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On The Quality Of Licensed Game Soundtracks
Thanks to GameSpot for their 'GameSpotting' editorial discussing the correct blend of licensed music for videogame soundtracks. The writer argues that "there isn't anything inherently bad" in using licensed music, but suggests: "Whether you produce your own music or use existing music for your soundtrack, thematic consistency is of the utmost importance." He then picks Wipeout XL ("[changed] how people perceived music in video games") and the more recent True Crime ("a well-made licensed soundtrack") as good examples of this, before singling out the EA Sports Trax program, as used in Madden 2004 and others, as "destined to fail - 'cus you can't make a good soundtrack out of singles." Do you have a favorite licensed soundtrack, or is the whole concept a concern to you?
a recent upserge in video game soundtrack popularity. There are even a couple of winamp streams out there playing them. ALT + L in winamp, under 'Internet Radio' there will be a couple. Also, check out Shoutcast for streams. Last time I tuned it, they are streaming some final fantasy tracks.
Before Wipeout XL, there was arguably two starting points for licensed music in games. The most obvious, was Road Rage for the Playstation. While the licensed music didn't make it into the the game proper, all of the menus / setup screens / shops used tracks from Soundgarden. At the time it was quite shocking, and the music fit well. If anything, that sold the game far more copies than it deserved.
Predating that, there was the little known BioMetal for the SNES... Yes, that's right, the SNES. That U.S. Developed games used MOD versions of 2Unlimited's excellent first album, a collection of mostly repetitive blips and beeps anyway (being dance techno). The soundtrack, however, turned out to be phenomenal, and particularly well suited to the shooter aesthetic. Sadly, the rest of the game wasn't quite as tight, and sales flagged.
Both soundtracks were excellent, but the games were terrible. I leave the consequences of this difference with Wipeout XL as an exercise to the reader.
The ______ Agenda
Hands down. Mostly obscure licensed tracks, but perfectly fitting the aesthetic of the game. Jet Set Radio Future wasn't quite as good, but still nice. I just wish they'd kept Dragula out of the US release (Jet Grind Radio). It's a nice song, but not in tune with the rest of the tracks.
I am old enough to remember when music in games was made with the midi part of your soundcard. It meant music was small, took little to no cpu time to play, didn't create crashes (music would keep playing AFTER a crash) and could easily be altered. The idea was in some games like x-wing that the music would change according to what was happening.
Even games that don't use midi will sometimes continue playing the music after a crash, it simply depends on how the game handled the music. The idea behind using midi, though, was simply that the music could be as complicated as you wanted it to be, and the sound card's ability to play it would determine what the user heard. In other words, if the user couldn't play 32, 64, 128, or 256 voices, it would just play the 8 or 16 voices it could play (and a well-encoded midi score would do this gracefully). Many of those older games sound significantly better on new sound cards if they can still be played (and can still work with your sound card).
For some reason midi died. I blame consoles but I blame them for anything. More likely just to many cheapo soundcards came out that did not properly support midi.
Actually, it's simply a matter of cheap soundcards that only had 16-voice midi playback being able to play the full score off a Redbook CD. In other words, playing off the CD sounded better, even on a cheap sound card. The only time the midi was comparable was on high-end cards that most people simply didn't have (and there was a whole industry of midi daughter-boards that catered to gamers and musicians which is now significantly smaller).
Instead some games. Tombraider comes to mind played music from the cd. Not file from the CD. Actual cd music. In fact speech was played from the cd as well. This more then anything else is my reason for hating consoles. Anyone who played it on a pc would probably agree.
Very little of this, though, had anything to do with consoles. Games were doing it quite a while before Tomb Raider came out, and it was mostly a big love-fest with the ability to do full CD-quality sound on even crappy computers, and the CD format in general.
Anyway. Nowadays music is most often an MP3 or even more recent an OGG or somthing like that. And I noticed something. Almost always switching the music off will improve not only speed but stability as well. The speed issue has dropped a bit since Command & Conquer days but the stability still seems to be there for me. Over several new pc's I always noticed that if a game reguarly freezes switching the music off will help.
These types of problems should only occur with the music being streamed off the CD (especially in Redbook format) and not being cached in any way on the disc. Generally speaking, any game that stores it's music in MP3 or OGG format shouldn't have this problem, and it was mostly corrected on games using Redbook audio by caching the soundtrack (though caching the music sometimes still lead to a slight delay or even freeze between tracks as the CD spun up, unless they had the forethought to cache the first few seconds of each song to play while the CD started).
That and the fact that most music is crap and even more crappily mixed. Soft music during heavy combat then swelling up as people start to talk.
That's just poor production on the part of the developers and/or whoever put the music into the game. That's not nearly as common today as it was almost 10 years ago, when CD music first started becoming popular in PC games.
So leave the music out eh? Or least keep it to the movies. I can play my own cd's thank you very much. My tastes are probably different anyway. Worst example of that was playing Kotor and finding a techno beat in some places. Ewh.
I prefer that they supply music, do it well, and then still give me the option to either turn it off or use my own music (the latter especially). There are plenty of music soundtracks out there that I can't stand, but there are also quite a few that I absolutely love, and that would not have existed if it weren't for the games themselves.
-PainKilleR-[CE]