Post by legios on Apr 6, 2008 15:25:27 GMT
I was pottering about playing "Civilisation III" recently and for some reason it got me started thinking about how important music is to my enjoyment of a lot of the games I play. For example, part of the reason I enjoy "Halo" a lot more than I do "Halo 2" is that I think that the score for the first game has a much more epic feel to it - it is much better at telling me that I am a tougher-than-nails supersoldier than does the score for "Halo 2".
Likewise the music for "Phantom Crash", an otherwise undistinguished mecha game is well chosen (even though I can't stand ninety-seven percent of it) because it sets the feeling of a "teenagers in mecha" quick-fire combat sport rather well.
The score for "Ace Combat 5" even makes me want to play the game even though I have no idea if it is any good or anything. But the heavy russian choral vocals combined with the Moscow Philharmonic make it sound like a cracking air combat epic.
Freespace is arguably one of the high-water marks for this. The score for that game is far superior to a number of major movies I've seen in terms of its effectiveness. Not bad for a video game.
Whereas some games can be handicapped by their music. "Godzilla:Save the Earth", whose budget didn't run to obtaining any of the original film music is saddled with some fairly non-descript random fighting game music. You don't notice it when playing multi-player (too busy trying to knock lumps out of your mates' Kaiju and listening to their howls of rage) but in single-player it drags the game down. It just isn't the same facing of against Megagirus or Godzilla without their Oshima and Ifukube themes as their entrance music.
The same fate really befalls "Robotech:Invasion", now it isn't a great game and in some respects Jesper Kyd's soundtrack is better than the gameplay, but it doesn't feel like it belongs. "Robotech" had a distinctive style musically, and Kyd's soundtrack doesn't fit in with it at all, leaving the music disconnected rather a lot from the gameplay for me. A shame, it is a good score that would probably have worked quite well on a different shooter.
But maybe that's just me. Does anyone else find music makes a signifiant difference to how they feel about a game?
Karl
Likewise the music for "Phantom Crash", an otherwise undistinguished mecha game is well chosen (even though I can't stand ninety-seven percent of it) because it sets the feeling of a "teenagers in mecha" quick-fire combat sport rather well.
The score for "Ace Combat 5" even makes me want to play the game even though I have no idea if it is any good or anything. But the heavy russian choral vocals combined with the Moscow Philharmonic make it sound like a cracking air combat epic.
Freespace is arguably one of the high-water marks for this. The score for that game is far superior to a number of major movies I've seen in terms of its effectiveness. Not bad for a video game.
Whereas some games can be handicapped by their music. "Godzilla:Save the Earth", whose budget didn't run to obtaining any of the original film music is saddled with some fairly non-descript random fighting game music. You don't notice it when playing multi-player (too busy trying to knock lumps out of your mates' Kaiju and listening to their howls of rage) but in single-player it drags the game down. It just isn't the same facing of against Megagirus or Godzilla without their Oshima and Ifukube themes as their entrance music.
The same fate really befalls "Robotech:Invasion", now it isn't a great game and in some respects Jesper Kyd's soundtrack is better than the gameplay, but it doesn't feel like it belongs. "Robotech" had a distinctive style musically, and Kyd's soundtrack doesn't fit in with it at all, leaving the music disconnected rather a lot from the gameplay for me. A shame, it is a good score that would probably have worked quite well on a different shooter.
But maybe that's just me. Does anyone else find music makes a signifiant difference to how they feel about a game?
Karl
