of course, but the combination of some of my favourite videogame melodies with rap is unexpectedly brilliant.

I'm listening to Team Teamwork's other album right now (The Ocarina of Rhyme) and got to thinking about how it would be impossible to make these albums with a vast majority of modern games because there's a complete absence of melody in gaming these days. This is unfortunate, because it is, contrary to popular belief, possible to make an "epic" soundtrack while still making the music remarkable in the melody department. I mean, can you hum any of the music from Modern Warfare 2 or from Final Fantasy XIII (a series formerly well-known for its music)? Didn't think so.

I try not to privilege any element of a game over another – they all contribute to creating the game as a whole. Yet, I'd have to say that more often than not, if a game has taken the time to have an incredible soundtrack, I'm going to love the hell out of it. A good example is the Commodore 64 series of games called The Last Ninja. Sure, the game looks nice, but it offers one hell of a challenge. Still, I'd recommend that every single person on the planet track it down, because it has one of the best soundtracks ever in gaming. It's worth way more than the $5 they're asking for on the Virtual Console. It must have just been complete crazy happenstance to have the absolute best computerized synthesizers available in the C64 and a great videogame composer in Matt Gray.

While I'd say that a majority of games that do have memorable melodies these days are either retro revivals or are composed by people whose names start with "Koji" and end with "Kondo" (seriously, Super Mario Galaxy's soundtrack is one of the best pieces of music ever, in any genre, and proves that orchestration doesn't necessarily have to mean abstract ambience or crashing nonsense), there are a few exceptions. Suda51 uses pop-ish music (and really strange white noise synth sounds) to great effect, and the addition of Akira Yamaoka (of Silent Hill fame) to Grasshopper Manufacture should really bump that element of his games into the stratosphere. But I do find it unfortunate that for too many developers, music is almost treated as another feature that game review websites can check off when they do their reviews. "There's an orchestrated score! Great! That's all we need to be satisfied!"

I've played videogames my whole life, but I didn't really start thinking about them as one of my primary forms of media entertainment until very recently. I've considered myself a musician first and foremost. That changed for me the night when I went to the symphony here in Regina for Video Games Live. My mom had taken me to a similar thing when I was a teenager, but it was a series of videogame soundtracks that weren't that well known at the time – not on the level of anything like a Legend of Zelda or anything, but hearing the Total Annihilation soundtrack was a highlight for me. Video Games Live was a whole different can of worms. I had some problems with trying to make a trip to the symphony "exhilirating" with video screens, lasers, and dry smoke, and the nerd culture on display was a little embarrassing. But I embraced it, because it was endearingly nerdy, even when Tommy Tellerico thought it would be a good idea to do ridiculous guitar solos over so many songs.

Still, at the end of the night, I was blown away. Soundtracks from Mario, Final Fantasy, Metroid, Chrono Trigger, Castlevania, Zelda, and so much more. It was like I was run over by a freight train of awesomeness. And when the symphony closed with One-Winged Angel, it started my current fascination with Final Fantasy games. I'd never played one before that (and this was just last May), and just its music was enough to cause an obsession.

I feel sad, because an entire generation of gamers who don't have the experiences with the incredible music of our youths are being shortchanged, and retro revivals can only do so much. I can only hope that the videogame adaptation of Scott Pilgrim catches on (the music's being done by the incredible chiptune band Anamanaguchi, who did the soundtrack for the last two Bit.Trip games. You can check out their incredible music below.)