Pixelated Audio is back from a wonderful weekend at VGMCon in Minnesota! Gene was slated to represent us but along the way drummed up a party including Pernell from Rhythm and Pixels, Carlos from Heroes Three, and Thomas Kresge head of the Game Brass (check out their new album Barrel Brassed)!When in Minnesota do as the Minnesotans do, as the sayin…

Kamen Rider Agito & Kuuga Wild Battle [仮面ライダーアギト＆クウガ ワイルドバトル] is a 2001 game for the Sega Pico developed by Arc System Works and published by Bandai. It is based on the Kamen Rider superhero license property which started in the 1970s.To keep it brief, the Sega Pico is less a console and more a children's toy. Imagine the guts of a Sega Genesis / M…

Ultimate Brain Games is a board game collection released for PS1 in 2003 developed by cosmigo and published by Telegames. There's not much to say about the board games themselves; things like dominoes, chess, backgammon and the like, but the soundtrack written by Zbigniew Siatecki is great! Cosmigo was a very small German developer responsible for …

GunMaster is a December 1994 arcade exclusive game developed by Metro Corporation. It's a single or two-player boss rush action game that's part fighting game and part platformer; think a dash of Gunstar Heroes with a Neo Geo art style. The game uses a well-established combo of soundchips: the OKIM6295 for 4 channels of ADPCM and the YM2151 for 8 c…

Gigandes (ギガンデス) is an arcade game developed by East Technology in 1989 and released in February of 1990. It's a horizontal shmup in the style of R-Type featuring all of the bio-mechanical tropes common to the era. It was designed for the Taito X System hardware which used a YM2610, the same audio configuration used in the Neo Geo, and was composed…

We’ve got a really fun soundtrack to dive into this episode from a Jaleco arcade title released in 1989 called Plus Alpha, composed by Tsukasa Tawada. It’s an overhead shooter similar to Twinbee, Raiden, or 1942 and was re-released on the Nintendo Switch in 2020 under the Arcade Archives series published by HAMSTER Corporation. This is one of Tsuka…

In this latest mini episode we're talking about Solstice: The Quest for the Staff of Demnos, a childhood favorite on the NES composed by Tim Follin.Solstice released on the NES in the US and UK in mid 1990. It was developed by Software Creations and published by various companies in different regions. It's a challenging isometric puzzle platformer …

In this bite-sized installment we're exploring the soundtrack from Bomb Jack on the Nintendo GameBoy composed by the legendary DMG DJ, Alberto José González.Bomb Jack released on the Game Boy in the UK in 1992 and Sweden in 1993. Adapted to the handheld by Bit Managers and New Frontier; published by Infogrames. Bomb Jack has had dozens of ports der…

Another titan of the game industry, George "The Fat Man" Sanger, joins us live at MAGWest! George has done so much to shape the course of game audio in America that the best we can hope for is scratching the surface with this post. During his career he's worked on numerous games, alongside his legendary group of cowboy composers under the moniker "…

Today we're joined by composer g3ntlebreeze for a unique behind the scenes look at his work on Castle in the Clouds, a Castlevania-inspired hentai game (NSFW - not safe for work). The game was developed by Libra Heart and pixel-teishoku and published by Critical Bliss. Castle in the Clouds is a 2D pixel art platformer released on Steam in 2021 with…

Pixelated Audio is back for the second annual Masters of VGM (@MastersofVGM), an event every June where podcasts come together to highlight some game music composers, either personal favorites or some that deserve a bit more attention. The event was created by bedroth, host of Very Good Music and BGMania podcasts. Check out some of the other partic…

We're joined today by Emily Reese; Minnesota Public Radio newscaster, VGM podcast legend and co-creator of the Level with Emily Reese and Top Score podcasts with Sam Keenan.She is a trumpet player, and studied music education and jazz studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder and received her master’s degree in Music Theory from the University…

How do you do justice describing Brian Schmidt's contribution to gaming? His impact on the global trajectory of games has been immense. There's no doubt in our minds that Brian is one of the most important figures in videogame history, and we couldn't be more honored to have him joining us on the show. This next paragraph is only a portion of what …