Hello all, I'm thinking about going on a shopping spree to buy games that would serve as inspiration for composing orechestra scores. Any suggestions? Any console is fine. Also, I would like the game suggestions to have scores that are more orchestral than General MIDI. thanks! Mike

CastleVania : Symphony of the Night

Off the top of my head, easily the best orchestral score, well, ever. Amazingly good music. The kind that gives me chills thinking about it.

Well, a good score is a good score, regardless of the type of media composed for. I would strongly recommend the Dark Crystal Soundtrack by Trevor Jones. Its incredibly epic and very dark as well. The orchestral colouring is quite delicious.

I find that the superiority of movie soundtracks is apparent when held in comparison to video game soundtracks...Its slowly changing...but there is still a dropoff in quality.

If you must have a video game soundtrack, my personal favorite is Final Fantasy Tactics (Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata) for PSX. Its incredible.


Legend of Mana (Yoko Shimomura) for PSX is also absolutely amazing.

Game? Psh. Watch Gladiator.

final fantasy 7 & 8

:p

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. As with any Star Wars game, it retains the opening fanfare during the title crawl, but everything after that is original score written just for the game. Apart from the opening piece, you'll occasionally hear the "Force" theme, which has been orchestrated in a new, very distinct style. The music in this title is a thing of beauty. Jeremy Soule captures the essence of Williams' work on the Star Wars series, and manages to make it his own at the same time. It's quite an awesome game, to boot. It won "game of the year" from virtually every game mag in existence, and since it's been out for a while now, it's only $20.00 at most places.

Brian

Quote: Original post by SKREAMZ
final fantasy 7 & 8

Quote: Gladiator

Lots of FF fansites will have midis you can listen to.

Quote: Original post by Vampyre_Dark

Quote: Original post by SKREAMZ
final fantasy 7 & 8

Quote: Gladiator

Lots of FF fansites will have midis you can listen to.

True. Still that won't be a very convincing orchestral rendition of the original work. If you are going to hear Final Fantasy VII and VIII it would be best to listen to them at their peak form.

I would strongly recommend this soundtrack:

¨Fithos Lusec Wecos Vinosec: Final Fantasy VIII Orchestra Version - Basically this takes the main themes from the FFVIII OSV and fully fleshes them out using the considerable power and subtlety of the orchestra.

Shirou Hamaguchi does an excellent job taking the orchestrations of Nobuo Uematsu and really writing them out for a good orchestral sound while being true to the excellent melodic ideas of Uematsu.

Also, listen to the Civilization 4 theme.

Elder Scrolls 3 : Morrowind

It's much more of a background music, but wonderfully immersive and after 500 hours of play it's still not annoying.