Music: Gaming Fantasy review (Taylor Davis violin album)

A video game soundtrack can be more emotionally affecting than any other piece of music. You're not only associating the game's soundtrack with a story, you're associating it with a story that you're participating in. For an avid gamer, just hearing one of these pieces is enough to trigger a powerful rush of nostalgia...nostalgia for places and events that only happened on a Ricoh 5A22.

Today's musical feature is guaranteed to tap into this deep well of gamer goodwill: the album "Gaming Fantasy," by Taylor Davis (better known as ViolinTay on Youtube). As the title suggests, much of the music is taken from Square's "Final Fantasy" series (composed by the legendary Nobuo Uematsu), including favorites like "Cid's Theme" (FFVII) and "To Zanarkand" (FFX), though other standout tracks include music from "Skyrim" and "The Legend of Zelda."

These are all fairly straightforward covers, with Davis' violin-playing front and center. I thought they were pretty well done, though not as sumptuously produced or technically perfect as the official classical cover versions of these soundtracks. If it sounds like something you're interested in, you can preview the album from Taylor Davis' website here.