Latest music purchases

I decided on impulse to buy two albums a few weeks ago.  Both on vinyl.

The first is Slayer's Reign in Blood:

Even after all these years it's still one of the best thrash albums out there.  It's fantastic.

The second one I got was South of Heaven:

Another great thrash album.  Not as good as Reign, but it's still damn fine.


Then on January 25th I'd read this little post on Bloody Disgusting.  It's a steep price, but I had to get it.  Had to.  It arrived 3 days later.

Gorgeous little package.  I was tempted to skip straight to Cosmo Canyon, JENOVA, Forested Temple, Birth of a God and One-Winged Angel tracks but then decided to just go through each side in order.  I'm glad I did. 16+ years later and I still remember where a good chunk of the music happened.

I can still imagine the motorbike chase to get out of Midgar, reaching the Chocobo Farm and seeing them dance before going into the swamp and getting totally annihalated by Midgar Zolom.  Getting to Costa del Sol and discovering you could buy a house there.  And seeing Red XIII playing football with a couple of kids (he must've been glad to get out of that sailor's outfit!).

So many good memories from that game.  My only regret about FFVII is not getting Aeris' final limit break.

It's a shame the series kinda went downhill from there.  Although I did play all the main PS1/2 releases to the end the only ones I really liked after that were IX (great story and art style), X (brilliant fighting system) and XII (again, the battles in that were brilliant, but I couldn't tell you what the story was about).

Never really cared for VIII (although I did spend midnight to 6am going down the Deep Sea Research Center to fight Ultima Weapon and get the summon Eden.  That was one hell of a journey that I was short on experience for.  But getting back up was a breeze!

But throughout all these games the one thing that I always liked was the music.  Up until XIII where I didn't really like the music.  Well, maybe that's a bit strong.  Nothing really stood out to me.  I still stuck with it through XIII-2 and will probably get Lightning Returns when I see it half price or less.  Not too keen on the battles in the demo, but then I wasn't too keen on the battles in XIII either and I stuck with that through to the end and beyond (I only need to kill Long Gui and get 5million gil so I can get all the weapons) and the same with XIII-2 (100% achievements)  So I may end up doing the same for LR.

It's a shame that the X/X-2 HD remakes are PS3 only as I'd like to play them again sometime (and maybe get further than the first race up a building in X-2) but I don't have a PS3 and likely won't have one for quite a while.