Wario Land: Shake it!
Wario Land Shake It! was released for the Nintendo Wii on July 24, 2008. It's developed by Good-Feel, which has worked on other Nintendo titles such as: Kirby's Epic Yarn, Yoshi's Wooly World and Yoshi's Crafted World. The soundtrack is composed by Tomoya Tomita, known for his work on Kirby's Epic Yarn and Yoshi's Woolly World. I never really knew much about Wario Land Shake It. 2008 was a busy time and there were games such as Smash Bros. Brawl, Mario Kart, Animal Crossing: City Folk, Metal Gear Solid 4, Call of Duty: World at War and at the end of the year Left 4 Dead that kept us all busy. Since it was requested, I had the chance to play it and it's a joy to look at. The hand drawn Saturday morning cartoon animations predate Cuphead by eight years(although not quite on the same scale). The controls are simple, following similar schemes from previous 2D Wario games and the shaking is a key feature. You will be shaking a fair amount. But come on, it's the Wii. The game isn't entirely easy, it has some challenging boss battles throughout. The soundtrack is eclectic and pretty darn catchy. A few tracks will grow old but others will stick with you. There are some tracks with interesting time signatures as well, such as Run-Down Pyramid(7/4) or Soggybog River(7/8) to mix things up. I found in some of the tracks motifs from previous Nintendo games were incorporated, which made it fun to listen through and to see if I could identify them.
The file format in the sound folder is the standard .brstm you'll commonly find in Wii games. Easy to convert over to FLAC and MP3. There weren't many duplicate tracks but one I found was ghost0717 and GHOST_RET2. I decided to leave out both the Introduction and Ending Cutscene Tracks because unfortunately, the sound effects and various grunts from the characters are built in and are difficult to remove from the tracks. When it came to the titles, the filenames didn't exactly help that much but at least it gave me a general idea when they play, for instance: egypt_NEW20070125-01-16b is Whoopsy Desert, AFRICA-INT-CUT is Savannah Valley/Lowdown Depths, New_Piero_Boss is Chortlebot Challange and so on. Others took some searching, such as No-rain-7beat1 which is Soggybog River, W28021-32k16b which is Main Menu, SIROP1 which is the Pirate Shop or zunzun1026 which is Just Plains. For the fourth boss battle, I decided to name the track Scumflower Skirmish (which is the PAL Version name) instead of Bloomsday Blowout or the five other names for the boss. I also decided not to loop the tracks twice this time. Some of them are rather long and because of that I thought one loop was more fitting. I did something a little different this time as well, instead of fading-out after the first loop, I let the track play for another 15-20 seconds before fading out. It gives a little more play time for those who would like the track to be looped twice but also pleases those who prefer one loop.
Most of the tracks are repeated for other levels. Sometimes they have small differences such as for Ropey Jungle and Riverbloat Rapids, which is one version has rain and the other does not. A majority of the end level tunes are used more than once. So, I placed the levels in parenthesis, for example "Escape! (Mt. Lava Lava/Sneak Peak)" or "Escape! (Airytale Castle/Prism Prison)". It makes them easier to locate, rather than use just one level title.
As usual, I didn't include sound effects from the game but did include the various fanfares and cues. They're placed together at the end of the soundtrack. The Wario Land: Shake It! Soundtrack is uploaded in FLAC and MP3. Enjoy!