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 saying goes. We had a fun time talking about all manner of VGM related to the Midwest; the region itself, games about the area and made there, as well as composers from the area. Getting more specific we cover pinball and edutainment in some level of dep ..read more

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 / Mega Drive (minus the FM) stuffed into a colorful laptop / digital storybook for pre-school age children. For the Sega Pico, Kamen Rider is surprisingly involved and game-like compared to most of the educational software the system was built for ..read more

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 a ton of board and card game collections from around 2000 to 2015. They still exist today, mostly as the developer on a pixel art graphic software called "Pro Motion". Zbigniew Siatecki's story is a somewhat familiar one around this timeframe. He's a ..read more

Gigandes (ギガンデス) is an arcade game developed by East Technology in 1989 and released in February of 1990. It is a horizontal shmup in the style of R-Type featuring all of the bio-mechanical tropes of the era. It was designed for the Taito X System hardware that used a YM2610, the same audio configuration used in the Neo Geo, and was composed by Akira Inoue and Takaro Nozaki. East Technology was a small developer based in Shinjuku that mostly worked on arcade games. The company was founded in 1987 and operated until around the mid 1990s. East Technology only produced around 10 games. Their most ..read more

We’ve got a really fun soundtrack to dive into in 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 1942/43 and was released on the Nintendo Switch in 2020 under the Arcade Archives series published by HAMSTER Corporation. Tsukasa Tawada brings lots of variety in this soundtrack, which is a ton of fun and also hits all the marks for an awesome arcade experience. Thanks to ctr from VGMRips for creating the pack ..read more

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 the vein of games like Knight Lore and Lumo. Solstice only released on NES, but it did have a sequel on the SNES called Equinox. Tim Follin is a VGM composer that hardly needs an introduction. Master of VGM folk and prog rock and putting way more ..read more

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 "Team Fat" which consisted of himself, Dave Govett, Joe McDermott and K. Weston Phelan. A short list of projects that George and Team Fat worked on: Thin Ice for Intellivision, Maniac Mansion and Rad Gravity for NES, Zombies Ate My Neighbors on SNES ..read more

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 lovingly crafted art and an incredible soundtrack. This "hornyvania" puts you in control of bounty hunter Lily on her quest to defeat hordes of monsters and maybe get a little something extra. Critical Bliss is a rapidly growing developer/publisher ..read more

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 of Nebraska-Lincoln. Emily is an avid gamer (RPGs and FPS games are a favorite), and a lover of music with jazz and classical in particular. Emily started her radio career in 2005 and began working at Minnesota Public Radio in 2008, where she and S ..read more

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 Brian has been up to for the last 35 years or so. Brian Schmidt began his career in games at Williams around 1987. He soon began working on music and sound programming on iconic pinball games like Swords of Fury and Black Knight 2000, as well as the ..read more