Are there two "t"s in the word? Actually, it doesn't matter. Either way it smells of filth and everything wants to kill you. Repeatedly.

The sound design of Blighttown is AMAZING. Well, occasionally the sound developer at From Software screwed up and the hideous rapey caterwhaul of the monsters gets stuck in an unending loop and you want to tear your earballs out. But this IS Dark Souls a la the hideous torment we remember as Demon's Souls so they may have felt that was beside what they deem to be quality.

QUALITY. Blight town is a quality gaming experience and you never want to go back. It is the furthest point from safety. It is the rotting carcass of a completely forgotten squashed OMG I haven't bathed in days. I am actually going out in public smelling of tepid cold weather body stink because I had to fight through blighttown's horrible maze again and it's the last thing I do before I go to work in the morning. Because it's awesome. Because the sound design is almost perfect. Every scraping nail and rotting creeky board is in there and it is glorious like Lovecraft. And if this were a Lovecraftian tale of torment or some classical wisp of intrigue we deem as suspense it would not be enough for the developers. Because after you struggle through the dark and sinister slime of countless, relentless flies that STAB you when you weren't expecting. Because after you scream at the top of your lungs that you just WANT TO BE AWAY FROM HERE. I DON'T CARE IF I HAVE TO COME BACK JUST LET ME BE ALLAYED FROM THESE GODDAMN FLIES FOR ONE FUCKING MINUTE..

Then you win.

And someone may have helped you, but regardless, somehow. You beat her. You beat the sexy chaos spider witch. Let me repeat that. The VERY sexy gloriously bussomed but strangely lipped chaos spider witch with a 10-foot dick-shaped fiery spear of horror. You actually kill her when she's just finished spewing another thousand gallons of FATAL MAGMA at you. I'm not spoiling anything for you because it's really that crazy.

And then you enter hell. It's the funniest game ever. But really, the sound design is almost perfect. Someone tell that wily haired weirdo at From Software that he needs to read the testers' reports. Because he fixed the music from the last game. So obviously he's not just snorting 30-year old Quaaludes and taking up precious studio hours.

Man, just finished playing this game and is it ever great. It's probably one of the best looking games ever and the graphics are great too. The thing with the health thingy is cool. Then there were violins and I was scared. I was sarcastic but that wasn't even the start of it. More violins! Then there was a thing with a huge spiked cock coming out of its shoulder and violins and I was scared. Then there were bright flashing lights and I got scared. Then I got scared by some big thing that looked like the other Necrophiles but bigger and violins and I was like, "the sound design is amazing (Kotaku, 2009)." But I wasn't too worried because I knew that I could goozex the game whenever I wanted because I posted it for trade after playing it for another hour and some other dingbat was gonna be playing it soon.

This is an evil horrible thing. Sony of America will pay for this with every ounce of human liquid I can eviscerate from the toothy sacks that they call a QA department.

Destructoid gave me this machine, and Sony took it away. Because I was just a middleman in the affair, I expect there to be an official agreement that Hamza can punch someone in the throat.

But, because THIS happened, I have gotten a chance to play Silent Hill: Shattered Memories on my magically functioning PS2. Upon popping the game in, I have been greeted with some awesome sound design which is only brought down by the questionable decisions by the developers.



Gameplay and atmosphere aside, Shattered Memories sounds fantastic! This time, the music plays more of a cinematic role, with very unnerving ambient music floating in whenever the player moves into a new environment. The environments in the game are pretty mundane, and the music does a great job of opening up the player's imagination to unseen dangers. But the issue of danger is actually a serious problem in the game, because although haunting music and the jarring sounds of cackling infants are intensely effective in arousing my feelings of weakness, the game very explicitly separates the monsters into one distinct world that you spend about 1/8th of the game in. The rest of the time, the game has gone out of the way to let me know that nothing can hurt me. That is stupid, and arrogant.


The developers really thought they were so good at psychological horror that they could get by on the "OMG that's creepy!" moments that come from the little messages and mildly weird junk that the world is populated with. But because I know EXACTLY what the conditions are for my character to be in danger, my doubt fades, my boredom rises, and my frustration and ability to enjoy the awesome sound design is greatly dampened. It's a shame, because if the same music and sound design were applied to a less contrived and well-designed game world, this game would be fucking fantastic.

Yamaoka 1. Climax 0.

Can music be more persuasive to a player than gameplay? Hell yes it can.

It took me a couple months after getting my PS3 to grab Brutal Legend, but before I had the ability to play the game, it was the game for me, and I had to have it. And it's not because I love Jack Black, and Tim Shafer's involvement only assured me that this game was going to get released no matter what. The reason I wanted to play Brutal Legend is because it was the first time I saw a video game that was openly stating that the music would be the central theme of the game design. This promo made me come:



Now, plenty and plenty of games have an extreme focus on sound and music to guide and reinforce gameplay, but only two or three come to my mind that used music as the central component of the game, and Vib Ribbon is just too crazy to compare with anything. So that leaves Brutal Legend in a subtly amazing position, and its effect is seen on thousands of youtube comments like this:



I'm a huge fan of many different varieties of metal, and Brutal Legend exposed me to at least three new bands whom I am now obsessed with, including one which I had previously dismissed. By selecting such a huge compendium of Metal masterpieces, Brutal Legend has become the most ass-kicking metal anthology of all time, and it will live on forever as a Rosetta Stone of how all the different bands represented on its soundtrack all connect to a cohesive lore and artistry that is Metal.

Even GTA: Vice City or San Andreas don't achieve this level of musical glory, since the games' music was more of an ambient recreation of the eras, while every single frame of Brutal Legend feels perfectly married to the music, and even the most trudgingly awful moments of tedious strategy gameplay are redeemed by the continuous symphony of Metal imagery and music. For that reason, I'm going to hold on to Brutal Legend forever, to ensure that when my children are born, I can put the controller from my decrepit old PS3 in their hands, and show them how important music can be to the world.

The gamer is passionate about their hobby. They can focus intense amounts of mathematical and logical data in order to defeat incredibly powerful enemies. Cooking Mama taught me how to make udon, and Ultima Online taught me how to treat people respectfully even under the harshest of temptation.

So, the question that may have occasionally scratched at the corner of the gamer's mind is "what am I really learning to do here?" You are using a lot of brainpower in order to find the blue key for the blue door so that the old wizard can give you 27 chrystals, and we gamers rarely have the luxury of a logical narrative to motivate us in performing these arcane tasks. The rules of maneuvering through the environment, and working with the NPCs and online players is a very complicated task which is training all gamers to do something very well. Modern sociology has nearly accepted the notion that all human culture is transmitted through our social lives, and only our survival needs seem to represent a greater importance to human beings. In this case, online gamers are some of the most socially active human beings on the planet within their virtual world, with much more opportunity to conquer complex tasks with other people than at our micro-managed jobs or decaying physical communities. It would be nice to imagine that all the time I've spent playing games has honed some useful part of my social ability, and that the virtual connections we live out through the internet are trasferrable to the real world.

Jane McGonigal is trying to answer these question, and she has a pretty sharp talk she recently gave at the TED conference




I hope she doesn't turn out to be full of shit.

Oddworld came into existence at a fantastic time for gaming. The shift from 2D to 3D was still stumbling about, and the industry had just come out of the incredible streak of games released on the Genesis and Super Nintendo. The makers of Oddworld: Abe's Odysee called themselves Oddworld Inhabitants, and they created a game which was beautiful, bizarre, odd, and highly innovative. The game shines in every single aspect of production, but for now; I'm concerned with the game's sound and its sound alone, and there's plenty to get in to.



The most innovative feature of Abe's Odysee is the voice of Abe and the other stumpy Mudokons which you encounter. You are able to make Abe say a few different prompts by holding down an L button and a face button including: two different whistles, a hello, a giggle, an angry hiss, "come here", "wait", and a glorious fart. Each sound is used in a game you play with other Mudokons, which is virtually just a game of Simon Says which joyfully ends with a fart every time. The most endearing sound in Abe's voice is the boyish giggle he makes after he lets one loose.

Back in 1997 this kind of sound interactivity was almost unheard of, although PaRappa the Rapper was released in the previous year. The game's Simon Says tasks fall into an audio category which Karen Collins, a game sound author, calls "adaptive audio". Adaptive audio is any sound in a game which reacts to a players input; like gunshots or in our case, a cute little fart. The difference between Oddworld's approach and previous examples of adaptive audio is that the skill of memorizing the sequence of sounds creates a slower and more methodical feeling, and the ultimate effect is that you truly feel like you are talking to the other Mudokons with a special language which you and them share. This conversation illusion is evident at the beginning of every encounter, where you must reciprocate the other Mudokon's "hello" before they start to speak with you. While PaRappa the Rapper used adaptive audio to create a purely technical challenge for the player, Oddworld uses the input of the player to immerse them in a foreign world, while also maintaining a technical challenge to keep it fun and realistic.

An interesting thing to note before I get into the other voices is that ALL the voices in ALL the Oddworld games were voiced by one person. Lorne Lanning is his name, and he's a badass. But Abe's Odysee only includes one other fully voiced character within the gameplay, and it's the Sligs.



Sligs are vile, nasty creatures with snouts that look like an ill fitting glove. The sligs are mean as bees, and their voices portray this with a mixture of croaky mumbles and grumbly exclamations. The points in the game where you can control the sligs allows you to talk as one, but it's much more satisfying to make them shoot eachother. The sligs have a ton of attitude, and they're at their most crude when one kills Abe and lets out oa few victory croaks.

The last character voice I wanted to note isn't really a character at all, but a horse-camel-kangaroo dinosaur thing called an Elum. The Elums are very obedient and sweet, and it makes my heart flutter every time I hear one make a mournful moo-howl whenever you ask it to stay behind, they're just adorable.



ATMOSPHERE! This game has loads of it, and it is conveyed through a few different ways. If you're inside the slimy metallic factory setting of Rupture Farms, there's grinding noises and a general soundscape of what I can only describe as mechanical tedium. If you're in the desert setting of Scrabania, there's a lot of animal noise in the background, with an abundance of half cricket-owl noises throughout. These sounds were nothing revolutionary in video game sound design, but they were presented with such detail and care that still today they outperform other titles in the depth and imagery contained within them. The real experiment going on in Abe's Odysee was it's adaptive score.

In video games, an adaptive score is a musical arrangement which changes based on the player's actions. A recent masterpiece of an adaptive score was Shadow of the Collosus, wherein the music would begin as suspenseful and minimal, then slowly build in intensity and OMG-ness once the player had mounted the colossus. In Oddworld, the score will add in exciting drum fills whenever Abe was jumping a particularly treacherous cliff or if he had unwitingly alerted a nearby Scrab of his presence. The drums can get a bit annoying at times, but when they are implemented right, they add a dramatic tension to several segments of the game that make the tedious trial and error gameplay into a much more tolerable, and downright exciting gameplay experience. Adaptive scores have been around since the speeding up of the music at the end of a timer in Super Mario World, but Abe's Odysee really stepped up the whole concept by making it into a more spontaneous effect.

That's it, with science.