[MOV_Games]

I've been analyzing all the content in this album and there's a lot of weird aspects of this release that I thought would be worth documenting here:

* Ice Cavern is a completely different mix, up to 0:50 it's mostly the same as the track in the final game but is mixed differently, after 0:50 it's entirely different and even has an ending rather than a fadeout.

* Twilight Harbour is missing half of the intro section including a unique drum fill part, so the track wasn't simply spliced by Insomniac to make it longer for the game. Rest of the track is 1-1 to the final game. Might be taken from a not quite final mix source file?

* Glimmer's intro is slightly cut off compared to the final game, while Metro Speedway has a longer intro. Nothing major but it's something.

* Hurricos is about half the length of the final track and the ending sustained note is cut short with a fairly sharp fadeout. This one may have been extended by Insomniac for the game as I believe it loops the same parts again, but not certain about this.

* Zephyr is an earlier mix with very notable changes/absences, similar to the early mixes of Sunny Beach, Icy Speedway or Skelos Badlands found in the prototypes and demos currently released. It's even using the earlier development name "Zephyr Meadow". This may have made it into here by mistake or it might be the only mix Stewart still has of the track?

* Fireworks Factory has been notably pitch and speed altered for some reason, and is lacking the fadeout entirely. This almost seems like an intentional edit, possibly even to do with the sample content in that particular track (it's primarily made up of samples from Groovemaker that none of the other YOTD tracks here used so could be issues clearing them for streaming/sale and editing them gets around that). Might also just be a bad export, either way it's a shame.

* Finally, multiple Year Of The Dragon tracks have errors and gliitches in them, some examples being 0:19 in Country Speedway (weird scrape noise), 3:45 on the fadeout of Charmed Ridge (dropout/stutter) and 1:22 in Dino Mines (another dropout/stutter). The YOTD tracks in particular seem like they may have been taken from a worse source than the others?

Bit of a shame that so many tracks are missing, but at least there's still some great upsides to this release such as the three mid 2000's Copeland website vault tracks in high quality, a brand new Spyro 2 track and a handful of new stereo Spyro 1 mixes (still missing a handful even after this though). I additionally wish they had credited Ryan Beveridge for the YOTD tracks since he did co compose every track in the game with Stewart in a constant back and forth (source: a friend and I contacted Ryan through Linkedin a year or two back and he confirmed this) but I guess it might be a legal thing why he isn't?