Good music is good music, technicalities aside. To me though all NES games were plinky plonk rubbish, and SNES games are very orchestral/General MIDI sounding. The artistic talent just isn't there like some of the great SIDs or stuff like Ghouls n Ghosts on Amiga. It's not a cultural thing because games like Vulcan Venture have awesome soundtracks in the arcade and the Sony chip in the SNES is technically good too. Yes Ghouls n Ghosts IS a crap conversion on Amiga (thanks to idiots hired by US Gold AGAIN!) BUT the music is light years ahead of the rubbish on the console versions. Limiting factor for Amiga games music was the floppy disk, but then cartridges have unlimited memory, With a hard drive on an A600 you could use all 1mb per level nicely without worrying about how many disk swaps would happen.
Well, Ghouls and Ghosts had the same tunes throughout all systems.... except for the Amiga, which had some cracked out disaster that was not like the arcade one at all. Even the NES's Ghosts n Goblins had the right tracks lol.
Also the Amiga one had no sound effects, which is another big WTF.
I much rather prefer the "plonky" / "cheesy" stuff that resembles the arcade ones as opposed to Soap Opera sounding background music and ambient noises or wonky sounding stuff that sounds like it belongs at a carnival. So calling the home ones that aren't Amiga rubbish is basically calling the arcade one rubbish too....
If you want an awesome arcade to home conversion of GnG.. see Daimakaimura for Super Grafx. Perfect soundtrack done w/ 32-Byte waveforms, and crisp visuals.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0NNXwvndjgand you can also check out the Megadrive one which has more arcade like FM tunes.
Both are excellent.
The arcade machines usually rocked the FM like a motherfudger anyway, and it often suits the games better. Then the home machines have similar hardware and sounds, and everyone rejoices at similar home versions of arcade games...
Amiga's Golden Axe was also guilty of this lack-of-proper-soundtrack business. I don't like swinging swords around to dance club music.
Usually it is 2 not 1 though as far as music quality goes, music and effects together has always been tricky on most home computers due to limited total numbers of sound channels. You can't really help it
Japanese consoles/games never seem to have this problem. MSX, NES, SMS, PC-Engine.... they all handled the sound limitations like a champ. It's commonplace on these systems for the music to be playing and then a sound effect comes on, toggles one of the channels off to play the sound effect.... and then the music picks up right where it left off. Perfectly blending sound effects and music without sacrificing anything.......
The omitting one or the other maneuver seems like something you only see on the C64 and sometimes (rarely) the Amiga. I never understood why. It really kills a game to not get both, especially if the arcade one had both...
Like R-Type for C64!
