Soundtrack Spotlight: Super Mario Land

Soundtrack Spotlight is a weekly CFD! feature devoted to all things VGM. Every week we celebrate the best in game music, highlight new releases and forgotten tracks, and bring you a spectrum of auditory awesomeness.

Soundtrack: Super Mario Land

Composed by: Hirokazu Tanaka

Mario’s Game Boy debut saw him take a bit a of detour into the unconventional. Super Mario Land‘s Sarasaland comes with strange one-off characters and some frankly un-Mario-like activities, but it also presents an outlet for some of the series’ most eclectic and memorable music.

Tanaka–whose notable collection of past contributions includes Metroid, Kid Icarus, and Earthbound, to name a few–plays well off the unique tone of SML, creating a complementary soundtrack that delivers a melodic dose of the game’s delightful surrealism while remaining as eminently listenable as any other entry.

Birabuto Kingdom

Bonus Chance

Chai Kingdom

Coin Room

Easton Kingdom

The Evil Alien Tatanga

Muda Kingdom

Rocket Ship Ride

If you’re in need of more Super Mario Land music and feeling a bit adventurous, put on your dancin’ pants and check out Super Mario Compact Disco, an awesomely esoteric bundle of remixed tracks from the Mario games courtesy of Ambassadors of Funk.

Available at Amazon.com

Super Mario Land

Go, Mario, Go!

—–

Albums: inFamous 2: Blue and Red soundtracks

Composed by: Jim Dooley, JD Mayer, Galactic, Brain, The Black Heart Procession

For me, one of the genuinely enjoyable aspects of inFamous was the near-perfect pairing of the game’s soundtrack–the undercurrent of ambient drones and rattles, specifically–to the physical griminess of the city environment. Watch as members of the game’s sound team extract dark, urban tones from a variety of “found objects” gathered and set up in the studio:

In inFamous 2, the city of New Marais comes with a similar set of grungy, wounded musical pieces. Along with the familiar industrial coldness, many of the tracks bear a strain of oozing bayou dread, similar to Left 4 Dead 2.

Available in the inFamous 2 Hero Edition

Available at Amazon.com

Abducted

Junction

Special Delivery

The Flood

Tasso

The Swamp

The Final Piece

7th Ward

Plight

Overcharge

Origin Stories

Hardcore Parkour

La Roux

Fade Away

—–

Album: Ocarina of Time Reorchestrated

Composed by: Koji Kondo

Arranged and performed by: Zelda Reorchestrated

If the Zelda orchestra segment which kicked off Nintendo’s E3 press conference this year piqued your interest, or if you can’t get your hands on the Ocarina of Time 3D bonus orchestral CD, then Zelda Reorchestrated is undoubtedly suited for you.

The fan-run project seeks to transcribe the memorable music of each game in the Zelda series into a fully realized form, and the quality and breadth of their work is astounding. Though we’re featuring only a small selection of tracks from their Ocarina of Time re-orchestration, the full series of ZREO albums is available on their website. If you like what you hear (and you will), please also consider making a donation.