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Games are cool for a whole bunch of reasons, but one of them is that you can do a whole lot of cool poo poo with sounds. poo poo like LucasArts' iMUSE system for dynamic music. Different sections of the same tune come in when the right flags are triggered. It's a great way to bring different sections of the same area together while still giving them their own flavour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N41TEcjcvM This cool piece of tech was used in a whole bunch of LucasArts games, including the 1995 floppy disk version of TIE Fighter! Dynamic music is still widely used today, for a variety of reasons and with a variety of tools, so in that way Monkey Island 2 left a huge legacy in games. Now, tell us all about cool pieces of sound design! Doesn't have to be tech, just something that makes a game better by sounding cool. 
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Feb 13, 2015 11:28
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The boss tracks in Metal Gear Rising get more stuff added in the further you get in the fight, with the lyrics kicking in at the final stage Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon does the same thing, adding more instruments to dungeon themes as you go deeper and deeper. The battle theme in Wind Waker is reactive based on your attacks and it owns Two of the boss themes in Skies of Arcadia are dynamic: "neutral," "your party is in dire straits," and "boss is almost dead" flavors Looper fucked around with this message at 11:57 on Feb 13, 2015 |
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Feb 13, 2015 11:54
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This is a cool topic  The Dead Space series had some of my favourite sound design of recent memory, even if there's lots of "standard" horror sounds; foley artists have been mutilating fruits and vegetables to simulate broken body parts for ages and there's nothing new about layering different animal and human sounds to make monster noises, but the application made for a super immersive experience. The developers made a dynamic sound engine that reacts to the player's actions and in game situations, so when you're being swarmed by necromorphs the audio experience changes dramatically and dynamically. It's also fun watching sound designers and foley artists at work on these sorts of projects. http://youtu.be/pv8mkxl8fbs
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Feb 13, 2015 12:13
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Games that take sound and music design seriously are cool and fun, especially when they implement it into the gameplay itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m5YQrucis8
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Feb 13, 2015 12:25
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I've always liked what FFXIV does with primal boss fight music, where it would change during phase transition to match the uptick in battle tempo. The final boss in the story ends up having the game's intro song cut into pieces with each chunk heralding a different phase. Its pretty cool.
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Feb 13, 2015 12:54
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I'll try and make a bit more of an effort post later, but one thing I love about Nintendo's games is just how reliant they are on audio cues. Every single action you perform, movement etc will have a loud, vibrant sound to go with it. You never really get that with other studios.
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Feb 13, 2015 13:00
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Been replaying Thief Gold recently, and the sound in that is better than most games since. There is no sound track exactly, instead it seems to just continually play the same ambient samples continously until you get to the next part of the level. It works, it ratchetts up the tension easily.
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Feb 13, 2015 13:03
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DrAlexanderTobacco posted:I'll try and make a bit more of an effort post later, but one thing I love about Nintendo's games is just how reliant they are on audio cues. Every single action you perform, movement etc will have a loud, vibrant sound to go with it. You never really get that with other studios. You must not play many other games, then. A lot of games, especially platformers where its' easy, do this. It's a pretty central point of good video game sound design.
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Feb 13, 2015 13:04
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Among more recent games, I think that Elite:Dangerous really nailed many aspects of its sound design. For example, the ship's engines produce a Shepard tone while in supercruise, with the tone's direction indicating whether you are accelerating or decelerating.
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Feb 13, 2015 13:09
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Broken Cog posted:You must not play many other games, then. A lot of games, especially platformers where its' easy, do this. It's a pretty central point of good video game sound design. Probably  I don't play many platformers at all. I can remember Crash Bandicoot having shitloads of cues but that's it.
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Feb 13, 2015 13:34
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Conversely, any game that uses unaltered stock sound effects (Offenders including common overused sounds like these) really annoys me. Stock sound effects are fine for placeholders, but if you're going to be using them they're for mixing into other sounds so you have something new. With STALKER they spoke a lot about how they went to actual firing ranges to record the sounds for guns to make them as realistic as possible, and then in their next game all the guns used stock sound effects. It's ridiculous. Silent Hill 4, a game that comes from a series renowned for incredible sound work, has their most basic dog enemy uses the "Cougar roaring" noise from one of the videos I linked and it's completely out of place. It reeks of utter laziness, usually the sounds don't fit in with the game at all, and it's immediately noticable. Once you hear the sounds once or twice from different sources, you notice them everywhere. Guns are a tough one because in real life most guns don't actually sound like the hellcannons they're depicted to be in games and movies, but that's no excuse to just go with stock noises. Make your guns sound big and tough and powerful and it goes a long, long way to making the player feel like they're much more of a badass than your game is actually allowing them to be. Songbearer fucked around with this message at 14:14 on Feb 13, 2015 |
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Feb 13, 2015 14:11
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Whether or not you approve of the games behind them, you have to admire DICE's sound designers. From Battlefield Bad Company 2 onward, they've been using gun sounds recorded at ranges, but what really makes them stand out is how the sound of your gun changes depending on where you are. In open areas, they have a heavily delayed echo, in close quarters the bass is muffled and the while the reverb is loud it only lasts for a few milliseconds. Of course, zoning off areas for different effects on sounds is at least as old as Half-Life, but BFBC2 really took the technique to new heights.
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Feb 13, 2015 15:27
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i like games that layer tracks gradually until you go from a skeletal beat to a nice, full score. like the bit.trip games. sound design is one of those things for me where i don't really notice it when it's done well, but it sticks out when it isn't. one of my peeves is when scrolling text is accompanied by a "dit dit dit dit" sound for each letter like i'm reading a telegram. i really liked the sound for dead space at first, but it started to get tecious when the music sting happened EVERY TIME a monster popped out. in contrast, i remember system shock 2 having great sound without getting too in my face, though that might be nostalgia talking. one of my favorite sound moments was from ss2, when i heard someone say "i'm sorry" behind me, and i spun around and a hybrid was midway through swinging a wrench down on me. i thought that was very effective and well done.
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Feb 13, 2015 15:42
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Great Joe posted:Whether or not you approve of the games behind them, you have to admire DICE's sound designers. From Battlefield Bad Company 2 onward, they've been using gun sounds recorded at ranges, but what really makes them stand out is how the sound of your gun changes depending on where you are. In open areas, they have a heavily delayed echo, in close quarters the bass is muffled and the while the reverb is loud it only lasts for a few milliseconds. Here's a video from DICE that shows them firing a PKM, and recording from different positions to show the difference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNm3FtE1I0A
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Feb 13, 2015 15:45
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Songbearer posted:Conversely, any game that uses unaltered stock sound effects (Offenders including common overused sounds like these) really annoys me. Stock sound effects are fine for placeholders, but if you're going to be using them they're for mixing into other sounds so you have something new.
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Feb 13, 2015 15:45
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There is this one game that gradually builds up the music during a boss fight, and when you finally beat it, the music drops immediately, and ends in complete silence until you progress to the next area. Does anyone know which game this could be, I can't remember. I got a feeling it might have been Half Life 2, but I'm not entirely sure.
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Feb 13, 2015 15:47
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Riven was a masterpiece adventure game and the sound design contributed a lot to making an otherwise static scene come to life. Every little metallic creak and door opening had its own unique sound. Listening to the game on stereo headphones at night blew my mind back in 1997. There were also lots of little audio cues you wouldn't notice until you'd been through an area multiple times, like how Gehn's theme would appear in his areas of political influence on the islands, and Catherine's theme in the rebel hideouts. One of the two major puzzles in the game was even solvable by listening closely to the game sounds. I probably haven't even touched the game in over a decade but I can still recall the sound of the MagLev car and linking book cue.
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Feb 13, 2015 15:52
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Songbearer posted:Guns are a tough one because in real life most guns don't actually sound like the hellcannons they're depicted to be in games and movies, but that's no excuse to just go with stock noises. Make your guns sound big and tough and powerful and it goes a long, long way to making the player feel like they're much more of a badass than your game is actually allowing them to be. The double-barrelled shotgun from Doom 2 sounds like God slamming his car door.
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Feb 13, 2015 15:55
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The last few Battlefield games always had great sound design. Gunshots and explosions have a proper echoing effect and can be faintly heard almost from across the map, making for a pretty great background ambience that's pretty great in terms of immersion. Additionally, there are a bunch of different audio settings that give things a different feel, and the "War Tapes" setting is just amazingly, ridiculously loud and bombastic. Here's a pretty good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73LU_xx201c Edit: Whoops, beaten already. Perestroika fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Feb 13, 2015 |
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Feb 13, 2015 16:15
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I love this topic. Here are a few random thoughts to add to the discussion. Chime: Plenty of games have used sound in gameplay like PaRappa and Rock Band / Guitar Hero but Chime is incredible. For anyone who hasn't played it, it's like a top-down version of tetris where you're attempting to make 3x3 or larger squares and then grow them to eventually cover the board like qbert. Each level is a specific song. Depending on where / when you play your pieces the board plays samples of the song in tune and in time. To someone in the room but not watching you play, it would sound like a regular electronic song but it's being dynamically generated based on how you play. You will never hear the song the same way in two different sittings. It's probably the most relaxing and rewarding game I've played. Perfect thing to wind down with after work with a toke or a beer. The songs are gorgeous and the game is satisfying without being frustrating. Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-D5fHIX0OU Red Dead Redemption: I've heard a few other people say this but I've been playing games since I could hold a controller (I'm 30 atm) and the "entering Mexico for the first time" section of Red Dead Redemption is the only time I actually got chills playing a game. You're galloping along into this new stage of the game where you're genuinely excited to see where things go, and this solemn guitar song drops out of nowhere with this wild west vista all around you. I had the biggest loving grin on my face while it happened. Hats off to Rockstar. I think it's the fact that they used a song with lyrics in a travel situation of the game. That and the fact that while you aren't really doing anything complicated, you're still in control of the character. Felt like playing a travel montage from a Hollywood movie. Clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUXGW6sWYDY Wav files: The simplicity of older games that had just a folder of wav files that you could replace ended up giving my friends and I tons of hilarious hours playing things like Warcraft 2 where we recorded all of our own sound effects for hits, movement, attacks, deaths etc. I know you can still do this now and I've seen videos of Randy Savage being added as zombies from L4D that had me in tears laughing, but it always takes more effort now because game files are all compressed or encrypted or something where the barrier to entry is higher. I miss the days of navigating to a folder that said "Sound Effects" and then just replacing them with your own stuff. Man that was fun. L4D: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMqPG4S80bo Sound design can make or break a game and the technology behind good immersive music and sound effects will often go un-appreciated if it's doing its job correctly. It's the offensive line of videogames.
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Feb 13, 2015 16:27
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Anyone who played NiGHTS Into Dreams might remember the nifty thing they did with the music there. Basically the music was dependent on the 'happiness' of these little dudes littered about the level. Hatch them from their eggs and each one contributed to the level theme in some way, adding flourishes and changing it accordingly. Of course, being a score attack game, who's got time for faffing around with that but you could also play around with all the level themes in a special sound test which allowed you to set each little dude (of which there were about 6-8) to one of 5(?) status settings, and create loads of - and sometimes quite different - variations of a level's music. It's amazing how creative sound designers were in the past when they had a lot less to work with, whereas these days it kinda feels far less effort is made. "Just stream the LSO playing off the DVD and we're done."
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Feb 13, 2015 16:47
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exquisite tea posted:linking book cue. i am a real big fun of this sound effect. someday i would like to incorporate it into my smartphone, and it will be like opening a linking book from the myst games
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Feb 13, 2015 17:24
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Well, music back then was all waveforms, frequency modulation and samples. You can fit a whole lot more music in when all it is is a series of descriptors that makes the sound chip do the grunt work for. MIDI and MOD files are just plain tiny. Music in games nowadays is all lossless so the biggest limiting factor is track length, not track complexity. I do want to give a shout-out to Black Rock Studios for including a really clever music system in Split/Second. Each piece of music is actually a set of eight tracks. Two after the start and two for each lap including the first. Each track within each pair is set up to loop seamlessly but the first half of one track is actually the second half of the other. This means that if a crash happens multiple times in a single lap, the music doesn't rewind to the exact same place in the lap music every time. So not only does the music get more intense if you crash on a new lap, but it doesn't get repetitive if you crash on a lap that's already had a crash.
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Feb 13, 2015 17:38
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System shock 2 was mentioned, but really had excellent sound design. Graphics have aged, but the audio in general is well up to "modern" standards. (Released in 1999) Voice of the Many is still the coolest "edited voice" I've heard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp5xGLj1RME (Shodan is pretty cool too)
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Feb 13, 2015 18:37
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Earthbound https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50iBA0Y8PJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eti_Sn8e87s
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Feb 13, 2015 18:41
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toosa posted:System shock 2 was mentioned, but really had excellent sound design. Graphics have aged, but the audio in general is well up to "modern" standards. (Released in 1999) Even System Shock 1 was pretty drat great in this regard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vnh0l_Ecpx4&t=520s
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Feb 13, 2015 19:29
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Deadly Premonition was a sound experience alright. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa19-c1R_Qg
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Feb 13, 2015 19:50
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Perestroika posted:The last few Battlefield games always had great sound design. Gunshots and explosions have a proper echoing effect and can be faintly heard almost from across the map, making for a pretty great background ambience that's pretty great in terms of immersion. Additionally, there are a bunch of different audio settings that give things a different feel, and the "War Tapes" setting is just amazingly, ridiculously loud and bombastic. Here's a pretty good example: I never played BF4 but I was kind of disappointed with BF3's changes to the sound after bad company 2, which I think still has the best sound of anything I've played. The war tapes option in that game sounded just incredible. I probably played that game a good 50 hours longer than I would have without that amazing sound design. Compared to earlier battlefields the scope was much smaller, but they made both the gameplay and presentation so intelligently focused that it didn't feel like a lesser game at all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEGT-j3yHVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t25X9-e1x-0 Sound is so overlooked in favor of graphics. Owl Inspector fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Feb 13, 2015 |
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Feb 13, 2015 20:03
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DrAlexanderTobacco posted:Here's a video from DICE that shows them firing a PKM, and recording from different positions to show the difference This is really interesting, because it shows that what a thing sounds like is going to be heavily dependent on your recording hardware and positioning. Which one of those sounds was what the gun 'really' sounds like? Do any of them correspond to what you would hear with your ears if you were standing next to the microphone?
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Feb 13, 2015 20:45
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The Kins posted:For some reason I always get a kick out of stock sound effects. It's like having an old neighbour poke his head out of an otherwise-immersive experience and give you a big, friendly wave. I don't think there's anything wrong with using stock effects, I actually find it quite neat if you can figure out a good way to make them fun. The Wilhelm scream is the most famous example of a stock effect that has since gone on to become a huge running joke on multiple levels. e: To add some actual content, I always loved how the very early GTA games put in the extra mile to have their own custom soundtracks. Stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WRGNw0uu5k Was great. Really helped the world feel more alive and its own thing when you have music that was made for it and it alone. As much as I like NWA etc, I think that sort of thing is a bit of a lazy shortcut. Rush Limbo fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Feb 13, 2015 |
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Feb 13, 2015 21:01
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Broken Cog posted:Games that take sound and music design seriously are cool and fun, especially when they implement it into the gameplay itself: That was amazing. The first few seconds hit and I thought to myself "That sounds an awful lot like Black Betty" and then... I was expecting something along the lines of that when I bought Theayrhythm. I was disappointed. psymonkey posted:Earthbound Come on, post something better than that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_oc9Ypcb2Q Dynamic music was pretty popular with N64 platform games and it's something I've loved to hear ever since. You hear it a lot in Nintendo titles now that I think about it. I had no idea it went as far back as Monkey Island.
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Feb 13, 2015 21:55
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An interview with Terry Garrett, a blind man who beat Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23JgGAmCGVU The Oddworld series always had great audio. Every single object and action has a distinct audio cue to it. And being able to "talk" in the game gives a response from most enemies so you can pinpoint their location by saying "hi!"
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Feb 13, 2015 22:30
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It always blows my mind thinking about how they programmed music for all those NES and C64 games in the 80s. Creating all your patches/notes by manually setting the registry bits in assembly or whatever. loving crazy considering the results they got out of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf09oRuF3Eg
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Feb 13, 2015 22:43
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I was always a fan of the idea for music that the Souls games used, which was to (mostly) not have any music at all until boss fights. It seemed incredibly odd at first, but it turned out to be immersive and a major gameplay boon, letting you hear things in the distance to be ready for and giving all effects that much more impact. It helps that, in doing that, the music they DID have was that much more impressive as a result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs59egXnb3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9piElENpvmM Ciaphas fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Feb 14, 2015 |
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Feb 14, 2015 00:07
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I always loved the sound design in the King's Field games. The weird grunts and otherworldly sounds coming out of those crazy rear end monsters really freaked me out as a kid. The termites in particular. It's a good example of how effective you can be with not much to work with. And, every now and then, one of the sound effects shows up in a Souls game. It's the little things I appreciate. SolidSnakesBandana fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Feb 14, 2015 |
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Feb 14, 2015 00:12
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Songbearer posted:Conversely, any game that uses unaltered stock sound effects (Offenders including common overused sounds like these) really annoys me. Stock sound effects are fine for placeholders, but if you're going to be using them they're for mixing into other sounds so you have something new. I think I've heard this sound in almost every single game I've played for well over a decade. It's like the wilhelm scream of video games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcLrmmLcKDA
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Feb 14, 2015 01:00
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For me, Alien: Isolation had really impressive sound design -- as well as being just beautiful to look at and experience in general. Every drat vent, computer, door or console seems to hiss, whirr, chitter, clank or thud in a menacing manner, many things sounding very, very similar to the titular alien itself. The crackling, fizzing displays, the heart-stopping bleeps of the motion scanner... not to mention that bastard alien skittering through the vents, stomping around on the metal floors and screeching like a blender having rough, angry sex with a masonry drill. The whole thing felt industrial, stark, opressive and dark from start to finish thanks to the cacophony of noises throughout, even managing a nice, subdued dark ambient piece over the end credits that was a surprise and a treat, something to soothe you away to nightmare-riddled sleep.
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Feb 14, 2015 01:10
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i really like how FTL transitions seamlessly between exploration music and fight music, and with the way that most events in game have their own distinct sound effect, like weapons, atmosphere outgassing, teleportations, shield recharges, you could almost tell what's going on even if you're not watching the screen. your crew will die in a fire though if you actually do that, because fire is the silent killer.
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Feb 14, 2015 14:40
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The guns in Wolfenstien New Order sound really fuckin good, a small detail that sets it so far apart other current gen fpses
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Feb 14, 2015 14:46
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happyhippy posted:Been replaying Thief Gold recently, and the sound in that is better than most games since. The thief games did have ambient loops associated with different parts of the levels. There were also backing tracks like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xK6N3Z_c60 Eric Brosius was responsible for the sound design in both those games, as well as System Shock 2 mentioned above. He went on to work for Harmonix on Guitar Hero. Not sure what he's up to now but definitely an industry legend.
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