The Weekly Nuke: Symphony of Destruction – Wrap Up

Well, it was a bit of a quiet one this week as we settle back into the regular Weekly Nukes, but I’m back again to give you the highlights.

On The Forums

I kicked things off by sharing a particular depiction of an orchestra in gaming, dredged up from memory.

Oh, for the days when that was actually quite an epic ident. Moving on, a few favourites were quickly expressed. From bobtindy:

My first thought was the feeling of running through the world in Okami with orchestral swells and a trail of flowers behind you being a breathtaking moment when first playing the game. I since found out that the sound was made with samples and not a real orchestra. It’s still gorgeous though.

Adushan stepped up:

Final Fantasy (number). My personal fav was 8, but they all rocked. Oh and Tomb Raider, and Gran Turismo, and World of Warcraft, and Halo, and Castlevania, and…

At which point I just had to make a little grumpy point about sample quality:

Actually, I think the PS1 FF games were an excellent example of how to do a great musical score and then slightly ruin it with shit samples. It’s not like the PS wasn’t capable of pulling off great sampled sounds, compare the FF soundtrack with Chrono Cross. At times FF8 sounds like a badly made midi, with horrible sounding strings at times and very poor woodwinds.

Since I have all the room I like to elaborate here, I’d just add that it’s not even necessarily the sounds used but the attention to detail on the mixing. For example, you might have very quiet strings followed by a woodwind that sounded like it was playing right in your ear. For the orchestra effect to really work, the samples can’t all sound like they were recorded in different rooms at different volumes. But anyway, nicojay had a few suggestions to follow, such as:

If you want me to recall music within a game that I know was performed by an actual orchestra that felt truly fitting/appropriate, I would recall fondly the music to Outcast. Performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra no less.

Later, he had this to say:

Sorry to be a dick (not that sorry though :twisted:) I don’t understand how people can like orchestral music added to JRPGs; the music is often so much better than the playing. For me this dissonance is like being poked in the eye (and ear, with a wet willy).

Mm. I’m not going anywhere near that one.

A shout out to the Halo series was overdue; whatever you think of the game it can’t be denied that the music is used to great effect. Faye provides:

The absolute standout for me is the opening to Halo 3: ODST. that game made me feel like I was plummeting to earth. And the soundtrack still does.

I remember the final run in Halo 3 being incredibly intense. The installation is exploding all around me, being harried by Sentinels and Flood all of the way, losing control, regaining it and the main theme playing over it, like it was designed for that moment in particular from the inception. it doesn’t have the same pop with me anymore, but any time a moment is marked my the main theme in a game I think is a good time.

Yeah, busting out the main theme in a moment of climax is a time worn trope, just think about Back to the Future for some great examples of that. There was a bit more talk about Final Fantasy and how wonderful 8′s soundtrack was, which made me start lamenting how rarely the brilliant work of LucasArts in the 90s comes up in discussion of great soundtracks, which so often tend to be Japan-centric. So began a huge digression in which I suggested Monkey Island 2 as required listening to anyone interested in game soundtracks, Faye disagreeing that anything should be considered required listening, and so on. I’m paraphrasing a little, but you can go and look.

Well, it’s all a bit academic really, but let me just speak as a musician, composer and game music enthusiast. I love the Monkey Island 2 soundtrack and it gives me the warm fuzzies all over. But that’s not the reason – or at least not the only reason – I’d describe something as required listening.

Some creative works are just Important – not because they’re magically superior to others or that you have to like them – they’re still as subject to taste as everything else. But they’re Important because they help to explain a bit about a medium’s history or put it into context in some way, or are instructive. So, an Important work of game design might be Portal. Puzzle design, Braid. Filmmaking, Tom and Jerry meet Sherlock Holmes. You get the idea.

All these and more I’d recommend to anyone with a genuine interest in those particular areas, and for reasons I go into on the Forum, I believe Monkey Island 2 more than qualifies. And if it seems to you like I am merely using the space of this Wrap Up column to make the same point I made in the Forums, just because I can, then I say to you…

…oh, is that the time?

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Look out for the next round of The Weekly Nuke soon.