Fighter's Ragnarök (MSX2) Original Soundtrack

 A soundtrack rip before I head off to a convention? Now where have I seen that before?

Yup, we're doing this again, and this time we're taking a deep dive into the depths of the library of the MSX2, a legendary Japanese home computer of the 80's. Having never officially released in the United States, my knowledge on the system itself was always quite limited, only being able to experience the platform through emulation and yearly trips to the Long Island Retro Gaming Expo (if they have one set up that is). Turns out, it had something of a doujin soft scene in the 80's and even up into the 90's.

For those not in the know, very early readers of this blog may be familiar with the term from my repeated mentioning and fascination of the doujin soft title Rosenkreuzstilette. Indeed, that game was a then-modern example of doujin soft. Kuru Ball, which I mentioned back in 2020, also counts as an earlier example of a Windows-based doujin soft title. In a way, they are self-published independent games released at trade shows and conventions for people to buy, but usually had limited demos available for download online. Understandably, this resulted in pretty much every doujin soft title being exclusive to Japan, and some never being archived in full and/or re-released officially. Today's subject, on the other hand, was lucky to escape being lost media thanks to being archived in full:

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Fighter's Ragnarök, a doujin soft fighting game released for the MSX2 by the circle Delta-Z in 1997 (with further bugfixes and an English version in the following year). The game features a lot of the charm of a late 90's doujin title, with the novelty of being such a late release for the MSX2, a system that, by 1998, was being effectively replaced by the modern-day Microsoft Windows computer. Players pick one of seven characters and attempt to run a ladder of multiple opponents, including a secret gag fighter, the final boss, and a hidden final boss. It has full two-player support and each of the game's playable roster comes packed with special moves to fight with. The only caveat with the game is it requires quite the beefy machine to run, being such a late release for a computer model that originally debuted in 1985 and needing all the power it can get to load into battles without struggling with loading screens.

Contributing to the game's obscurity, search results for this game are muddied by other games and media with the name "Ragnarök". The game has a decent number of results on Youtube, including a rip of the game's battle themes from back in 2012, and some coverage on MSX database websites but very little else. Heck, I can count the number of times the manga and anime series Record of Ragnarök appeared in search results whenever I tried to search for Fighter's Ragnarök data, even using the game's original Japanese title (ファイターズ・ラグナロク). Surprisingly, the game's official web site is still intact, with a dedicated site for Fighter's Ragnarök and an archive of the original Fighters Ragnarök site from the 90's. Unfortunately, Delta-Z's run was short-lived, and plans for a sequel to Fighters Ragnarök as well as a shoot-em-up project, HaZard, went belly-up when Delta-Z's doors closed around 2003. While the Fighters Ragnarök section thankfully still works and contains all the original images posted almost 25 years ago, the HaZard page turns up nothing and the Fighters Ragnarök 2 site only gives this mysterious "Keep Out" image. Perhaps they would have been new fighters in the sequel? The world may never know...

Now where were we? R-Right, the music. The soundtrack for Fighter's Ragnarök was surprisingly easy to rip, if only thanks to the "Music Mode" accessible from the title screen. It was however very time-consuming, taking me pretty much all of Friday afternoon to get the entire song list recorded and converted to mp3 format between both errands and a friend dropping by for a few hours. Plus, some of the songs had loop points that were difficult to determine through ears alone. All of the songs were recording through OpenMSX running default settings, so I'm not entirely sure if there's any way to make the songs come out at a higher quality at this time. That said I think this is a confident enough rip that I can share it online and not have to worry about revisiting this game's soundtrack for a re-rip in the near future. In total, there are 25 songs composed by HAKASE covering the various menus, all the fighters, and their associated endings. The assigned year is the release of the English version ('98) and not the year the game originally came out ('97) so make of that what you will.

Before this blog post gets too long with another big paragraph, I'm going to cut it here and leave you with the download for the full Fighter's Ragnarök soundtrack. As for what's next, I got a few things I need to get back to writing, if only to diversify this blog with more than just summaries of events/conventions I attend while getting back into the swing of getting more productive with art and spriting.

Multicartverse Original Soundtrack

It was yet another normal Sunday evening in the lair of Superjustinbros and after a delicious homemade cheeseburger dinner with baked fries on the side, I decided to tune into one of my favorite Twitch streamers Vinny “Binyot” Vinesauce for his weekly Sunday stream. The theme of the first segment was on fan-created ports, remakes and re-imaginings of popular games, ranging from silly memes/jokes made for a good laugh to genuinely fantastic efforts that I would personally recommend to anyone. One of the games featured in the segment would catch my attention, and not for the reasons one would initially think.

Enter Multicartverse, a SMB1-style crossover game starring Mario, Sonic, Link, Pac-Man, and various popular characters from the bootleg gaming community. Somari is there. Kung Fu Mari is there, and who else but 7 Grand Dad in his iconic caveman garb to round out the roster. As for the game itself, Multicartverse is inspired by the likes of Super Mario Bros. Crossover and Super Mario Boil, featuring Mario level design mixed with Sonic gameplay, although the level design doesn’t give you much of an opportunity to really experiment with high-speed platforming. Audio-wise, everything is based wholesale on the Genesis and the famous Yamaha YM2612 that helped it produce many-a-soundtrack during its heyday, featuring custom Genesis remixes of various different Mario and bootleg songs. The game also has something of a sense of humor: beyond the NPC's hanging out near the closed-up warp zone in the second stage, three of the five options on the main menu are essentially jokes: "Watch a Movie" plays a clip of Mario in Garry's Mod firing various weapons with all sorts of silly sounds/effects, "Fart Button" is, well, take a guess, and "Play a Better Game" loads a joke game re-creating the "SO RETRO" meme.

In spite of its large roster of characters, colorful spritework, and potential for further development, the game didn't really take off and only had a single beta titled Ver. 0.0.1. And you can kind of feel this in the gameplay itself: Around half the roster are clones or skins of existing characters, others are missing moves that one would expect the characters to have (Kirby has no inhale feature and "Fred" cannot use his club to attack as examples). The Sonic characters and Somari's extreme speed and floaty physics can find themselves at odds with the Mario-inspired level design (it's really easy to trigger a dash and launch yourself forwards, then wall jump repeatedly off walls trying to maintain control). And the Tetromino (yes, the Tetromino is a playable character here too) has no way to interact with ? blocks and will find itself taking damage trying to hard drop onto enemies to stomp them. My Windows 11 computer also caused other performance hiccups during my time playing Multicartverse, lagging the game if played on too high of a resolution and making Stage 4 pretty much impossible due to speeding up the autoscroller to the point no character can traverse it fast enough. The game's developer, now known as Mtgames, acknowledges many of Multicartverse's shortcomings in a blog post on the game's itch.io page describing why the game never made it past the Ver. 0.0.1 demo. In short, losing the game's files pretty much did the game in, dooming it to obscurity until the “Sauce Man” discovered it and exposed the game to several thousand people. And even with its newfound time in the sun, there is no interest in continuing development, all for understandable reasons of course.

Playing Multicartverse for myself, I was fascinated by the game's jank and all of the ways you could mess around with the movesets of the characters and the game’s very wild movement and jumping physics to blaze through entire levels and smash through enemies along the path. Of course, the game not being optimized for Windows 11 prevented me from getting the full experience until I pulled out my Windows 7 and downloaded it there, and in that case it was mostly to slow the autoscroller in Stage 4 down to manageable levels so I could get a taste of the final boss. All of the levels were fairly short overall and semi-remakes of SMB1 levels, but Stages 1 and 2 were probably the best levels of the package as they worked perfectly with the faster characters while still giving the slower, more balanced cast members some obstacles to platform around and enemies to stomp. Practically the only character on here that I’d say was “missing” on the roster was The Hummer, the horse mascot of Hummer Team and the original creator of Somari, though the game already has enough Sonic clones as is.

But we all know why we’re here: The soundtrack. You know it was the reason I got invested into this game to begin with, and I know I cannot turn down some good Mega Drive/Sega Genesis-style music whenever it be original songs or remixed from other sources. So later in the week that  I discovered Multicartverse, I downloaded the game and grabbed recordings of all the songs I could, migrating to my Windows 7 for a brief period to grab the boss theme as there was no way I was recording it on my main machine. The final result is a 16-track soundtrack featuring song rips of all the menus, the four main stages, an extra bonus stage, and several joke modes/screens. One song (for one of the joke modes) is taken wholesale from the bootleg Genesis game Sonic Jam 6, but since it still fits with the theme of Multicartverse, I included it as a bonus track. Since credits on the game and who made what are mostly non-existent, I opted to simply credit the album’s songs to “GreenSun Games” for the time being.

With all that said, here is the download.

I should make it clear that this rip was done with incomplete research so the actual song names and artist tags are not 100% set in stone. If the true names for each song/song author are supplied, I will update the download with updated tags. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some conventions to prep for...

Charlie Blast's Territory (N64) Game Rip

Happy Halloween, everyone! It seems like I had one more thing in me to assemble up, and it's something I've personally wanted to do for a very, very long time. And before you ask, no, there's not a single trick up my sleeve in this post.

But first, a small introduction. Back in the day, I was undoubtedly a Nintendo person, and the one to introduce me to Nintendo's lineage of consoles was my PopPop. He used to own a Nintendo 64 along with a few games, mainly Super Mario 64 and a small set of the system's few mature-themed games (such as Nuclear Strike 64). But one title that was in his possession caught my eye, and it was unlike anything I had ever seen up to that point.

Enter Charlie Blast's Territory, a 1999 block-sliding puzzle game from Kemco and Realtime Associates. The game stars demolition expert Charlie Blast and his task to travel across different themed islands and use a colorful roster of bombs at his disposal to chain together increasingly lengthy chains of explosions. Only by catching every single explosive in the level in one big combo is enough to destroy an island- leaving one bomb unscathed or getting Charlie caught in one of the explosions forces a restart of the level. I would never be able to get any further than Level 9 as a young kid, and with N64 games no longer being sold complete in boxes in my later years in elementary school thanks to the sixth generation having taken off, I never really had a chance to play the game on my own N64 and was only able to touch it when I visited my PopPop. Thankfully, used games would start being sold at various video game retailers of the era and one day after fourth grade, my mother would surprise me with a used copy of Charlie Blast's Territory. And then years later I found out the game was a partial conversion of Kemco's earlier PS1 title The Bombing Islands, starring their mascot character Kid Klown... And then I discovered years later that The Bombing Islands was loosely based on an old computer game from Europe known as Bombuzal.

That was quite the deep rabbit hole, huh? Anyways, in the early 2010's Charlie Blast's Territory was one of those games that didn't seem to catch on with retro game music rippers of the era due to its relative obscurity outside of N64 fan groups. And thus in around 2012 or 2013, I decided to take matters into my own hands and record the game music myself off of an emulator until I had all the level themes plus the title screen. Unfortunately, as with many of my unpublished pre-2020 music rips on this blog, the entire rip would become lost after the demise of my Macintosh's hard drive. And after re-recording a number of soundtracks I lost in the crash, I figured it was time to do the same to Charlie Blast's Territory. In this new and enhanced rip, you will find the title screen song, the five main level themes, one multiplayer-exclusive level theme, and the level win and level lose jingles.

And at long last, here is the link to download the album.

Mangchi The HammerBoy (PC) Audio Rip

Since times have still been a bit slow and light in productivity for my liking lately and I've just begun to warm back up into doing bigger projects, how about another soundtrack rip to pass the time? This one came by rather sudden, as it's a very obscure little gem that even I, someone who knows way too much about obscure games, completely passed on back then until a streamer I started following since last year did a surprise longplay of it live on their Twitch channel back in March.

That's right, we're traveling to Korea to experience the one and only Mangchi the HammerBoy.

Released in the year 2004 as a loose adaptation/licensed title for the similarly-titled "Hammerboy" anime film based on the manhwa of the same name, Mangchi the HammerBoy is a simple 3D platformer exclusive to Windows PC. Owing to its obscurity, it has very little documentation online, and what documentation exists in English is extremely brief. What's most notable from this research is Mangchi's complete redesign into something closer to Kingdome Hearts' Sora, including changing the weapon from a real-life hammer with a rope on it to a giant cartoon mallet. All the characters from the original story that do appear were able to keep their names at the least, including the game's central villain and final boss Moonk. The game is also pretty short, having only 5 stages total, but I will admit that the first level, an abandoned and flooded city, is not a common trope for the setting of a 3D platformer.

The game's audio comes entirely in the form of wav files, which made assembling the soundtrack as easy as "convert to mp3 and tag the files appropriately". I also included the theme used in the opening FMV sequence but, for understandable reasons, didn't do the same with the rest of the in-game cutscenes that are full of sound effects and voice lines. If there is interest in listening to those as well, I will gladly convert those and bundle them with the full rip as extras since I would also like to update the track of Stage 4's boss with the boss' actual name if I ever come across it in the future.

With that all covered, here's the audio rip for your listening pleasure.

Naughty Ones (Commodore Amiga) Soundtrack

Well I couldn't figure out something to post last month so to kick off February I'm posting another game soundtrack that, to my knowledge, has not received a modern rip: A little-known Commodore Amiga game that goes by the name "Naughty Ones".

Released on both the Amiga and it's console counterpart, the Amiga CD32, Naughty Ones is what happens when a group of people decide to make an elimination platformer that bucks some of the trends of the subgenre birthed by the runaway success of Taito's Bubble Bobble. You move John (and Jim in two player mode) from room to room, chucking destructive rubber balls at whatever enemies came up in the minds of the developers in order to escape the surreal reality the heroes have been trapped in.

(...Can conform, rubber balls are really destructive)

You all probably recognize the game from the Angry Video Game Nerd's episode on the Amiga CD32, which was how I myself came across the title years ago. It drove me to break out the Amiga emulator and try the game for myself. It manages to dodge the "europlatformer" trope common in Amiga games where they pad out the gameplay with collectathon elements since the worst it gets is having to find a single key to reach the end instead of dropping you inside a huge maze and tasking you with grabbing every single last thing in the level.

While based on existing soundtrack rips, said rips either combine all the songs into one video (i.e. Youtube uploads) or are simply the raw audio files extracted from the game, including the level intros in the same audio files as their parent level. This rip takes the audio files, separates the intros into their own audio tracks, and converts everything into more universal mp3 files. For the audio tracks that were already separate, they were simply copied over and converted with no further alterations. Thus, I cannot claim full credit for this rip, just the part of making it easier to listen to individual tracks in the soundtrack. 

You can download the full set of songs here. I am uncertain on if and when I'll decide to create another soundtrack rip, but the next one that gets posted here will (hopefully) have more effort put behind it on my part aside from just "throw into foobar2000 and press convert". As for what else is in store, that is on my terms to figure out.

Soundtrack Double Feature: Christmas in Springtime in Hell

This post came a little later than I'd like- my Mac had a sudden hardware failure and I had to rush it to the Apple store at the mall for repairs... thankfully unlike what happened three years ago I had a backup at the ready so nothing was lost in the long run. It still put me out of being able to work on my stuff until today, and before I was forced to bring my computer in for repairs, I had ripped two new soundtracks (or at least put them into a format one can easily put them in their music player of choice). But of course, I like to offer a little background on each respective soundtrack. 

Since 2009, retroUSB has created special NES cartridges themed around the holidays to sell on their website. While I never had a personal interest in purchasing these cartridges, they are pretty neat novelties--including a (sometimes interactive) Christmas visual with 8-bit renditions of holiday songs you can leave on in the background during a Christmas gathering and a Christmas themed game or mod. The cartridges also aren't your standard grey plastic: these come in clear white and shine internal LED's like a Christmas tree when plugged into an NES and powered on. Several of the 8-bit Xmas cartridges, including 2015 and 2016's, were showcased at the Festival of Games, a retro gaming-themed holiday event from the same hosts that brought you Long Island Retro Gaming Expo. One of these special cartridges was even used to command a literal quartet of ROB's to dance to Christmas songs.

Of course, you can also get the ROMs to plug into your favorite emulator, and that leads me to 8-bit Xmas 2021, an extensive mod of Excitebike that swaps the bikers with ducks on snowmobiles, adds four player support, and widens the track to six lanes over the original four. It only runs four (music) tracks long: the three songs that play on the title screen, and the theme of the game itself, Exciteduck, which shifts in speed depending on the speed of the ducks. The latter steals the whole show and I would recommend giving the OST a listen if only to hear the Exciteduck theme alone, though that's not to say the title screen tunes aren't worth it if you're in the mood for something a bit more relaxed and fitting for the season... in nine months from now anyways.

Grab the soundtrack for 8-bit Xmas 2021 here. Of course, this isn't the only game soundtrack I have prepped for today, as I have one more treat for everyone.

Some of you may be familiar with Doom, the legendary FPS from the 90's that spawned a million different mods providing new levels, gameplay tweaks, and soundtracks composed in midi instruments. During the end of the front half of 2022, I ended up in a sudden classic Doom phase, playing dozens and dozens of mods throughout the year and even into 2023, and one of the mods I played was the Plutonia MIDI Pack, a music mod that replaces the stock Doom/Doom II soundtrack with new compositions designed for use with The Plutonia Experiment, one half of the commercial mod compilation Final Doom, which initially lacked music created specifically for it.

The soundtrack quickly grew on me throughout 2022, and while the raw midi files were included as extras in the mod download, not many music players support midi format music. This music rip converts them to the more universal mp3 with all the appropriate tags so you can easily listen to them at your own leisure. Of course, I always encourage you to give the MIDI pack a try if you like the songs and want to see how they transform and complement the atmosphere of the Plutonia Experiment.

The Plutonia MIDI Pack's soundtrack can be found here. The MIDI version of the soundtrack (as well as the mod itself) can be directly downloaded from here.

And that's all I have for today- Next month should be pretty packed, with prepping for Easter and the first big convention of the year, and I still have some blog posts I'd like to write to fill the void while I grind out projects in the back. That said, I bid you farewell for now.

Sonic the Hedgehog Hack Series Recordings- Version September 2021

A few years back I posted a small album of custom music tracks recorded from various ROM hacks made for the original classic Sonic the Hedgehog trilogy. Following the original post from 2017, I ripped a small sprinkle of other music tracks from hacks that released afterwards and into the following years, yet I never thought of making another public update to the album for various reasons. And if you've been following me for a while then you should all remember what happened in late 2020, I lost pretty much everything that I didn't back up online or had on one of my other computers which included these post-online uploaded tracks from the Sonic Hack Series Recordings.

So after holding off on the project for almost a year, I got inspired to do a full second round of ROM hack music rips back in Autumn 2021. And this time, all the new songs would be under a new "Part II" album to distinguish them from the first wave of songs four years prior. Some of the songs are rips from hacks covered in the original collection, while the majority of the set is from all new faces to the Hack Series Recordings. As with before, I could only rip songs that were available through an in-game sound test and, if they weren't, were available to record through standard gameplay without being disrupted by sound effects.

This time around, the songs are a mixture of rips from the following hacks:

• I Made You a Salad!
• Metal Sonic Rebooted
• Mr. Cat's 16 Day Challenge
• Return of Shadow
• Studium
• Sonic 1 Dragon Edition
• Sonic Egg Factory ReMastered
• Sonic Legacy
• Sonic the Hedgehog Megamix
• Sonic the Hedgehog ReOne
• Sonic - Project Regal
• Tisha Mania
• Tisha Project

Not as big of a list as last time but then again I didn't really intend to go all out as I once did as the original intent was to simply update the original music pack with newer hacks and some leftovers I initially missed and gather some of the songs that I initially lost to the hard drive crash. And before I go and leave you with the download, I'd strongly recommend playing these hacks for yourself if you have an emulator or a flash cart that can run them.

Download

2019 Blind Kaizo Race OST

Happy New Year's, everyone! This isn't a typical update post since my previous one was very recent so I'm holding off until sometime later in Janruary before I give everyone a taste of what's to come throughout 2022. For now I wanted to squeeze out one final project before the end of the year, and since I've gone quite some time since I made one of these.

Back in the year 2019, a "Kaizo" ROM hack of Super Mario World was created specifically for Summer Games Done Quick 2019: the 2019 Blind Kaizo Race. Instead of controlling Mario, you play as one of eight Kaizo Mario World speedrunners split off into two teams: the blue-clad One Tile Men, and the orange-donning Lunar Magicians and carry them through seven levels of chaos. At the event itself, the teams would rotate out their respective players each time one bit the dust, and the run concluded with the One Tile Men winning the event overall. That said the ending doesn't change based on which team you carry to the end of the game, so for casual runs it mostly boils down to which set of runners you prefer.

The OST is a 10-track collaboration of both original and converted tunes from five different artists, all rendered in Super Mario World's engine. Ripping them was not as straightforward as you might expect since only ZSNES provided audio that wasn't prone to stuttering mid-song, and still some songs were affected and didn't result in flawless recordings despite my best efforts.. Two of the levels spawned enemies that would produce some kind of sound- interrupting the recording's first parts, and the credits, well, cannot be accessed unless you beat the final level. Since I had no patience to play through the hack, I edited the levels through Lunar Magic so the enemies cannot cause sounds to play through their actions and the final level can be beaten by just taking a door to the final room then defeating the boss in a much safer environment without killer plants everywhere. At the end of the day I still managed to do everything the night before New Year's and provide something to cap off 2021, despite the possible likelihood that I'll have to come back to this hack and re-rip a song or two in order to improve the recordings.

Will I rip the songs from another Kaizo hack? Likely not, as many of them run for much longer lengths and don't give you the connivance of skipping levels or jumping straight to the final level. Anyways, you can grab the download for current version of the soundtrack here and I'll see you all in the new year.

Maze-Kun (PC-88) Game Rip

With the end of May upon us, I thought I'd go and post a soundtrack I ripped earlier in the month just so there's some activity in times where it's really, really hard to be productive with the state the world is in (even if my home state is making progress).

This is Maze-Kun, a puzzle game from 1989 that has a heavy Sokoban feel. It was released on both the PC-88 and MSX2, but as the MSX2 version is really hard to find, this rip focuses on the more easily-accessible PC-88 version, containing all seven tracks. In all honesty it's not exactly something I'd call "my favorite" when it comes to game music and the less I can say about... whatever you'd call the Pro Level theme, the better. Needless to say if I was ripping these for personal use like what I've been doing on my original Mac for a decade, it would just be the Beginner level theme and the title screen, however for the sake of providing a complete product and especially now that I'm posting these online, I'm pretty much required to do a full rip no matter my personal opinion on one or more of the tracks.

As usual you can grab the entire thing at this link.

Tang Tang (GBA) Original Sound Vision

After spending most of the past few days burned out on stuff to do that isn't just mindless grinding, I turned to collecting and binging video game soundtracks to fill the void. And with that came to mind another game I had ripped long ago in (almost) its entirety only to lose the rip to the "great hard drive failure of September 2020".

The subject is Tang Tang, the Game Boy Advance adaptation of DSL's arcade game of the same name. It stars four characters clad in different-colored armors in a Solomon's Key clone, traveling to five different themed planets to gather rings and kill five copy-pasted bosses. The Game Boy Advance version was outsourced the GameVision Corporation and keeps the general aesthetic and gameplay of the arcade version but features all new levels, simplifies some of the graphics, removes the option for two-player co-op, and remixes the entire soundtrack into a more bombastic and lively series of compositions.

Of course I got the Game Boy Advance version of the game when it was new, bringing it and my stash of Game Boy games with me everywhere I went. Karate lessons, relatives' homes, and even to Florida. Of course being a conversion of a coin-operated game with nothing extra in the package does lend itself to a rather mixed package (the bosses in particular are a pain to fight and just amount to finding a spot to camp and blindly shoot until the boss drops if it doesn't decide to run you into a wall first) but if you like straight-to-the-point arcade/arcade-style games it's worth a look, if not the GBA version then at least the arcade version (even if I prefer the music of the GBA version tenfold).

As for the rip itself, it has the five main world themes plus two jingles and two other themes (the title screen and ending). The only real causality is the ending theme- as the beginning is obstructed by the sound of popping fireworks, only the looped version can be fully recorded, and I know no one wants a sudden abrupt skip to occur in the music (or dead silence). Not that the ending theme missing the non-looping section is a big deal anyways and considering the odd sound hardware Tang Tang uses compared to other, more popular titles on the platform I doubt it'll ever receive a full, complete recording.

Anyways, you can download the complete soundtrack here.

Little Nicky (Game Boy Color) Game Rip

Okay, this post came out of left field so I'll make it brief. No I've never seen Little Nicky and from what I've heard it's a trainwreck and Adam Sandler may have... not been the greatest choice for the lead. Fitting considering today's subject.

Back in 2018, the video game tie-in to Little Nicky was one of the games presented on Vinesauce's "Quality GBA and GBC games" stream in August 2018. After having played it myself, the only opinion I can give is that it's playable, but hard, especially since there is no proper difficulty curve, you don't heal inbetween levels, and you cannot continue once you're out of lives. The backgrounds may be decent but the sprites are rather sloppy looking (especially the faces) and the levels are not designed around the limited view you're given thanks to screen crunch.

This is not the game's boxart- I went with the first copyright screen because the actual boxart is atrocious.

The soundtrack on the other hand, done by Robert Baffy, is what caught me onto the game during the aforementioned Vinesauce stream. It's no contender for best Game Boy music or even the best VGM of 2000, but it still features some catchy themes despite coming from a game based on a movie starring Adam Sandler.

This rip contains all 13 (heh) tracks from the game's sound test (or the "Metal Mix" as the game calls it), as portrayed by the emulator bgb. It's probably the best I can get the game's soundfont to cooperate and not sound butchered considering there's not really any other Game Boy game with this kind of hard-rockin' music to memory.

I'll be quiet now and give you all the download link.

Crazy Climber 2 (Arcade) Soundtrack

Happy New Years! I know it's a bit late to say that now but all last week I was glued into watching Awesome Games Done Quick 2021 Online and it was kind of to the detriment of all my other projects. So while I figure things out and sort through some IRL things I wanted to get to (including finishing spicing up my game room and arcade), I have another game soundtrack to share which I originally ripped around August 2017 and listened to quite a bit around New Year's Day 2018, so I loosely associate it with that particular holiday.

This is Nichibutsu's Japan-only followup to their 1980's smash hit Crazy Climber, released in 1988, and with it came all new music to jam along to while you ascend six super-tall structures. While there do exist several music rips of this game on other sites, none of them sound as they would on original hardware (as well as the Arcade Archives re-release and MAME) and they all splice together the game start and odd-numbered stage theme into one track. This rip uses a direct recording from the game's service mode sound test and separates the two aforementioned songs into individual tracks. While the tracks loop from the end to the beginning smoothly, every song otherwise begins with a drumbeat in the actual game, so that element was retained.

You can download the entire music rip here.

Jump'N'Bump 3D Soundtrack

No this isn't the big New Years' post you were expecting, that won't be until about a day or two from now. But with Flash deactivating very very soon I thought it'd be appropriate to rip and share this soundtrack.

This here is Jump'N'Bump 3D, a flash game from February 2009 that was a part of my freshman-in-high-school self's favorite Flash games of the time. In other words the period when my imagination was at its peak and before I begun my entry into the world of social media and proceeding to embarrass my current older self. This game was a big part of that era and I deeply loved it, not to mention it was back when any sort of 3D in flash games was a rarity. And of course there's Julian Robotz' legendary score for the game, spanning seven tracks total and still being a fun listen even eleven years later, (twelve if you catch this by February 2021)

I've ripped the game a while back in the past but it was very incomplete rip, so this time I went double-duty and extracted all the music from the game followed by running it through Audacity to add all the necessary tags and establish better loop points.

Anyways I'll just shut up now and give you the link.
If the loops are wrong/incorrect please let me know and I'll update the soundtrack in the future.

Candy Crisis (Mac/Windows) Soundtrack

Last time on Super Justin the Blog, you may recall that I lost many if not all of my ripped OST's and my desire to slowly revisit many of these games and provide rips not widely available online or ones that are improved over other downloads of the same soundtrack.

Today's subject and one that I have not tackled before is a Puyo Puyo clone released for Macintosh(!) back in 1999. Discovered around late October around when I received my new Mac, the soundtrack of Candy Crisis grew on me throughout November and to make getting a hand of it in a more widely-recognized format easier, I threw the audio files into a converter, added proper album info and track numbers, and compiled everything into a ZIP. For added connivence, I spliced the title screen theme "Delicious Nightmare" into three different songs: Unlooped and looped versions (the latter used in the game proper), and the second half normally not heard in-game due to the loop.

Download

As for what's next, the next OST I decide to tackle will be one I ripped previously but never posted online, so it should be fresh and new to most of you.

Mario Hack Series Recordings: Final(?) Release

It's been roughly eight or so years since the day I started ripping a plethora of music from various Super Mario Bros. ROM hacks. Dubbed the "Super Mario Hack Series Recordings" since its creation in January 2011, this project set out to record the best musics across thirty different hacks, resulting in an impressive count of 95 tracks total.

Last updated in 2017, here's the latest version of the project for your listening enjoyment:

=Download=

Sonic the Hedgehog Hack Series Recordings- Version July 2017

I mentioned making this last night on Twitter, so I thought I'd deliver.
Below is a compilation of various music ripped by yours truly from a plethora of different Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 hacks.

All credit for the songs themselves go to the original composers/converters, I just made this so you can listen to some of these songs outside of the games' Sound Tests (or just leaving the game idle in the case of hacks that completely lack a Sound Test).

The collection contains music form the following hacks:

• Sonic Boom
• Sonic Brother Trouble
• Sonic EraZor
• Sonic Halloween
• Sonic Legacy
• Sonic Megamix
• Sonic Zeta Overdrive
• Sonic 2 Advanced Edit
• Sonic 2 Recreation
• Sonic 2 Retro Remix
• Metal Sonic Overdrive
• Pana Der Hejhog
• S Factor

-DOWNLOAD-

Motos (Sharp X68K Arranged Soundtrack)

Here's another OST for you all; this is a recorded collection of songs used in Namco and Dempa's conversion of Motos for the Japanese Sharp X68000 computer. Contains songs in both internal and MT-32 sound formats.

(Now updated with a new functional link)

Download

3D Maze Man OST (fixed links)

Here's another OST, ripped and edited to be as accurate as possible to the original game. This time it's 3D Maze Man, a Pac-Man clone form 1998, and one of my childhood favorites. It's a somewhat controversial game, between being bundled with all sorts of suspicious programs and getting pulled from the market in 2000. On the plus side it has some great tunes, composed by Ariel Gross.

This soundtrack has the themes of all ten worlds across all 5 games in the series (3D Maze Man, 3D Maze-Man: Winter Wonderland, Ms. Maze: Tropical Adventures, 3D Frog Man, and 3D Munch Man II).

~Download Here~
MEGA Mirror

M&M's: Shell Shocked & The Lost Formulas Original Soundtrack

I kinda regret posting this but seeing as there's no other full rip of it, I figured I should do the job.

This is the OST for the M&M's-based Crash Bandicoot knockoffs that were produced for the Playstation and PC, titled M&M's: Shell Shocked and M&M's: The Lost Formulas. Back when I was young I used to love this game, and even for a licensed game it had some darn good themes.

Both games are literally the same thing, except Shell Shocked has (albeit simple) boss battles while Lost Formulas instead does educational math levels. Overall it's okay. Lost Formulas is the more polished of the two thanks to the PC having better graphic capabilities than the PS1, but still you're better off playing any of the Crash Bandicoot games from the Naughty Dog era than either of these games.

This rip is based on the MIDI's from The Lost Formulas' disc.

Download, and don't fall for the clickbait advertisements!

Bio Force Ape (NES Proto) Soundtrack

Here's a gamerip I had made a while ago of Seta's unreleased NES title Bio Force Ape, not to be confused with Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa. But hey it'd be awesome seeing a terrifying baby monkey swat a rattle at mutants to make them inflate before it knocks the mutants into their own kind, destroying them in the process.

I seriously have no idea what I'm talking about, so on with the OST itself.

These are direct recordings of every song used in the game: the three level themes, several of the shorter tunes used for things like stage completion, and the Records screen theme which you can only hear in full by triggering the Sound Test.

-Download- (Mediafire mirror)