As PCs and consoles can now easily play a compressed pre-compressed sound file while a game plays, the possibilities of dynamism in video game music started fading away. Some game still played multiple pre-recorded tracks, for example in Super Mario Galaxy 2, but given the high production costs this is unusual.
Yet, all the while, games that made music one of the central point of the game rose in popularity, especially "rythm games". The first highly popular one was Dance Dance Revolution which, while strictly speaking is a dancing game, requires the player to perform moves in sync with the music to win the game. While they have music as an important factor in learning the rythm and moves, missing those "beats" usually have little to no effect on the music itself. At best, a successful beat plays a note that plays well with the pre-recorded musical track. The only time I was impressed was with the iOS game Groove Coaster, where beats would play a pre-recorded sampled note, and missing plays it with a high-pass filter effectively only giving you a hint of how the complete song sounds like.
In the Bit.Trip games which I mentioned before, there is a small variation over the rythm games where users are allowed to play a "beat instrument" at will at any time, just for fun. Their following game, Bit.Trip Runner 2, will now match the music's chords to make sure any random sound, even if not played on beat, sounds good. So while I still think that time quatization is still too difficult in video games (you either hit a beat before of right on time, but beyond 100ms too late and you're too far to the next beat to play anything), at least any interactive element in a game produced by the player can now fully fit with the background music. What I hope is that even in games whose central focus isn't music have greater synergy between the interaction and the music, making interresting artistic impact on the video game players.
Published on May 17, 2012 at 21:09 EDT
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