GAC(k!)

1. Why Do Game Soundtracks Have to SUCK So Bad!?

i mean really, if i have to listen to one more overly-dramatic, pounding-bass, timpani-and-tuba, sturm-und-drang, up-to-eleven, no-dynamics, "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we had full choir!?" piece-of-crap game soundtrack, i'm gonna do what so many customers do, and just turn the damn thing OFF!

But what annoys me is NOT that there are so many hack composers doing John Williams soundalikes who've never conducted a real orchestra in their lives (raises hand, guilty!), or that so many game soundtracks are BADASS and FUNKY and IN YOUR FACE (yo, buddy, get the fuck outa my face, will ya? i'm trying to play a game here!!), or, oh, oh, my favorite conceit: adding noise to a digital recording of sampled instruments to make it sound "retro" ... grrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!

no, THAT's not what annoys me most ... what absolutely kills me is ==> here we have these outrageously powerful desktop machines, easily producing many more channels of audio than were available to $100,000 mixing consoles just a few years ago -- and THIS is the best we can come up with!? tired, recyled 50's gladiator movie soundtracks? the Matrix again and again? heavy metal guitar cliche after cliche ... ach! my ears!! gimme the volume control ...

Where is the creativity to exploit the astonishing audio technology these game platforms represent? Where is the console game soundtrack that's like nothing i've ever heard before, that makes me go "woah, nice! how'd they do that?" Xbox 360 supports over two HUNDRED simultaneous channels of hi-rez stereo audio streams ... can't we use this for something more musically intriguing, more aesthetically adventurous, more rhythmically fascinating, more emotionally riveting, more spiritually enlightening, than simply going boom-boom-boom while bullets whiz past your head!?

(Note: most interesting soundtrack i've heard this year ... electroplankton for Nintendo DS!)

2. Games That Break Their Own Paradigm

this one really sets my teeth on edge! look, mr. game designer, mr. license publisher, mr. big-time hollywood producer ... if i'm gonna shell out my hard earned bucks for a Batman game, there better not be a scene where Batman picks up a gun and shoots the bad guy in the head, right? Bats, he don't do that, and if i wanted to shoot bad guys in the head, i'd play Grand Theft Auto!

I see this kind of thing all the time ... years ago, i played "Star Trek: Borg", and in the opening cinematic, you're a starfleet cadet at the Battle of Wolf 359, you've been hit, the captain has ordered Abandon Ship, and then Q (the trickster) comes to you and sez "i'm giving you a choice:

     (A) follow your orders, or

     (B) go back in time to screw around with historical events for completely personal reasons"

Now, any good Starfleet Cadet knows that you follow orders (duh!) **especially** when Q (the devil) shows up offering you some whacky deal. So i pressed (A), fully expecting Q (the prankster) to say "Fu-Q, buddy, i'm sending you back anyway, good luck with that!" which would've been just like him. let's face it, folks, Q is kind of an asshole!

BUT instead ... the game ENDED, stopped, thanks for playing, please try again! The only way to actually play the game was to choose to follow Q against Captain's Orders, and that's just so out of character, so lame, so non-Trekkie, it ruined the whole experience for me. really people, did you even WATCH the show!?

And the trend continues: i recently played a cell phone game called "Peter Jackson's King Kong" because i absolutely LOVE that movie. i've seen the original many times, and the new one is simply a marvel of technology and romance, so when it shows up in a long list of incomprehensible titles and anime graphix, i push "buy, please!"

And of course, it's Donkey Kong ... now this doesn't bother me much. given the power and screen size of cell phones, it's fine, and i use the 12-key pad to jump lo-rez canyons and climb aliased cliffs, until (uh-oh) i run into one of those pesky dinosaurs, and 5-5-5-5-5 bim bam boom, i beat it down, followed by a good chest thumping and monstrous victory roar (which sounds like an extended mouse fart on the cell phone speaker). All well and good, this is what casual gaming is all about, i'm happy ... until i notice that the dead dinosaur is highlighted as a powerup. i walk over to it and then ... Kong EATS the dinosaur!!!

AAAARGH, damn it!! Did any of the game's developers actually watch "Peter Jackson's King Kong"!? ... it's kind of a plot point: Kong is a VEG-E-TA-RI-AN ... he's an enormous mountain gorrilla, the ultimate alpha male silverback, he'll take on Three Tyranosaurs at the same time to protect the woman he loves, but all he really wants to do is kick back at the penthouse and munch on yummy bamboo shoots while the little lady entertains him with that crazy dance all the cool kids are doing these days.

In the movie, dinosaurs (and all humans except naomi watts) are enemies, not food, and yet now on my cell phone, i'm treated to a lovely little lo-rez animation of Kong tearing into a dead raptor, guts flying, bright red blood, gobbling down flesh, bleah!!! so stupid, so out of character, flip! i'll never play that game again ... but of course, i'll never see that $5 again either!!

3. Preaching To The Choir

Personally, i love speaking at conferences, partly because it's fun to talk about shit you know, but mostly because "on stage in front of an audience" is one of the places i feel most comfortable (ya gotta remember, i made a living as a piano player for many years before falling into the wacky world of multimedia audio).

And i love listening to my peers and colleagues talk about their shit as well, and while some sessions are memorable (like tommy's audio keynote at GDC 99), others informative and technical, and many complete crap (like the "how to make money as a musician in the games industry" roundtable where one of the panelists was asked a question about taxes, and replied "i don't know, i declared bankruptcy last year!"), for the most part, sessions are simply the best places to meet and greet, and take care of business.

But one thing that constantly annoys me about conferences is the "preaching to the choir" aspect of so many presentations. this is not limited to audio gatherings, and certainly there's an appeal to saying things you know your audience will understand and appreciate, but still ... every time i hear somebody bitch and moan about dealing with producers who don't understand the technical requirements of audio development, or how not to get screwed on the money, or the problems associated with assembling soundtracks using database management tools, i always think:

yes, absolutely, no question, i get it, i understand, i feel your pain, i can relate, i do that all the time myself BUT i'm not the guy you should be telling this to! The guy who should be listening to this impassioned rant, this plea for sonic goodness, this blueprint for life, liberty and the pursuit of audio happiness, is snoring through a "new markets for casual games in asia" session down the hall. The tool programmers are at microsoft-sponsored technical sessions no musician could make heads or tails of, and the bean counters aren't even in the building (they rarely let them out of their cages to begin with, and *certainly* not to listen to a bunch of lunatic audio guys!)

And Guess What: I'm Doing It Myself Right Now!! you, gentle reader, are most likely a media industry professional, or student of computer generated soundtracks, or at least somehow interested in interactive audio, or god forbid, an actual musician --- but you're most probably NOT a game producer, or tool developer, or money manager (and if you are, excuse me, but why are you reading digitalmedia.oreilly.com? usually we talk about file formats, and wierd audio devices, and then there's all that photography stuff that goes right over my head).

It's really a crying shame that all these great conference presentations, brilliant audio ideas, solid arguments, sound solutions to real problems, and effective methods of making noise for fun and profit, are NOT falling on deaf ears! everybody in this audience can already hear exactly what i'm talking about, and the message never goes out to the people who actually need to listen to it, who have never heard it before, who don't even know there is a problem, who could actually DO something about the problem if they knew if it existed, who actually have the power to make things better ...

(sigh) it's SO annoying!!!

      - pdx

cheers, jeers, and audio topics that annoy you can be sent to the annoying audio guy ...