Nintendo 64 Original Soundtrack Greatest Hits

This album kinda had me disappointed the first time I listened to it, but now that I've accepted that it's nothing like the totally awesome CDs Nintendo has, such as the Donkey Kong Country soundtracks, Play It Loud!, and Super Mario 64 soundtrack, I actually enjoy this album. Now let me get on to the disappointing stuff. KI Gold's tracks disturb me, especially track 5, which doesn't contain music at all. All it has is just a totally terrible cacophony of sound effects, along with a voice line or four. The lines are something like "hakoda" or "indakuroken", then I hear screaming. *Groan*. Also, track 6, although enjoyable, is not even in Wave Race 64. Why didn't Nintendo just put the actual music from the game on the CD instead of just wasting it with a silent, hardly exciting, 7:48 track that seems to go on forever?!

The Star Fox 64 music is just as awesome as the original game, with guitars exploding all around it. I haven't played the game yet, but I hope this music gets to be in it. The Blast Corps music is questionable. Most of the BC tracks are full of malevolent feeling, except for track 10, which sounds like I'm in the jungle with futuristic music. The Super Mario 64 music, however, is something quite different. Track 18 is a humorous "It's a me, Mario!", then the following track is that same familiar Mario Bros. theme, juiced up with a 64-bit update. Wow. All of the other tracks give me the feeling of playing the game itself as well as playing the Mario games of the past. This CD is very good, but it could have been better if there were a bit of more music from the other games and if it had track 5 the hell out of there.

If Nintendo put half the effort into creating their game music CDs as they did in their games I'd be in heaven. Nintendo may have learned a thing or two since producing their last CD, but they still have a long way to go if they want to compete with the great game music CDs that are already on the market.

This soundtrack is composed of tracks from various Nintendo 64 games that are available and still unreleased as of the time of this writing. The music on this CD is fairly well done and sounds pretty good considering it's all OSVs of the music. Nintendo corrected a few errors that were in their last effort. For example, the tracks now all fade out, the tracks are roughly all the same lengths and the selection of music is pretty decent.

But alas, Nintendo can't seem to get it right. As in their last CD, there are problems with the mastering. On track 7 at 1:53 there is approximately half a second of dead space, where the music stops completely for half a second then picks up again. This is *incredibly* annoying and it happens on every CD player that I try it on. Can anyone back me up here? I don't see how in the hell this CD could be mastered with a huge glitch like that in there. If this were any other type of CD, Nintendo would never hear the end of it. Did they think that we wouldn't notice? Isn't there any quality control!? Also, the one Wave Race track on the soundtrack is not even in the game! It is a very quiet tune that most likely got cut from the game... and with good reason. Other than that, the CD is pretty good. If you're looking for some N64 music to tide you over until the next N64 game is released, this might be right up your alley. Otherwise, approach this CD with caution.