On 24/08/2013 09:46 AM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

> In the early days of home computing, we had games with ground-breaking
> graphical richness; games like Xenon 2, Disposable Hero, Flashback,
> Shadow of the Beast, Abe's Odyssey, and so on. Today it would be "easy"
> to make games like these; we've all got high-colour, high-resolution
> displays and terabyte harddisks. And yet... nobody makes games like
> these any more. They only make brown FPS games. (Again, maybe this one
> is about fashion rather than technology.)

What about game music?

There was a time when cranking out something that was more memorable 
than just bleeps and gurgles was really hard. The C64 may be iconic, but 
almost everything ever produced with it sounds extremely samey. Even 
with an Amiga, you've got a piffling four tracks, which means that you 
can play a maximum of four notes at once. (A little more if you start 
sampling chords.) If you want to leave tracks free for the game sound 
effects (i.e., if this is the background music not the title music), 
things get harder still. And yet, we had such great music that I 
actually went to all the trouble of recording it for posterity.

Today, it's *easy*. You can record ANYTHING YOU LIKE, save it as a tiny 
MP3 file, and include it with your game. You have unlimited audio 
tracks, you'll never run out of space for in-game sounds. And yet... 
well, let me put it this way. What's the last game you played where the 
music was particularly note-worthy? (See what I did there?)

In my case, it was Far Cry 3. Mainly because, after several hours of 
completely generic suspense / battle scene music (broken dubstep), I 
suddenly found myself listening to Skrillex feat. Damien Marley. (??!) 
If I heard this on the radio I wouldn't even notice, but it's so 
jarringly out of place here... Later on, I find myself making my escape 
in a helicopter to the tune of... no, seriously... FLIGHT OF THE 
VALKYRIES?! How original. :-P

To some extent, game music is mostly incidental music now, and 
incidental isn't SUPPOSED to be noticed. (Can you remember the 
background music to that episode of Horizon you watched the other 
night?) But really, the art of great game music seems to be lost.



The other night, I had a look on Steam's Greenlight thing. (You know, 
where they let starving game developers put their stuff on Steam if 
enough people vote for it.) The staggering majority of these seem to be 
retro-style games with giant pixels. Because if you render giant pixels, 
you don't need to do as much drawing. That seems to be basically it. 
People seem to think that if you make it "look retro", that 
automatically makes it appealing.

What's especially galling is that many of these games have graphics that 
wouldn't have been possible back in the day (in terms of number of 
colours on screen at once, amount of animation per frame, etc.), yet 
look far less interesting than the games of old. I guess when everything 
is easy, you try less hard or something.

In fairness, there was also a game featuring "a new game engine built 
from the ground up", which honestly looked like it might even give 
CryEngine a run for its money. The actual *game* surrounding it looked 
astonishingly dull. Not to say it's unoriginal - it seemed to have some 
genuinely novel ideas - but the gameplay trailer was singularly 
unimpressive. Given how almost all the product description talks about 
the engine technology, you can see where the three developers' focus is.

I also saw one game where you start off playing on a simulated green LCD 
screen (which honestly LOOKS like a GameBoy or something), and it goes 
through the "evolution" of gaming history. Which sounds utterly lame, 
until you see that the final, fully 3D levels are... actually quite 
polished. It looks like they actually did the whole concept quite well, 
rather than using it as a cheap prop to hide the fact they had no ideas.

Finally, I managed to find one game which, while it has a suspiciously 
low graphical resolution and the animation looks a bit suspect, does at 
least ATTEMPT to be a graphically rich extravaganza in the style of 
Flashback or Abe's Odyssey. It looks fairly good, actually.

And, of course, because these are all starving game devs, this stuff is 
cheap.

Then again... DLC Quest? A game where you have to collect enough coins 
to "buy" new "DLC" that actives game features like "being able to walk 
in both directions"? Seriously, this is more of a sarcastic joke than a 
game I'd actually want to play. :-P

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