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Recently, I found myself lost in a particularly shameful corner of the shameful mash-up world — the lost kingdom of hip hop remixes of video game soundtracks. And they weren’t tributes to just any old video games, they were tributes to some of the nerdiest video games ever made, Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy VII. The shit that kids who never, ever go outside play. The shit that kids who actually, seriously want to be elves play. Indeed, the shit that capital “g” Gamers play. Are you wincing yet?

Unsurprisingly, Team Teamwork’s mash-ups of big hip-hop hits with the soundtracks for both games can only be the guiltiest of guilty pleasures. You see, The Ocarina of Rhyme and Vinyl Fantasy VII definitely belong in that kind of embarrassing “I don’t like hop hop but…” camp. And they both serve as further proof that nerdcore only exists because the aforementioned Gamers are so socially-retarded they can’t relate to anything that hasn’t been reworked to fit within their nacho cheese-coated, basement-dwelling worldview. That was mean. But you know what they say — the truth is mean.

The execution on many of the tracks is questionable at best, but there’s something infectious and intriguing about the projects all the same. A big reason why is that the beats sound like nothing you’ve heard paired with hip hop before. In the cringe-worthy cases, it’s because the beat was just never going to work as a hip hop track to begin with. But in some of the luckier pairings, they’re strange but just novel enough to work.

The first time I listened to these, I was mostly compelled by sheer interest and fascination with how goddamned fucking weird this shit was. I wasn’t sure if it was worth listening to ever again, but something hooked me. As time has gone by, that same weirdness has kept me coming back to these albums — each time discovering new things, like a Level 13 Nethermage scouring a zombie-infested dungeon for rupees. My final consensus is that the albums are worth checking out simply to hear something completely different from anything vaguely rap-related you’ve ever listened to. However, their staying power is limited because, let’s face it, sometimes experiments don’t quite succeed, like having intercourse with an N64, for example.

Sure, video games are great to play when you’re high, but as I grow older, that’s increasingly the realm in which they stay. And to be honest, that’s probably where these mixes should remain as well.