Video Game Diaries with Jabu

When I hear the Bomberman Hero soundtrack it reminds me of sitting in my brother’s room on a weekend with warm sunlight shining in and lighting up all the floating dust.. I really think this soundtrack by June Chikuma got me into jungle and drum and bass.. It’s so perfect! The over compressed sound is perfect for breaks, and her baselines are so good..
It’s not a typical floaty underwater level soundtrack – the level was fast paced with lots of underwater explosions. This game wasn’t as good as Bomberman 64 but my brother and I still listen to the soundtrack loads..
Chikuma is amazing, a release of some of her 80s music came out on Freedom To Spend last year, it’s so immaculate and strange..

I replayed a lot of the zeldas over the first lockdown. Zelda was a big part of all three of our childhoods and we’re hugely influenced by it.
I heard that there was no dedicated audio chip in the N64, so the soundtrack had to compete with graphics for space. A lot of the audio had to be massively compressed and composers would try to mask this with reverb.. That’s why so many N64 soundtracks are so dreamy!

I feel like ocarina of time was one of the first video games that really played with my emotions. I feel really lucky to have played it when it first came out. The sound and the game mechanics are so tied up together… They really pull you around from wonder to dread to relief – all over the place. The way Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask play with light and darkness is genius – you can hear it in this track.. I think the track comes alive the most when you hear the sound design on top though – the bubbles and clanking iron boots. The sound effects were so sharp and so loud! No wonder we remember them all..

This is such a great soundtrack – the way Kondo does a beach level! It’s so spooky, even with the steel drums. And then he brings the emotional scary strings in..
This is definitely my favourite part of the game. There are so many weird things going on in the great bay; the way you have to get there by horse, then you can’t stand on the beach for too long otherwise you’ll get killed by the things so you have to get straight in the water, where you find the dead zora, then the egg lab, the zora music hall, the pirates’ fortress, the beaver races and the poisonous pinnacle rock… That’s before you even get to the temple, which is definitely the hardest one..

I used to play Mystical Ninja all the time with my brother – we had Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon 1 but we would always go to Choices to rent Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon 2 (Geomon’s great adventure) cause it was co-op.. I think it was really hard to actually find a copy to buy at the time but we used to get so excited planning to rent it for a weekend.. I remember a few times we went there and the one copy (which felt like ours) wasn’t there – was so sad. Had to choose something from this series, this bit is nice it’s around the time you first get to play underwater as Yae the ninja mermaid.

I can’t lie, my favourite song from this OST is without a doubt it’s opening theme, like all my other picks I first listened to it when I was very young and it made an immediate and lasting impression on me. However, in the spirit of things I’ve listened back to this tune a lot and it’s sick, the whole soundtrack is really.

I’m showing Nintendo music a lot of love here, which feels right considering these games coloured my younger years and ultimately gave me some of my first influences creatively, before much of the music I would come to love and appreciate the most.

I remember playing through this game with my brothers as kids. This area was probably the least intense bit of gameplay Ocarina had to offer and felt like a bit of needed respite from an otherwise high stakes story.
So many of my fullest memories are tied to the experience of playing this game, or watching my older brother Jon play it when certain boss fights or puzzles became too much for me to handle.

As to why I like the song itself, the melodies, however repetitive are undeniably catchy and they are so well matched with this area of the world the devs created. There’s a reason why this game is in most top 10 ‘All time’ lists.

Also, we took our name from the fish-deity you meet shortly after seeing the Zora’s domain for the first time.

This is another one from my childhood.

I’ve only really played this game as an adult, I watched my uncles play this for hours on end in the early 90’s. I couldn’t wrap my head around the controls and even if I had been able to I imagine it would have been more fun for me to simply wait with DK and Diddy at the beginning of the level so the music would stay in a continuous loop without any interruptions. I’m pretty sure I’ve done that a fair bit with games.

There’s something unsettling about this track, buried beneath its more glaring sounds. That’s what makes it special to me and much like the Zora theme, it fits brilliantly with the level.

So I got this game while on holiday with my mate and both of our mums in Thailand,
it must have been around 1998/99 so we were 7/8.
We found a place in this shopping centre selling thousands of Gameboy games and loads of pirate ones too, was such a mad exciting feeling to see hundreds and hundreds of cartridges and video game boxes in this tiny glass room – my friend got a couple of (pirate) 100 game in 1 cartridge type things (which actually turned out to be about 3 games but with 100 different names) and i got Warioland 2.
I was jealous of his games for ages and not too fussed on Wario, I kind of wanted it to be more like a classic Mario game but it was really weird and more of a puzzle game. he kept wanting to borrow it from me and by watching him play it more and more I realised how amazing it was – anyway this level was a pain in the arse because it was full of currents that would take you back to the start – music is really special though.

The same friend I got Warioland 2 with and me used to play this together a lot, we’d try and stay up all night with the aim of completing it which would never happen because this game is insanely hard. We were probably 13/14 when we were playing this for the first time, I remember talking about the music and just about starting to understand about what drum n bass was and etc.
If I remember rightly this underwater world is about the point where the game got serious and we’d get stuck on one level for ages just watching our lives slowly running out.
This game is honestly so stressful and I’m sure it shaved many years off my life.
I later heard about another friend playing it on mushrooms and getting into some kind of fugue state where he was able to do all of the hardest levels.