There's likely some deeper technical reason besides "too much effort" and "obviously consumers don't want OLD BUSTED BEEP BOOP", but it made me wonder exactly what heights the original GB sound hardware could achieve - not necessarily in terms of composition/arrangement, but the limits to which the system could be stretched, especially when it was still handling a game at the same time.
So please suggest some impressive Game Boy/Color music for me to listen to, preferably actual soundtracks but original/demo work is fine too. I know there's a lot of fun stuff in later European licensed games, but I'm hoping to get some opinions/suggestions I wouldn't have considered before.
Metroid Zero Mission makes some use of the gameboy's audio chip for some tracks... only game i could think of since i didn't play as many gba titles as gameboy games.
Edit: Opps, there I go only reading part of something again...
Summon Night: Swordcraft Story has one of the same composers as the GBC Zelda Oracle games (Minako Adachi). Compare Queen Ambi's Palace to Central Craftsman Castle and you can hear it, though I've not outright confirmed whether or not Minako Adachi was the one who composed Central Craftsman Castle, and it could have been one of the other composers. But I digress. SN:SCS's entire soundtrack is really nice to listen to.
edited 10:11 AM EST December 24, 2015
edited 11:50 AM EST December 24, 2015
by MindReader at 11:18 PM EST on December 28, 2015
Add The Smurfs' Nightmare to the list. Like, holy crap.
Ugh, GB stereo is garbage. There's no panning, it's either all the way to the left, all the way to the right, or dead center. It totally messes with the beat, mono sounds better for those particular games.
Shantae on Gameboy Colour has some pretty awesome dungeon music. If you download the GBS file from Zophar's Domain (41 audio tracks), listen to tracks 1, 8, 20, 21, 26 and 27. Their very fitting for the areas you hear them in.
Edit: I too hate music players that output everything either 100% left, 100% right or dead center. Music player's like NotSoFatSo are pretty awesome though because they have some channels be like 75% loud out of one speaker and 25% loud out of the other to create a sort of pseudo stereo effect (It's still technically mono of course). This eliminates the migraine inducing effect of having always 100% left and 100% right audio when wearing headphones.
When using desktop speakers 100% left & 100% right audio effects isn't an issue that needs to be circumvented because both your ears will naturally pick up the audio from each speaker to some degree where as with headphones your ears are isolated and can only hear from one speaker (If the headphones are circumaural). I enjoy wearing circumaural headphones when listening to music and just in general when gaming etc.
Ha, I guess all stereo Genesis music sucks too, then.
Technically panning has nothing to do with "the beat." I'm musically trained, and it doesn't bother me. Greater than zero panning equals more information in the audio, which has the potential for a more immersive experience. Plus technically more bandwidth.
Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. I'm still slowly working through my perspective on this, going back to old favorites while also checking out stuff I hadn't heard before. Seems like it will take a bit of dwelling on this topic before I can come to any conclusions I feel comfortable with.
I feel kind of silly asking this, but how do you all choose to listen to the music (outside of the actual games)? I've been using headphones, but I've been wondering if some of the simple stereo speakers I have lying around would give a better representation of the audio.
Players/plugins is something I'm curious about as well. As far as I can tell, the latest NEZplug++ (found here) is the best in terms of everything but play-around features, and Winamp is the preferred player to use it with if you want the benefit of proper m3u handling (although I may simply have KbMediaPlayer set up wrong).
As you may have noticed, I'm kind of paranoid about the possibility of having a suboptimal listening experience...