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Burnout 2 uses its soundtrack in a really clever way. When you're racing the music is quite low down in the mix, audible but not given preference over the engine and ambient noise. When you finally gain and hit your boost, that music opens out and explodes, forcing home the sensation of speed. It works for so many reasons, but mainly because when you can only just hear it, it annoys you. You want to get to the point where you can use your vehicle’s boost and you want to chain those boosts together because the game suddenly becomes that much more enjoyable when the sound quality of the music improves. It’s an effect that was removed for the next game in the series and, as a result, made boosting far less entertaining.
On the subject of sound quality, part of what blew me away when I first played the Saturn version of Virtua Fighter was just how sharp the effects were. Hits cracked and whipped around the screen with a satisfying feeling of solidity, but blocked moves just resulted in a disappointingly dull thud. Again, the sound of success acted like a reward.
The best use of sound in any recent game, imo, is in Otogi 2. The music isn’t music so much as it’s abstract whistles, drums and bells. Helps to create a haunting, mythical, feudal Japan perfectly. Better than the music, though, is the original Japanese voice track. Compared to the English language option, it’s masterful. The English version features bog-standard booming demons and echo-treated ghosts. The Japanese vocal track doesn’t go for such obvious tricks. The voices of ghouls sound like eggs cracking. Demons are the opposite of what you’d expect – all the bass removed and the treble increased, with effects laid over the top that sound like paper sheets being torn. There’s one section of the story where a character gets taken over by a demon and, to illustrate it, they have that character’s voice slow down for a split second, like an audio tape getting chewed up in the machine. Just really imaginative little touches that add to the otherness. The sort of thing that you got in Spirited Away.
Equally, though, poor voice acting can lead to a game becoming less involving than it should be. Thief: Deadly Shadows continues the series’ tradition of great ambient sound, but the abysmal vocal work very nearly undoes all it all.
Legba: Which reminds me of when I fiddled Age Of Empires so as I could play my own CDs as a soundtrack; lots of free jazz noodling from Soft Machine lent a whole new level of agression to the proceedings.
I remember first hearing about how the Xbox was going to support custom soundtracks – games allowing you to select music that you’d ripped to the console’s hard drive – and worrying that it would lead to any easy way out for publishers. Instead of having to worry about getting somebody in to write and record the music for a game, they could just stick any old tat in, safe in the knowledge that the player would be replacing it with something of their own choosing anyway. Combine it with the increase in licensed soundtracks and prospects started to look even worse. That has come to pass in some cases – when it came to selecting the songs that’d make up the soundtrack to Burnout 3, it seems that EA used the old ‘names from a hat’ method, resulting in a bunch of tracks that were totally unsuitable – but, thankfully, hasn’t yet become the standard. Amped also went the licensed tracks route, but used the extra capacity offered by DVD to cover a huge number of musical bases and provided music that had obviously been hand-picked. Dead or Alive Volleyball had some of the most ridiculously upbeat, sugary pop around – including normally asinine nonsense from the likes of B*Witched, for Christ’s sake – and it worked to enhance the summery, holiday atmosphere fantastically. Alright, so in both cases I’ve moved on to playing them with my own selection of music – abstract, ambient stuff for Amped, random tracks ripped from those cheapo Trojan box sets for DoAXBV – but the point is that the official soundtracks work just as well. And every racing game around is improved immeasurably by having music from the Ridge Racer series as accompaniment.
Another thing, dance, music and pattern-based games are all based on the use of sound... think of the range of experiences you get between Space Channel 5, Rez, Jet Set Radio, DDRMax and even Donkey Konga.
There’s an entire thread to be had out of bemani games. I’ve been thinking of starting it for a while, but if you want to, then please do. |
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