not deep into chiptune / video game music but i'll post my usual rotation. would be nice to have a decent productive VGM thread here
everyone knows and reveres tim follin. a composer who could work on both fart-chips like the genesis and crown jewels like the c64 and create works of equal harmonic density and tunefulness. he proved that a prog rock piece sans the bells and whistles of live instrumentation could outplay a whole band
it's interesting to note that his masterpieces mainly came from forgotten piles which are universally overshadowed by his scores. must cause a certain bit of hubris as a composer to know your commission outshines the work it accompanies, but i assume he's pretty humble about it
i'm sure most of us here would agree that most pokemon games have wonderful OSTs but the spinoffs are something else.
junichi masuda is a respectable composer in his own right, don't get me wrong. anyone in the target audience for gen 3 can tell you that much. however his propensity for annoying tasteless instrumentation (gba trumpet abuse, midi guitars, gen 5 kick dance beat on everything) kicks him down a notch below the 3rd party/b-team nobodies who worked on games like those aforementioned. also his best contribution is still putting the thing in where you can miscegenate pokemon from cartridges in different countries and get a shiny quicker
smt nocturne, also known as: my favourite game i can't be arsed to beat. i like to joke about shoji meguro as the slayer of video game composers in that he likes to write variations on the same formula that work beautifully every time. also certain tracks in nocturne were composed so that the game could draw from a random library of guitar solos and they would all work interchangeably. this is also very slayer-esque. however unlike meguro, slayer still hasn't written any catchy jpop tunes with rapping in them. you're gonna have to look to
marty friedman of megadeth for that.
streets of rage 2 is a best-selling sega genesis game from 1992 with music that might not sound terribly out of place in a club from that time period. definitely the most underappreciated of the retro game OSTs that everyone and their mom remembers
also battle garegga