You know, I don't tend to pay attention to a lot of game music now, because I felt that a lot of it sort of faded into the background compared to the (forced) more catchily melodic efforts that hardware musicians had to come up with around the 8 and 16-bit eras. But recently I've been listening to two pieces that were made up as replacements for music that came earlier in a series, and - shockingly for someone on the Internet - I've come to think that they're just as good or even better than the classics that they replaced.

The first is Baba Yetu by Christopher Tin, and it is wondrous. I remember the first time I saw it, I sort of laughed at the Civilization IV title screen for its sudden Lion King stylings, but when you let it play through and think about how... epic the idea of trying to capture the whole of world history is, it's incredible. Something that I've only just realized is that its structure fits perfectly with the progression of the game itself, starting off as very plain but becoming gradually more complex as it adds in the orchestra piece by piece later on.

This parody of it isn't half bad either, and sums up the game perfectly in a very different way. "Win with science, culture or napalm - Watch out, Gandhi might drop an A-bomb."

The second one is the (slightly unfortunately titled, given the subject of the game) Metal Gear Saga by Harry Gregson-Williams, which hastily replaced the iconic Metal Gear Solid theme music after it was found out that it had been slightly stolen from a composition by Georgy Sviridov. It keeps the synth-choir and busy percussion mood of the previous theme while making the whole thing sound more film-like, and as demonstrated halfway through, works beautifully in as many different modes as the first game's theme did.

While listening to it during work yesterday, it certainly produced the most exciting-sounding login page I've ever written.