Obscure Cover Art-palooza 2020

I don't know about you guys, but there's something about building a new PC that makes me want everything on it to be tidy and clean and fresh: something that's had me side-eyeing the disaster area that was my music collection on several occasions, wondering if this was the time I finally tackled it: tidied everything up, fixed all the broken tags, and, most crucially, got hold of decent cover art for everything.

Well, having starting right after I built my current PC in 2018, only now have I finally finished doing exactly that. The stumbling block that made the whole process take so long: unsurprisingly the lack of good cover art for a large chunk of the VA compilations I've ripped over the years. With the only art available in many cases being some dark, crooked 200x200px photo someone took of the album in 2005, my only option was to scan, clean up and color correct everything myself. Yikes!

While I'm really happy with the end result, with over 90 compilations to take care of, this was definitely no small task. So, in the hopes of maybe saving some other obsessive, oddball music fans some time, I went ahead and uploaded the fruits of my labors. Let's take a look.

So, these are all imgur galleries that you can click into and download the art from in JPEG form, but for all my PNG aficionados out there, I've also put up a zip file with all of this cover art in PNG format. (Well, I say all of it. There were a small number I forgot to save as PNGs that are in there as JPEGs, so, you know, exercise caution.) You can download that here:

high-res cover scans.zip (403 MB)

Okay, to the galleries!

Hits Series High-res Scans

So, first up we have 23 entries in the Hits series - a longtime rival to the UK's Now That's What I Call Music that, despite numerous confusing relaunches, never quite managed to surpass it. Seriously, deciphering the chronology of this series makes the Wonder Boy lineage look like a walk in the park.

(For the purposes of Google searchability) The cover art here includes (and this is, I think, in chronological order): The Hits Album 7, The Hits Album 10, Snap it Up: Monster Hits 2, Hits 96, New Hits 96, Fresh Hits 96, Huge Hits 1996, Hits 97, New Hits 1997, Fresh Hits 1997, Huge Hits 1997, Big Hits, New Hits 98, Fresh Hits 98, Big Hits 98, Huge Hits 1998, Hits 99, New Hits 99, Fresh Hits 99, Big Hits 99, Huge Hits 99, Huge Hits 2000 and Christmas Hits (2007).

Shine Series High-Res Cover Art

Blissfully more straightforward is Telstar TV's Shine series which ran from 1995 to 1998, featuring the best, and, oh boy, the rest of the Britpop era, as well as branching into some alternative US stuff here and there. Not a bad little set of CDs, and always useful to be reminded that for every Pulp or Elastica there were at least two or three Menswears.

The cover art here includes Shine (1995), Shine Too (1995), Shine 3 (1995), Shine Four (1996), Shine 5 (1996), Shine 6 (1996), Shine 7 (1996), Shine 8 (1997), Shine 9 (1997), Shine: The Best of 97 and Shine 10 (1998)

The Album (Virgin)

The Album - a follow-up series of sorts to Virgin's The Best Album in the World ...Ever! series, which was their Shine equivalent as far as I can tell, this ran from 2001 to 2005. I think these albums encapsulate that start-of-the-00's post-Britpop era in UK rock music quite well: lots of downer-ey, middle-of-the-road dad rock from some real second-rate bands, with only the very occasional exception.

But they do also have the little rays of light that made listening to the radio at the time slightly more bearable (And boy, did I do a lot of that back then: this was prime homework-doing time for me.) from a resurgent Ash; to a revival in garage rock in the US and Europe; to innovative, interesting electronic music; even a little hip hop here and there.

Even so, listening to rock radio was still mostly a test of endurance back then: one, I guess, I do have some nostalgia for though. I don't know what's wrong with me. :D

Another Bloody Reblog: October 2015 Pick-ups and More

Okay, I’ll admit it: it's been me all along! :D

No, not much in the way of rarities here, I’m afraid. This lot's mostly made up of a bundle of Mario-related games I bought a few weeks ago, mostly games I already had in some form, but never on the NES/Famicom. It’s been kind of neat to go back and play Mario 2 and 3 without the Mario All-Stars enhanced graphics for the first time though, and it’s proved to be a great refresher course for Super Mario Maker, even though I didn’t quite plan things out that way.

Also picked up a few Konami classics (the two Wai Wai World games and the Famicom version of Kid Dracula, which is super fun), plus Downtown Special: Kunio-kun no Jidaigeki da yo Zen'in Shūgō, a follow-up to River City Ransom set in old-timey Japan (JiliK: history expert). I was really temped to grab that one up on the Japanese Virtual Console, but there’s far too much text to try and play it in Japanese. Thankfully though there’s a translation patch out there though and with the cart, I can put it to use on my Retron 5.



Picked up a few Super Famicom and Gameboy games too. Puzzle platformers aren’t usually my thing, but I spotted a copy of Mario & Wario going for a few dollars and I couldn’t resist. Mystic Ark was much the same. All I know is that it’s an Enix RPG that involves collecting people that have been turned into dolls, or something. Eh, it was two bucks and there’s a (really well-done so far) translation patch. It’s got to be worth a shot at least.

The other two SFC games I’ve played a fair bit of already. Magical Taruruuto-kun (top left) looked like a pretty neat cartoony platformer in videos. From what I’ve played of it though, the platforming seems super basic, but the game’s also quite frustrating because if you take a single hit, you not only die, you go back to the freaking map screen. Heisei Inu Monogatari Bow: Pop'n Smash (centre left), I’m enjoying a lot though. It’s a wacky tennis meets soccer game, more or less, where both you and the computer have goals sealed off by blocks. The basic aim of the game is to smash the blocks by lobbing a ball off them with your tennis racket and getting it into your opponent’s goal. There’s definitely a bit of jankiness to it, but it’s been pretty fun, frantic action so far.

On the Gameboy side, I also got the portable version of Kid Dracula, as well as Metroid II and Donkey Kong Land, which I've actually been enjoying quite a bit. It’s impressive how much of the SNES game they managed to cram in there, especially in the animation department. Granted it looks kind of like garbage, and it can be tricky to play with the big character and limited view of your surroundings, but it features all-original levels and the Retron’s save states take a lot of the frustration out. I’d say it’s worth a look if you can get it for cheap and preferably Retron/Retrode it up.



Some new additions to the family. That brings me up to 13 amiibos now. I think. :D Definitely still a few out now that I’m thinking of getting. I’d be surprised if I make it to the end of the year without picking up Sonic and Fox, and maybe the Duck Hunt dog. Overall though, I find most of the amiibos they've released so far either fall into the categories of cool-looking figures for characters I have no attachment to (Palutena, Little Mac, Shulk, ROB) or characters I like with figures that I don’t (Gannondorf, Wario, Link). Chibo Robo will be mine though. Oh yes, he will be mine.



Club Nintendooo!!! Having blown most of my remaining points on the Link Between Worlds soundtrack a few months prior, I was just short of getting the MK8 soundtrack when it appeared, of course, at the eleventh hour before the service shut down, leading me to spend..... too much on eBay for a copy once they started going out to other members. But boy, that soundtrack’s awesome.
That’s not the only Club Nintendo soundtrack I picked up in the last while though. I managed to snag the Ocarina of Time, Animal Crossing and Kid Icarus: Uprising all for about €20 each thanks to a saved search I set up. Not bad. Actually bad though: Pokémon 2BA Master. Thanks, Laser Time.



If the Mario Kart 8 soundtrack hit at the eleventh hour of Club Nintendo, the Endings and Credits CD hit at the twelfth. This time though I wasn’t about to spend *cough* *cough* *cough* euros on the damn thing. Instead, I bought a few unused Club Nintendo codes on eBay, enabling me to clear out the last of my stars in style. (Though it really bums me out to think of how many more I'd still have to play around with if I hadn’t spent all my Gamecube era ones on all those terrible wallpapers. Damn it, Nintendo.)

Also grabbed the Mario 30th Anniversary double CD, and, let’s address the elephant in the room: I bought the Data Discs Shenmue soundtrack...



...which is pretty rad, but it’s the thing that finally got me to cave and get a turntable, and I held out for so long. Vinyl is just something I have no attachment to or nostalgia for. Now I have this bulky-ass player and (already) a stack of records that I don’t know where to put, and I'm just ripping everything to MP3 anyway. Couldn’t we have skipped the middle step and you could have just given me downloadable versions of hard to find/non-existent video game soundtracks, Data Discs/iam8bit?



But no, you had to get me out there buying vinyl-exclusive early Now compilations didn’t you, because hey, I might as well. I’m already swimming in a sea of the stuff!

More Compilations: Now 47, Shine 7

I hit up eBay earlier this month in search of more Now compilations and after much deliberation, I decided to go with Now 47 from 2000 and in a surprise move, Shine 7, a 1996 entry from the Shine series - a short-lived series of indie compilations released in the mid to late 90s.

Now 47
This wasn't one of the Now entries that I was super excited about getting my hands on, but after giving it a listen, there's actually quite a few decent tracks on here. There's some great tunes from Texas, David Grey, Coldplay and Kylie, possibly the only decent All Saints song ever, a great guilty pleasure from LeAnn Rimes and a nice selection of dance tracks on disc 2, including a excellent Ibiza-fuelled cover of "Ordinary World" by Aurora with Naimee Coleman on vocals. Having said that, the compilation also plays host to that fucking awful musical atrocity,"Who Let the Dogs Out" and there's plenty dodgy tracks from all the usual suspects - Ronan Keating, Steps, S Club 7...you get the idea.

Shine 7
I really only bought this to get my hands on "Whatever" - the ever elusive Oasis single, now too expensive to pick up in it's original format and unavailable to download anywhere. However, there's plenty more to like on here besides that. There's several massive anthems from the time from the likes of Blur, Suede, Pulp and Radiohead and a bunch of great tracks from the likes of Babybird, Space, Placebo, Super Furry Animals and The Divine Comedy. Some of the stuff here was completely new to me - I really enjoyed "Twisted" by Skunk Anansie and Morrissey sound-alike My Life Story with "Sparkle". Of course, there's lots of bland pap from long forgotten acts bulking out the compilation, but you could do a lot worse than picking this up.

Poptastic! - Now 36

Okay, I'll admit it. I've kind of got a thing for late 90's pop music. I can't stand most of the chart music around at the moment, even turning on the radio these days is liable to make me violently nauseous :D. Back then though, the radio in my trusty old Sony Walkman provided soundtrack to my life. And what an awesome soundtrack it was...... Not really though, there was still a lot of shit, just less than at the moment.

Anyway, in a fit of nostalgia I picked up Now 44 on eBay earlier in the year and I've continued to grab one now and again since. I'm mostly interested in 35-50 (51 being the exact point where music turned to crap, of course), but I'd quite like to pick up some of the earlier ones at some point too

The latest one to pop through my letterbox is Now 36 from March 1997. Let's see what we've got on that then (full track listing here). It's gets off to a pretty dodgy start with the Spice Girl slush fest "Mama". That's thankfully followed by a bunch of great tunes from the likes of Texas, The Beautiful South and Robert Miles. Disc 1 ends with swirling torrent of crap, featuring a load of boy band dross and Peter Andre to boot.

While the first disc is mostly pop, the second straddles the rock and dance camps, featuring the likes of The Prodigy, Mansun, Sash!, Monaco and The Divine Comedy. There's a pretty forgettable song from Cast, plus a pointless cover of Waterloo Sunset and I can't stand "You've Got The Love" by The Source after being bombarded by the remix of it everywhere a few years ago. Overall though, the second disc is pretty damn solid throughout. There's even a *shocker* semi-tolerable song from Ant & Dec (that I would have probably ignored had I known it was them at first :D).

It's definitely one of the stronger entries in the series from that time, but be warned, it does tend to sell for more than some of the others from the same period.