The USA Nintendo centric retro gamer YouTubers can't comprehend just how good and bright the YM2612 can sound and just how muddy and muffled the samples from the SNES chip can be
decent grift potential for a retro channel using music theory 101 wordsalad to lengthily talk up increasingly shitty sfc music while derisively comparing it to snippets of increasingly excellent md synth
I don't watch YT, and a friend pointed me to that channel once.
Notwithstanding that's not what I think as "101", but I felt that anyone who makes a video called "anyone can write a Mega Man II tune" is a fucking assidiot
Most of the time for SNES/Genesis games there’s a direct correlation between bad sound and the use of stock sound drivers (GEMS!) and samples. A lot of the games with great sound also had custom sound programming. It was true on both sides of the console war.
That's what gets me every time, how people think the bad ones are how all Genesis music is, cuz to this day I still see people making the same ol' "lul it sounds like farts" comments at most MD music, even if it doesn't sound "farty" at all. It's just sad.
I guess it's more common with MD stuff cuz FM sound sounds harsher to some folks, but there's quite a few SNES ones that sound very harsh too; Aerobiz Supersonic always comes to mind for me where the SNES one sounds really bad compared to the much nicer MD version's music.
Both platforms can absolutely *sing* when given to someone who knows what they are doing. Mega Drive still has some of my favourite use of slap bass in gaming across several titles, and good SNES music did an amazing job of sounding "orchestral" before fully digitised soundtracks became a thing.
Thinking of SNES, I remember being absolutely blown away the first time I heard the crash cymbals in Link to the Past, or the electric rhythm guitar on the Titania boss for Star Fox. Was miles ahead of what our PC could do at the time.
had this game as a kid. you got to listen to this tune the entire time. it's permanently burned in. especially great because when you turned the difficulty up the game would take *seriously* long amounts of time to move, which gave you more time to listen to this song!!
I swear that when "Genesis music sucked" crops up it's always cherry picking the worst possible options too. It's never the Streets of Rages or Alisia Dragoons of the system. It's "We found the electrofartiest options for our bit and we're sticking to it."
I still think of an edit of that one image of the bird singing getting interrupted by a crow where the former was the SMB1 overworld and the latter was, what else, Sonic Spinball's options music; at least if you're gonna do something like that pick one that isn't done to death.
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Notwithstanding that's not what I think as "101", but I felt that anyone who makes a video called "anyone can write a Mega Man II tune" is a fucking assidiot
SNES had some dire music too.