What is your opinion on the music in games today?

Sebs_316

Question in the topic.
Personally, my opinion on this subject is that these days most of the games out there have pretty good music. Although the musical scores from most of the new Final Fantasy games and the new games such as Team Fortress 2, have game music that is starting to go more towards orchestra like instrumental music with the occasional large rock soundtrack (a la "Blow me Away" in Halo 2). I think that there should be more rock music tracks in video games. Your thoughts folks?

trogdor9

I think Portal actually pulled off the music pretty well.  It goes mostly unnoticed, but if you pay attention you realize how much it adds to the experience.  Often it is simply an ambient futuristic-sounding tune, while sometimes, (spoilers avast, highlight to read:) like in the "Baking" sequence you notice the more upbeat suspense-building music before you portal to the other side.  Also, "Still Alive" from the end credit sequence is simply brilliant.
I also have high hopes for the Smash Brothers Brawl soundtrack.

Dave

Source engine games need to do a better job at integrating their soundtracks so they aren't so obvious when they show up. Seriously, across the board they're all super quiet and then just slap you in the face when they need music. And generally it's a good pump up when you need to kill you some soldiers or not get burned into a fire, but it's a real shock to the system.

xenomouse

Hands down, the best soundtrack for any video game made ever is the the soundtrack for Quake - not bloody two nor three nor four, but the original one. It was made by Trent Reznor, and it is awesome (the first 1:30 is from the soundtrack).



It's funny that this topic came up, because the past couple days I've been listening to the first track (see the YouTube link above) to get myself pumped up for work.

clx

Source engine games need to do a better job at integrating their soundtracks so they aren't so obvious when they show up. Seriously, across the board they're all super quiet and then just slap you in the face when they need music. And generally it's a good pump up when you need to kill you some soldiers or not get burned into a fire, but it's a real shock to the system.

I agree, the Valve games have some good tracks but they don't exactly creep up on you. Halo is almost the same but do a better job of leading up to tracks, although they get round some of the integration by having most tracks at the cutscenes when they can fully correograph what is happening on screen. Apart from that there aren't many other games that have tracks good enough to notice, even if they do use the tracks well.

Andrew

Morrowind and Oblivion had excellent soundtracks.

Apreche

Tribes 2. The way that game played music to pump you up as it was loading the map was perfection unto itself. Many games have come close, but none have yet matched it.

Starfox

"Blow me Away" in Halo 2

God, I love this song. It's good stuff.

JukeBoxJosh

I had this discussion with my English teacher!
Well, I think that some video game music is pretty lame, like for Super Smash Bros. Brawl, for example. They're basically doing the sames songs over again, with little changes in the presentation. That's why we (Ms. Teacher and I) have a bunch of remixes and covers of video game music, because we think that these songs have so much potential and that the musicians who created them aren't willing to get a little weird or absurd with their stuff. Like, for example, one of my English teacher's most loved songs is the 1-Ups' version of a Zelda medley with a whole bunch of silly things going on, and mine is the Super Mario Dirty Mix that has bits of stuff from other songs all put together to make a nice Mario theme.
That's pretty much our 30 minute conversation summed up.

bodtchboy

Since they don't sell the music soundtrack, does anyone know how to get the soundtracks out of the game? I'd love to listen to some of the music in my mp3 player.

VentureJ

Portal's ending song was brilliant, though.

Sebs_316

Yeah the portal music was really good and well placed. Like when you go into the first little secret area where it has the scrawl of 'the cake is a lie', and I have noticed what you said xenomouse, especially with Half-Life 2.

MitchyD

"Blow me Away" in Halo 2God, I love this song. It's good stuff.


It's not really that good - it's got a catchy and cool opener. The Half Life music, from what I can tell via Fast Karate intro/outros, is pretty rad. BioShock had awesome 30's tunes and my all time favorite is Metal Gear Solid.

Johannes Uglyfred II

Morrowind and Oblivion had excellent soundtracks.

Pretty much every game score composed by Jeremy Soule is freaking awesome.

Mr. Eric

Live orchestras are great for sound tracks. I'm liking the idea of basing a game off Chopin, the wonderful piano composer. Its called Eternal Sonata and looks awesome.

Kiey

I think its a very similar situation with music in games, being a lot like music in movies. For the most part orchestral music works with any genre, but then of course videogames also tend to have settings where orchestral fits better then any other type of music (i.e. Fantasy settings, WWII games, etc.) But then there are also instances where a more rock oriented style works better (although usually that can be swapped with a techno style usually fairly easily which I don't think you could necessarily do in a movie.)

bunnikun

Chrono Cross, FFX, and Legend of the Dragoon all had excellent soundtracks.

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time also had an awesome soundtrack for its age.

T045T

"Bandits: Phoenix Rising" had some pretty good music IMHO. It's kinda split up into what amounts to one album for each fraction (Wolfpack, kinda Funk; The Flaming Pumpkins, Punk/Metal; Crusaders, umm...."Military Rock"?; and Enclave, Electronic).
Plus all the songs are already .OGGs in one of the game's folders (;

Diddgery

I freaking love me some video game music. The majority of the music on my hard drive is video game soundtracks, remixes, orchestrated albums, and the like. There are some games that I only like because they have good music (such as Riviera for the GBA).

When it comes to music in games today.. I think there's been a lot of good music coming out of games released recently. If the three arranged albums are any indication, the music of the Ace Attorney series holds water pretty well on its own. MOTHER 3, while I have yet to play it, has a soundtrack good enough to warrant a release on the iTunes store (twice, actually - it has two separate albums, MOTHER 3i and MOTHER 3+). I consider the Odin Sphere soundtrack a masterpiece and really wish that an official soundtrack would be released sometime soon so I could be able to listen to the music at any time. Shadow of the Colossus has an absolutely amazing soundtrack. And while it may be too early to say, the soundtrack for Super Smash Bros. Brawl is looking to be incredible.

...Though, to be honest, I find it difficult for me to not enjoy music in the games that I play. You could say that it's because I have certain feelings that I associate with certain pieces of music - I'm not sure how many other people would enjoy listening to the ending theme to Kirby Super Star, but I love the song because it reminds me of when I first beat the final boss of Kirby Super Star. That, and... well, the ending theme to Kirby Super Star IS a good song.

I'm starting to ramble, so I'll cut to the chase: Video game music is great. I like other music, of course, but video games are where I hear the majority of the music I enjoy.

Li_Akahi

I enjoyed the soundtracks to Kingdom Hearts I and II. If you liked those soundtracks, I would suggest you track down a copy of the Original Soundtrack Complete (it has nine discs!) on Bittorent.

HMTKSteve

I hear the in game music on Guitar Hero 3 kicks ass.

cosmicenema

I hear the in game music on Guitar Hero 3 kicks ass.

Wait what?