Game Music
I would admit that I have a very large amount of game music on my iTunes, in fact I probably have an equal share of game music to any other of my music. My friend and I are both planning to play Final Fantasy 10: Hymn of Fayth at our funerals, as we both love Nobuo Uematsu’s work in the final fantasy series. Which brings me to another point the importance of music and sound in a game. Music sets the tone and the atmosphere in the game and can be compared to horror films such as when they use violins to heighten the mood and when the victim opens a door only to find….absolutely nothing.
However if the music isn’t done quite right then chances are it will hider the players experience as such music (especially when looped over and over (FF7 battle music I found partially annoying)).
http://www.errormacro.com/2006/08/the_worst_songs_in_video_games.php A link saying the top 15 worst songs in history, fairly amusing.
I adore Final Fantasy music however I also find that Martin O’Donnell’s work on the Halo series particularly good and of course listening to WoW’s Legend of Azeroth still gets me pumped up.
Of course a powerful and popular score for a game can result in success and can lead to the music being available to purchase, such as the Final Fantasy series for example.
However due to the increase in popularity of games in general, the music of such games have caused a car out for concerts and thus forth the first Symphonic Game Music Concert was held in 2003 and conducted by Andy Brick and 3 other concerts have followed and due to such popularity have sold out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphonic_Game_Music_Concerts
However sound is important in a game, creating mood; for example having no sound or very little sound can create a feeling of loneliness whereas having a game full of quick beats etc will get the player amped up to fight or for some action.
Dialog and therefore speech comes under this subject, as a bad voice actor can make a game a bit irritating however in some games where they get round the whole problem of getting the language just right just make up their own language such as The Sims and Okami where they just speak gibberish.
However due to being on a game course I thought I’d leave you with something everyone should enjoy.
Sunday 25 February 2007
Week 17: Game Engines
Game Engines are the core of a game, it deals with the technology part of a game due to the fact it works with animations, scripts, physics and rendering. Using a pre-existing game engines makes things a lot more cheaper for developers to work with as create a game engine from scratch will be extremely time consuming and not cost effective and if it’s already been made and works extremely well then it makes more sense to buy this little boxed game engine and make the art for it.
These Game engines also allow a game to be released on a range on consoles and operating systems thus maximizing market potential. There are also many other engines that work towards creating components like architecture, sound and trees (FMOD, SpeedTree). A game engine can have many uses and in some cases aren’t always used for games exclusively, it can be used for architectural purposes and demos. However the extremely highly sought after engines include the Unreal Engine, Doom and Havok however these engines being so popular and all, come with a hefty price tag, the cost for the Unreal engine is estimated to be more than $700,000, yet still cheaper then making your own and chances are it won’t be as polished and bug free as this engine.
So here’s a link of all the goodies that you’ll receive for blowing $700,00 (or £356,433)
http://www.devmaster.net/engines/engine_details.php?id=25
oh and for further reading into engines
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines
The Warcraft 3 engine will set you back a nice $3,750,000 and it is an interesting note that World of Warcraft (<3) uses the same but improved engine. Having the game components and the engine separate means that it can be sold to other developers for well…a hell of a lot of money.
A growing trend in games, though mostly PC is to include level editors so that users can create their own custom content and levels such games include Unreal, Neverwinter Nights and perhaps the most popular user content heavy game; The Sims. Providing an editor of such adds a different and more create aspect of playing a game and will hold the interest of a player for longer.
These Game engines also allow a game to be released on a range on consoles and operating systems thus maximizing market potential. There are also many other engines that work towards creating components like architecture, sound and trees (FMOD, SpeedTree). A game engine can have many uses and in some cases aren’t always used for games exclusively, it can be used for architectural purposes and demos. However the extremely highly sought after engines include the Unreal Engine, Doom and Havok however these engines being so popular and all, come with a hefty price tag, the cost for the Unreal engine is estimated to be more than $700,000, yet still cheaper then making your own and chances are it won’t be as polished and bug free as this engine.
So here’s a link of all the goodies that you’ll receive for blowing $700,00 (or £356,433)
http://www.devmaster.net/engines/engine_details.php?id=25
oh and for further reading into engines
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines
The Warcraft 3 engine will set you back a nice $3,750,000 and it is an interesting note that World of Warcraft (<3) uses the same but improved engine. Having the game components and the engine separate means that it can be sold to other developers for well…a hell of a lot of money.
A growing trend in games, though mostly PC is to include level editors so that users can create their own custom content and levels such games include Unreal, Neverwinter Nights and perhaps the most popular user content heavy game; The Sims. Providing an editor of such adds a different and more create aspect of playing a game and will hold the interest of a player for longer.
Have some more bad humour
Alright last bit of WoWness – well for a little while anyway.
Gnomes on WoW come in many different forms but all of them are annoying and have pink hair, their hair is so pink that it is annoying in it’s own right. So have some more WoW jokes showing my dedication to the eradication of these insanely annoying character class..
What's blue and flies around the room?
A gnome with a punctured lung
What’s pink,red, and silver and runs into walls?
A gnome with forks stuck in its eyes
What’s pink and red and sits in a corner?
A gnome playing with a razor blade
What’s green and yellow and sits in a corner?
The same gnome three weeks later
What’s pink and red and gets shorter by the minute?
A gnome rubbing its head on a cheese grater
What’s more disgusting than a pile of dead gnomes
The other gnome eating its way to the top
What’s worse than ten gnomes stapled to one tree
One gnome stapled to ten trees
How do you make a dead gnome float
Take your foot off its head.
Gnomes…….ugh.
Gnomes on WoW come in many different forms but all of them are annoying and have pink hair, their hair is so pink that it is annoying in it’s own right. So have some more WoW jokes showing my dedication to the eradication of these insanely annoying character class..
What's blue and flies around the room?
A gnome with a punctured lung
What’s pink,red, and silver and runs into walls?
A gnome with forks stuck in its eyes
What’s pink and red and sits in a corner?
A gnome playing with a razor blade
What’s green and yellow and sits in a corner?
The same gnome three weeks later
What’s pink and red and gets shorter by the minute?
A gnome rubbing its head on a cheese grater
What’s more disgusting than a pile of dead gnomes
The other gnome eating its way to the top
What’s worse than ten gnomes stapled to one tree
One gnome stapled to ten trees
How do you make a dead gnome float
Take your foot off its head.
Gnomes…….ugh.
On a WoW related note
Just doing this because I’m bored but according to an online quiz it turns out that I’m a cow.
I meant a Tauren! Geddit?! Funny, no….. Ok I’ll stop.
Since it’s a while before I go home for another WoW weekend and also to see my family I decided to post some WoW related jokes…because jokes are good. Jokes make people smile. Smiling good yes?
Anyway..
Why didn't the undead cross the road with the chicken?
-...he didn't have the guts. Harrrrrr!
What do undead Tauren say?
-Boo.
What do you call a Tauren with no legs at all?
-Ground beef
Q: How do Tauren hide in the forests?
A: They paint their balls red and hide in apple trees.
Q: Have you ever seen a Tauren hiding in an apple tree?
A: No, it works!!
Q: How did the gnome die?
A: Picking Apples
What do you call a Tauren who's "shaking hands with his best friend"?
-Beef Strokanoff
How many gnomes does it take to paint a house?
-It depends how hard you throw ‘em
What do you call 10 gnomes buried up to their necks in sand?
-Not enough sand.
...yeah.
That's enough of that for now.
|
I meant a Tauren! Geddit?! Funny, no….. Ok I’ll stop.
Since it’s a while before I go home for another WoW weekend and also to see my family I decided to post some WoW related jokes…because jokes are good. Jokes make people smile. Smiling good yes?
Anyway..
Why didn't the undead cross the road with the chicken?
-...he didn't have the guts. Harrrrrr!
What do undead Tauren say?
-Boo.
What do you call a Tauren with no legs at all?
-Ground beef
Q: How do Tauren hide in the forests?
A: They paint their balls red and hide in apple trees.
Q: Have you ever seen a Tauren hiding in an apple tree?
A: No, it works!!
Q: How did the gnome die?
A: Picking Apples
What do you call a Tauren who's "shaking hands with his best friend"?
-Beef Strokanoff
How many gnomes does it take to paint a house?
-It depends how hard you throw ‘em
What do you call 10 gnomes buried up to their necks in sand?
-Not enough sand.
...yeah.
That's enough of that for now.
Week 16: Gaming Cultures
Anyone that knows me at all will know that I will spend this whole post ranting about how great and godly WoW is. I shall try to refrain, I really will.
Ok screw that.
WoW is god. <>
Alright being serious, most of my years I’ve spent in one gaming culture or another, I’ve met some of my best friends through games and I still find it intriguing how easy it is talking to someone you’ve just met about their favourite games. Pretty much like everyone else, I adored Pokemon and me and a few others would play at lunchtime in school. Another culture I got involved in was NeverWinter Nights, spending my time testing online friends modules.
I met two very good friends through a large conversation about Final fantasy and Devil may cry. One of which is my flatmate and follow guitar hero buddy (when her brother was manager at Game, he hooked up the two guitars and let us play all lunchtime- we so sold that game.)
Belonging to a game is much like a clique at high school in my opinion as there are many different sub groups much like games, it’s like the Horde and Alliance are Goths and Jocks in the game based world…
Which brings me on to WoW I guess, I’ve been playing it since August so I’m a late coming to the whole WoW experience as my computer at the time simply could not run it however I would agree that the game should be re-named to World of Warcrack as it is highly addictive and I’ve lost many, many hours to this game doing mindless quests. However it is an extremely satisfying and addictive feeling killing the Alliance my only grievance is that I can’t play it any more because of my halls.
I belonged to a female gaming forum at one point where one of the members kept badgering me to play Guild Wars, to which my response was to hiss at her and scuttle back to my WoW cave.
But I’m not addicted….I’m a WoW enthusiast.
I guess knowing the fan history behind a game includes you in it’s culture, so I shall leave you with the Leeroy Jenkins fan history.
Leeeeeeeeeeroy Jenkins!!!
Ok screw that.
WoW is god. <>
Alright being serious, most of my years I’ve spent in one gaming culture or another, I’ve met some of my best friends through games and I still find it intriguing how easy it is talking to someone you’ve just met about their favourite games. Pretty much like everyone else, I adored Pokemon and me and a few others would play at lunchtime in school. Another culture I got involved in was NeverWinter Nights, spending my time testing online friends modules.
I met two very good friends through a large conversation about Final fantasy and Devil may cry. One of which is my flatmate and follow guitar hero buddy (when her brother was manager at Game, he hooked up the two guitars and let us play all lunchtime- we so sold that game.)
Belonging to a game is much like a clique at high school in my opinion as there are many different sub groups much like games, it’s like the Horde and Alliance are Goths and Jocks in the game based world…
Which brings me on to WoW I guess, I’ve been playing it since August so I’m a late coming to the whole WoW experience as my computer at the time simply could not run it however I would agree that the game should be re-named to World of Warcrack as it is highly addictive and I’ve lost many, many hours to this game doing mindless quests. However it is an extremely satisfying and addictive feeling killing the Alliance my only grievance is that I can’t play it any more because of my halls.
I belonged to a female gaming forum at one point where one of the members kept badgering me to play Guild Wars, to which my response was to hiss at her and scuttle back to my WoW cave.
But I’m not addicted….I’m a WoW enthusiast.
I guess knowing the fan history behind a game includes you in it’s culture, so I shall leave you with the Leeroy Jenkins fan history.
Leeeeeeeeeeroy Jenkins!!!
Week 15: The Game Industry
The Industry has seen a huge growth in this past few decades, it has become a case where nearly every home has a computer and access to the internet, if not you might be considered a lowly cave dweller worthy of being shunned by modern society because you don’t know what “LOL” means. Harsh but true.
The industry has grown in terms of more advanced gameplay, graphics, people working on a title and budget. There is a huge amount of money to be made if done well seeing some titles edge into other areas of popular culture (Tomb Raider the movie, Diablo Books, World of Warcraft trading cards, Halo figures and Final Fantasy music collection)
. It is quite safe to say that every kid from the 1990’s will grow up surrounded by a game of some sort.
The view of gamers and games have changed from the generic fat, over 40, balding game enthusiast living in his mom’s basement to well..nearly everyone. The market has divided into many different sub markets and you can get a game for anyone.
Game and GameStations are cropping up in every town, almost like Starbucks –except without the overpriced coffee. Of course with this huge increase in market, the money and the budget has also grown – rivalling the movie industry. However since everyone nowadays wants everything done at super lightning speed, games need to be released quicker with polished graphics, an amazing score and inventive gameplay and be affordable to the consumer (not that easy to do). As a student hoping to get a job in the games industry I have to realise that my job in theory could go to someone in outsourcing, it’s not affordable to have all these highly educated employees doing the same job that someone on the other side of the world could do – and do it a lot cheaper too.
Another point that I wanted to make was where the industry might go. With technology increasing in complexity it gives the designer more scope to really let loose with their imagination however we’ll easily see saturation in the market as games and ideas just get repeated and hauled off as some new game. Popular games of yesteryear will just get remade and done up with fancier graphics and not to mention the many, many games that will get sequels and trilogies in order to make more money out of a title.
Still for the moment I’m intrigued to see what will happen next, perhaps the merge of many different ideas and genres. However if the game industry ever starts to run out of ideas and merge Mario and Star Wars together or Link in a GTA set up then I’ll give up with the industry and retire to Tahiti.
The industry has grown in terms of more advanced gameplay, graphics, people working on a title and budget. There is a huge amount of money to be made if done well seeing some titles edge into other areas of popular culture (Tomb Raider the movie, Diablo Books, World of Warcraft trading cards, Halo figures and Final Fantasy music collection)
. It is quite safe to say that every kid from the 1990’s will grow up surrounded by a game of some sort. The view of gamers and games have changed from the generic fat, over 40, balding game enthusiast living in his mom’s basement to well..nearly everyone. The market has divided into many different sub markets and you can get a game for anyone.
Game and GameStations are cropping up in every town, almost like Starbucks –except without the overpriced coffee. Of course with this huge increase in market, the money and the budget has also grown – rivalling the movie industry. However since everyone nowadays wants everything done at super lightning speed, games need to be released quicker with polished graphics, an amazing score and inventive gameplay and be affordable to the consumer (not that easy to do). As a student hoping to get a job in the games industry I have to realise that my job in theory could go to someone in outsourcing, it’s not affordable to have all these highly educated employees doing the same job that someone on the other side of the world could do – and do it a lot cheaper too.
Another point that I wanted to make was where the industry might go. With technology increasing in complexity it gives the designer more scope to really let loose with their imagination however we’ll easily see saturation in the market as games and ideas just get repeated and hauled off as some new game. Popular games of yesteryear will just get remade and done up with fancier graphics and not to mention the many, many games that will get sequels and trilogies in order to make more money out of a title.
Still for the moment I’m intrigued to see what will happen next, perhaps the merge of many different ideas and genres. However if the game industry ever starts to run out of ideas and merge Mario and Star Wars together or Link in a GTA set up then I’ll give up with the industry and retire to Tahiti.
Week 11: Game Play
The word gameplay seems a bit of an empty term to loosely describe elements in a game. Many different people from different backgrounds will make their own assumptions about what the following term means, which makes it a hard term to pin point exactly. Gaming magazines and articles will often rate gameplay but it’s a lax term to describe and even to rate as their interpretation of what is “gameplay” might differ considerably between your view and mine.
However in my own opinion I guess that this quote is the one that I mostly agree with. “Ambiguous term for the total effect of all active game elements. Refers to the holistic game experience and the ability of the game to command the attention of the player.”
Game Play is the sheer core of a game, the foundation if you will. Strip a game of it’s music, graphics and storyline and chances are that it won’t be such a satisfying play however if the game play is done correctly, theoretically you still would play it. Having a look back at early games such as Pong and Space Invaders where there was no storyline, very basic graphics they were still huge hits and considered old favorites because simply the gameplay offered a huge reward to the playing, buying into human nature of being competitive and wanting to achieve. Those games didn’t need fancy music artists to lend their vocals to the games, it didn’t need Ragdoll physics (not that it was available at that time but you get my point) and it didn’t need a witty and clever script to accompany it.
My point is that the old school games of years past is as close to sheer gameplay as you can probably get as all those games had to offer was good gameplay. It’s an important factor in any game as it is the very foundation of a good game and if done right then a player will keep returning to the game – thus equaling a success.
Game Play is how a player experiences the game, what that game means to a player, how successful it can keep the attention of the player through numerous hours and what a player can get out of the game, which should be enjoyment above all else.
I don’t really trust the word “Game Play”, as it is such a broad term and in this day and age where there is so many different genres of game and so many different types of gamer. More games that are targeted towards casual players offer such a uniquely different approach then games targeted towards the hardcore market. Compare say Brain Training to Ninja Gaiden, how would you rate the gameplay between games such as these where the player is getting something completely different?
In short my belief is that Game Play is a loose term for player involvement and experience however I’m sure that many have came up with their own conclusions about this term in which it is not a case of right or wrong as the term is so ambiguous that there is no defiant answer.
However in my own opinion I guess that this quote is the one that I mostly agree with. “Ambiguous term for the total effect of all active game elements. Refers to the holistic game experience and the ability of the game to command the attention of the player.”
Game Play is the sheer core of a game, the foundation if you will. Strip a game of it’s music, graphics and storyline and chances are that it won’t be such a satisfying play however if the game play is done correctly, theoretically you still would play it. Having a look back at early games such as Pong and Space Invaders where there was no storyline, very basic graphics they were still huge hits and considered old favorites because simply the gameplay offered a huge reward to the playing, buying into human nature of being competitive and wanting to achieve. Those games didn’t need fancy music artists to lend their vocals to the games, it didn’t need Ragdoll physics (not that it was available at that time but you get my point) and it didn’t need a witty and clever script to accompany it.
My point is that the old school games of years past is as close to sheer gameplay as you can probably get as all those games had to offer was good gameplay. It’s an important factor in any game as it is the very foundation of a good game and if done right then a player will keep returning to the game – thus equaling a success.
Game Play is how a player experiences the game, what that game means to a player, how successful it can keep the attention of the player through numerous hours and what a player can get out of the game, which should be enjoyment above all else.
I don’t really trust the word “Game Play”, as it is such a broad term and in this day and age where there is so many different genres of game and so many different types of gamer. More games that are targeted towards casual players offer such a uniquely different approach then games targeted towards the hardcore market. Compare say Brain Training to Ninja Gaiden, how would you rate the gameplay between games such as these where the player is getting something completely different?
In short my belief is that Game Play is a loose term for player involvement and experience however I’m sure that many have came up with their own conclusions about this term in which it is not a case of right or wrong as the term is so ambiguous that there is no defiant answer.
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