Task 18

Sometimes I dispair, more often than not because someone has made a silly, silly comment.

One of the worst I remember, and it's come up a few times, is the line that says sound/music in games does nothing for the game itself, and has no effect on how much one enjoys a game. This usually refers to music more than sound effects, but doesn't forgive the fact that this is:

WRONG.

Fortunately, most people's ears aren't clogged up. It's hardly a matter for debate - sound in video games is massively important, and I shall tell ye a few reasons why...

A long time ago I downloaded an MMORPG that will remain unnamed. I gave it a spin, and I wasn't overly impressed. It had the foundations for something really nice, it looked unique at the time, but something was missing. There were no BGMs, or Background Music tracks, and as a result it had no atmosphere. It was all a bit plain and you really realized that you were wasting time.

Anyhoo, about a year or so afterwards I decided to give it another go, but this time it had music. It had excellent music, in fact. Each tune was a happy, nicely constructed midi-orchestral piece, and it really brought you into the colourful world. You could while away hours just listening to it all, idley advancing your character in the process. I loved it for a long while, but never being good at MMOs, I eventually gave up (Copying the whole music folder before uninstalling, of course.)

Music can move a game forwards, it can enhance action sequences tenfold, it can bring a huge amount more emotion to a scene than dialogue alone can. It's a device to enrich a game and give the player a much better experience. With a little imagination, music can do these things by itself, but when you combine it with a videogame that you're in control of, things can become bananas-awesome.

That's not to say that every game has good music, of course. Despite there being rather a lot of high quality tunes made originally for the humble game, there's also a lot of tuneless pants that doesn't amuse the player in any way. Sometimes I wonder how they got away with making such low-quality tracks!

Then again, not every game actually needs music. I'm currently playing through F.E.A.R, as I'm about 10 months slower than everyone else at getting games. I like F.E.A.R; it's not the best game ever made, it drags, it's very samey and I fight the same battle over and over. However, the paranormal bits, the attempt at a storyline and (I suppose I'll have to say it!) the graphical quality is really rather good.

F.E.A.R has a couple of tracks that could definitely be classed as music, and that's fine. However, most of the time during play, it's an ambient, classic 'horror story' series of sounds, including jumpy bits when you see something that's supposed to make you jump. Some people have criticized this, but F.E.A.R just wouldn't be right if it had a 'true' soundtrack. It's a horror movie-style game, and so the perfect atmosphere is created just by using ambience. Music can really can really eliminate any scariness in a scene.

As for sound effects themselves, things have come a long way! We all remember Sonic and Mario of yesteryear, those chiptunes and nice little synthesized sound effects. Boing... Boing...

These days we have insane surround sound, so you can hear exactly where everything is, where that ninja is sneaking up on you, how far down the corridor that answer machine is beeping, and you can hear for yourself how loud that SuperFragger Mk9,000,000 really is. So much effort is being put into sound effects, and it's really showing. If I remember rightly, Quake 4 had over 40,000 sound effects in its library. That's quite a few...

So things are getting clearer and more realistic in videogames. Much like graphics, the more underrated category of 'game sound' is becoming more and more impressive.