DDD’s Top 10 Video Game Tracks!

     If you can recall when I wrote about my top 5 favorite Nintendo soundtracks, I spoke about the soundtracks as a whole and not the individual pieces of the music. For those who do not recall, this is what I had listed as my top 5 favorite Nintendo soundtracks of all time.

5. Super Mario RPG – Yoko Shimomura

4. Metroid Prime – Kenji Yamamoto and Kouichi Kyuuma

3. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island – Koji Kondo

2. Banjo-Kazooie – Grant Kirkhope

1. Super Smash Bros. Brawl – Various Composers

      Now, I compared each of these soundtracks to each other as a whole in attempt to sort out which soundtrack I liked altogether. It was very difficult to leave certain soundtracks off the list because I do like a wide variety of Nintendo soundtracks and many individual tracks within the games separately. It was hard to pick out an all-time favorite from the many soundtracks I enjoyed. Likewise, it was very difficult to pick out individual songs/pieces of music as my all-time favorite pieces.

      Regardless, here we are, and this list will not be biased towards the soundtracks I picked above. How a soundtrack holds up as a whole is a lot different than liking individual pieces of music from a soundtrack. That’s not to say I will refrain from putting songs I like from the above list of games onto this one, it just means that they are not the deciding factors as to why I like an individual song. The game could have a bogus soundtrack, yet have one piece of music that stands out above the rest. Likewise, the opposite can be true. A game can have an excellent soundtrack, but not have any individual pieces that really stand out.

BMD’s top 10 video game tracks

Oh boy, another list! I’d like to apologize that this list was so delayed from Grifflon’s and Pixellll’s, I had some trouble writing it and wanted to make it different/better than my previous. Anyways, I left the gooey intros to the Top 5 soundtracks list so lets just get right into this one!

10. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island – Hop! Hop! Donut Lifts – Koji Kondo

I always thought the donut lifts looked more like onion ring lifts…

Yoshi’s Island is such a happy, fun game to play. Whenever you’re having a bad day, go listen to the Yoshi’s Island soundtrack, it’ll cheer you up. Also, for those of you saying that you didn’t like the game because of baby mario crying, go away. I don’t like you.

Banjo-Kazooie vs. Banjo-Tooie

Let’s take a look at the late nineties of Nintendo. The Nintendo 64 had just been released and 3D gaming was a very rare thing if not unthinkable thing. I was very young at the time the Nintendo 64 first came into being and had only known the NES to exist. Two dimensional gaming was all my little 5 year old head could comprehend at the time. I remember going into a Gamestop video game store for my 5^th birthday and receiving a Nintendo 64 as a gift. The rest of the afternoon was spent with my parents trying to figure out how to connect the thing to the TV. We knew we got it right when the title screen for Super Mario 64 appeared and all we could see was Mario’s giant head.

“It’s a me, Mario!”

Top 5 Best Nintendo Soundtracks

As much as I love video games themselves, we have to remember all of the components that make up a good video game. Typically, there involves a story, good gameplay, nice visuals (you don’t need good graphics to have nice visuals, but it’s a nice bonus), and of course, music. Next to the actual gameplay and control of a game, I think the music and the ambient sounds play a huge role in the success of a game.  I extend the term music to apply to a game that even uses silence to set a mood. Music is so very important, it can determine whether a game is worth it to play or not.

This being said, there are many great games out there with amazing soundtracks to go with them. Even narrowing the range to just Nintendo soundtracks, there are many incredible titles out there. I’ve compiled a list of my top five favourite Nintendo soundtracks. These are just some of my personal favourites, and these were really difficult to pick out from the many great games Nintendo has made. Agree or disagree, here is what I think to be some of Nintendo’s finest.