’ll never forget what Aaron Burke told me when I mentioned that every type of music and sound effect was possible in the Playstations, Xboxes and GameCubes. “Now that anything is possible, you risk the whole gamut of shit: minimalist bullshit, ambient pricks, 'lush' movie soundtracks, Steve Vai-type [guitar] soloing,” he shot back during the interview.

Burke has a right to be cynical—he plays guitar for the Minibosses, a Phoenix band who cover songs note by note, beat by beat, from games on the dinosaur machine that robbed daylight and fresh air from millions of youth (myself included), the Nintendo Entertainment System. It is a folk music that immediately piques nostalgia for the twenty-to-forty-something year-olds. When I heard a mashup of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” and the Legend of Zelda theme at a Sacramento club, I was reduced to the same pathetic escapist who would continue slashing the air with a Master Sword in my backyard long after my parents disconnected my NES, back in ’89. The NES’s unique, heavily synthesized 8-bit sound is limited to four channels that only allow for two lead parts, bass, and percussion. Such tight boundaries forced composers to devise music catchy and pleasing enough to be repeated a thousand times without boring players during a game. In short, the songs had to be damn good. “These [NES] composers were trying to write melodies that would not become rage-inducing after millions of repetitions,” as Burke put it. The Minibosses, along with their rival NES cover bands NESkimos and the Advantage, took that challenge up—eschewing samplers and any synthesizers in favor of playing straight-up rock and roll. Earlier experiments where original songs were composed on the 8-bit Nintendo Game Boy (i.e. Alec Empire’s Nintendo Teenage Robots project and the Nanoloop compilation) felt rather stale without the visuals needed to make them sing. On the other hand, the NES cover bands know that the visuals have already been burned into so many memories that they only need to nudge them awake.

Sacramento’s The Advantage make such covers sound effortless. But like the Minibosses (NESkimos play a sort of sloppy blues versions that seem to be all done for free beer at parties), the music still sounds very prog. Heard on the guitar, the melodies are compacted into noodled riffs that don’t allow for much breathing space as the NES’s limited memory required it. However, The Advantage—composed of members from Hella and Generic—are still quite deft in proving their faithfulness to the originals and retaining the tension heard on their 2004 eponymous debut album. Elf-Titled is their new batch of covers of specific game levels.

The band’s center remains Spencer Seim on the trap kit, who propels the band forward with raw strikes on the snare. He mutates Contra’s sinister “boss music” into a thrash that comes home with cuts and bruises, while he takes Solar Jetman’s “Braveheart Level” song into a clove-footed frolic. The songs that do not brim with a Clash of the Titans bombast as performed by the Rick Wakeman Orchestra or Rush, all stand out. Duck Tales’ “Moon Level” is full-on pop-punk that could be mistaken for a Green Day instrumental, while Bomberman 2’s “Wiggy” has an odd funkiness in its steel-toed cadence. The band also throws in a few amusing medleys, where they move from the beast-has-arisen metal stomp of Castlevania III’s “Boss Music” to the Renaissance Faire ditty for the kids in Willow’s “Village” to the prog frightmare of Megaman II’s “Bubbleman.”

I only wish the band took more liberties with the music and twisted them into new directions, as they do on Castlevania’s “Intro,” where a cobwebbed guitar wails like a Theremin. In the closer, a Wizards & Warriors medley, they indulge in Valhalla beer-hall chanting before they curiously end the record with a soft guitar squeal that takes an entire minute to gradually fade away.

The Advantage is unquestionably all about nostalgia; if one never saw or played the NES games they cover, they’re just another prog-metal band. There is a certain monotony that grows across the record as many of the songs seem to be played in the same key and bump along to the same choppy rhythm. However, the band still successfully validates the supposedly “obsolete” sounds from the NES as true songs that still sound fresh after repeated plays. However, I still haven’t played Elf-Titled a thousand times yet.