Sonic's 18th Birthday ^_^

[Rökkan]

Funny thing is, Sonic3K introduced Knuckles and has a small plot twist on it. Not that Knuckles is not welcome in Sonic games, but outside 3K and the first Adventure plots, well, he pretty much is unnecessary >:
Also Sonic3K didn't have Fumie Kumatani composing, therefore, it's not the best soundtrack of all Sonic games. D< Neither did Sonic CD, but it had Takenobu Mitsuyoshi and Cosmic Eternity~

But I agree with you, Sonic 3 & Knuckles was one of my most pleasant experience with a Sonic game, almost par with Sonic CD.

Well I dunno what games Kumatani composed for, (or who they are sadly) but I love Howard Drossin's work more than most Japanese composers.

I regret informing you that I've never played CD, but I want to try it.

Also I just remembered MJ helped compose for Sonic 3, I'm sad now..

Actually, after the last year's interview on Drossin, it was revealed that a very very little amount of tracks are of his authory. If I recall, it was Sonic & Knuckles' theme the only track that was comproved to be his work. Pretty much rest of the whole soundtrack were composed by other composers.

Kumatani was the main composer for games such as NiGHTS Into Dreams and Sonic Adventure (alongside with Jun Senoue on the last one). She also composed several songs for Sonic Unleashed (which is one of the best game soundtracks ever) and also Sonic and the Secret Rings, along with several other works that I'm not reminded right now.

Make sure that when you play Sonic CD, you play the European/Japanese version. American version's soundtrack takes off the whole excitement of the game. It's not a bad soundtrack, but goddamnit, the Japanese one is just perfect.

Also, coming back to Kumatani, these are my favorite works of her:

NiGHTS and Reala - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ODb24FltH8

E102 Gamma's Theme - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_V6yjKc3Z0

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Some Sonic 3 songs were comproved to be Michael Jackson songs but "chiptunized" and sometimes speeded up.
Michael Jackson did a tape with a lot of original tracks for Sonic 3, but after the child raping scandal, they had to push him away from the project and come up fast with new songs for the game, and those songs were "remixes" of MJ songs as I told before.