Does anyone here think that good sound and music can really help to change a game with not so good graphics? I think that sound plays a greater role than the visuals in a game so much so that people would less notice a game's flaws. Look at all the original arcade stuff like PacMan!
One thing to take into consideration is the state of the industry. Pac-Man came out when the industry was still in its infancy. It was games like that that formed the foundation of what we do now and what we play now.
Music and sound are pivotal to the gaming experience in the modern age. A game with bad graphics can easily become memorable with a great soundtrack. Likewise, a game with "OMG S00P3R L33T!!!!!!!111111" graphics can bomb bigtime without the right sound. I for one have always argued that music and sound are vastly more important than graphics in a game. A good recent example of this is Quest For Opa-Opa...it's a text game, it has no graphics at all! Yet it has a great soundtrack which enhances the mood of the game and in the end, becomes quite a memorable experience. A game with "OMG R33T GFX PWNSZ J00!!!!!111111" might make a big splash with kids but doesn't cut it with adult gamers.
Games I do not know much about, but I know that a chief editor
(or whatever) for a audio/video magazin has recommended that
if you want to create your home cinema, it is more important to
upgrade the sound system than buying a big screen...
A game with stunning GFX and crappy sound still manage, I usually disable sound in games after i've played them a few hundred times.
On the other hand, disabling gfx is kind of hard, and a small gfx glitch will sting in your eyes more and more each time you see it
I need sound, and it has to be good sound too, Graphics has secondary nature to me. Of course, a good story is still far and away the most important.
Good sound would be a certainly awesome thing if it would be so easy to create it like the graphic...
(I mean here that if nothing else, MSPaint is there for everybody. Or much better: Gimp if somebody has Linux. But anything what can be used to easily start making sounds or music... Such software is just some sort of nice dream)
Quote:Good sound would be a certainly awesome thing if it would be so easy to create it like the graphic...
(I mean here that if nothing else, MSPaint is there for everybody. Or much better: Gimp if somebody has Linux. But anything what can be used to easily start making sounds or music... Such software is just some sort of nice dream)
Dream? Try modplug or impulse tracker. Or a midi sequencer. :wink:
I have some trackers including ModPlug, and i tried to create music with the same effort like i tried to create computer graphic. From that last you can see some little example at my homepage: the logo, and the yellow cheetah - outlines were made using Deluxe Paint II, and were converted with Gimp. The background was made with Gimp as well. But i could not get to generate any simple tone in these softwares yet, although i wrote a 100% QB FM midi player (sorry, it is not downloadable yet, hopefully will be available with the next update after some weeks). I could only get to somewhere with some very old FM trackers.
Sound is a big thing for me... games with a great musical score (*coughHomeworldcoughAceCombat5cough*) are only helped by their sound.
--j_k
When I added sound to Star Phalanx, it defintitely felt like a more solid title, While a solid title with solid graphics will last on it's own, sound make it more visceral, so in games which require a visceral touch, sound is important.
On the other hand, Secret of Cooey 1 had excellent music(especially using wavetable synth with SBMIDI /3), but all it caused was dissonance with the games EGA graphics, causing more problems than it solved.