In the running for what is possibly the last of this month’s Musings, I thought I’d explore one of my favorite aspects of video games: the audio. It’s possibly the least targeted aspect of games because graphics are usually the first thing to take hits. But like all components of the industry, it needs review.

I’ve been gaming long enough to remember when all soundtracks were actually MIDI files. These file types are virtually never used anymore, except in what is somewhat sarcastically called “chiptune” soundtracks. Now why is that? The MIDI file type is actually dependent on the sound card’s driver, which has undergone far less radical changes than video drivers and related hardware. Integrated sound processors, still standard use on even many gaming PCs, will run the files. So the argument “it doesn’t work anymore” is invalid.

Are we complaining about sound quality? Well, yes, there is a SLIGHT difference in depth between MIDI and the MP3 format, but I fail to notice any critical shortcomings. The soundtracks of games are nothing new; in fact, many of them sound suspiciously identical after a while. They tend to either be orchestral (based heavily on string and wind instruments) or electronica/dance (a catchall category for anything difficult to replicate IRL). Both are fully contained by the MIDI format, which is far more versatile than people give it credit for. It is capable of replicating most soundtracks perfectly.

The format’s primary problem is its inability to play on a large number of channels at once. That’s possibly why it was abandoned in favor of the MP3 format, which records the full frequency/amplitude of the sound. The MP3 format can record a discordant mixture of a million different sounds and still sound cohesive. For the truly epic soundtracks we’ve come to expect, MP3 is sadly the only option. For anything less than that, including all flash games, most shmups and fighters, and “repetitive” tracks like intro themes, the “quality” isn’t a critical factor.



And now, for something completely different.

Just how much of our limited funds are we expected to spend listening to these things? The earlier-gen consoles were configured for stereo sound, and the Wii still is. So since when is surround sound considered the only way to go? I saw a site user’s gaming setup a few weeks ago, and while I admire the effort he put into it, I can’t understand why he needed the full 5.1 configuration. Sound coming from behind you? Since all the attention is focused on the events in front of you, why is it necessary?

I’ve met a few FPS players who claim that surround sound allows them to detect opponents in any direction, thus giving them an advantage. I honestly don’t know how to take that. The human auditory setup works by registering the apparent distance to a source from both ears, thus limiting the location to a point on a circle. In most cases, where action takes place on a 2D plane, that condenses to two points. One of those points is in front of you, where you can see it. In nearly all cases you can replace surround sound by following the old mantra: if you can’t see it, turn around. Relying on 5.1 for something that simple seems unnecessary and, to be honest, a bit lazy.

When I purchased my PC a few months back, the suggested setup my parents proposed had a discrete sound card. I politely turned it down and replaced it with a Razor headset, because honestly I consider sound depth more important than sound variety. Besides, at top volume, surround sound all tends to blur together, as anyone who frequents theaters will tell you.



Now, one last final note on audio. I don’t get it why we have to pay for audio tracks, or why they’re often limited to hard-copy, region-specific formats. It seems like the developers are trying to gouge us over something that they provide free the rest of the time. I mean, why include a “jukebox” or audio gallery with the game and then charge us to listen to it elsewhere? This is one case where “piracy” of audio, what with soundtracks making it onto YouTube, isn’t something I have a problem with. Heck, I’ve copied the MP3 files from PC games to disk so I could listen to them anytime.

I could be wrong about this, but most people won’t buy a whole soundtrack unless they like about everything on it, and this more than likely means they’ve played the game. So the developers aren’t losing anything by making these files available free of charge. Get with the program, people.

Wow … did I just write all that? This is probably the most disjointed Monthly Musing to date. To sum up in eight words: Only fools pay for same old, same old. So shoot the receiver and play/make the damn game. No one’s really shouting, but I’m still going deaf with the nonsense.

I’m just not any good at the FPS genre, which is too bad because there are a lot of impressive FPS titles out there I’ll never get to play. What am I doing wrong? Or, alternately, what is it about the games that make them so challenging to play? I’m really quite curious, and I have been thinking about a solution for several days.

Combat in any real-time game is difficult. Often it’s less about the powers at your command and instead about whether you stay calm enough to use them properly. Since the player is never in any physical danger, normally this doesn’t seem to be a problem. This is a case where immersion, that term that seems to have suddenly warped into the c-blogs, may be a negative factor, since I doubt even the most diehard gamer would remain calm in an actual war zone. Too much of it, and that protective distance that civilians hold from real events vanishes.

FPS games seem to live off immersion in multiple senses. Although plenty of shmups, which are related in concept, have cartoonish or flat-looking graphics, I’ve yet to see an FPS that doesn’t push the system's hardware to the limit. That’s one way to achieve immersion, but it can’t be the sense I’m looking for. Virtually every genre of game has at least one example of a graphics powerhouse, and I’ve managed to handle that.

I also don’t think it’s the large number of enemies, since even the largest FPS can’t generate the number of hostile entities a dedicated RTS can. Admittedly, you have an army at your back in that case, but good RTS players still spend a lot of time manipulating and targeting single units. Neither is it the power of enemies relative to your character, since almost every genre of game has opponents capable of killing you in a single strike.

What is it then?



After watching a large number of trailers, including several for Halo 3, I think I may have identified a potential issue: the first-person aspect. Obvious, huh? But apparently that brings up a whole host of problems. Immersion is probably easiest to achieve when there’s no barrier between the player’s eyes and the character’s surroundings, which is what happens in third-person games. And whether that’s a mark of a game’s success or not, it is guaranteed to disorient the player to a certain extent.

Take perspective, for example. The Battlefield: BC 2 trailer made me jump back a little when the character’s weapon literally leaped up in front of me, blocking my view. Since I’m focusing on a faraway opponent, it’s incredibly irritating to have a massive, nearby object appear out of nowhere. It’s the same experience we get when focusing on the screen and having a younger sibling launch a small object in your face. If you can’t even rely on your own weapon to stay in one place, what can you trust?

I also can’t understand why the camera moves so much. I mean, yes, if something explodes fifteen feet to your side your head is going to shake, but that’s almost a little too real, no? It destroys a certain amount of the immersion as your eyes rapidly attempt to track everything’s new position while the rest of your body stays perfectly still. The Dust 514 trailer doesn’t seem to have this problem: all camera movement looks cohesive even when something does explode fifteen feet to your side. As a result, it doesn’t look nearly as overwhelming.



So it’s the first two letters that get to me, and not the third. Well, I’ve got a few options if I want to practice. Someone was nice enough to recommend Portal, which, while not a conventional shooter as far as I can tell, does have a first-person view. So I have the ability to improve and am not stuck with the third-person viewpoint. Still, it’s possible to have too much immersion.

And make certain to read the manual first. First-person doesn't extend to ducking.

I’m here because I am once again confused about all the shouting. The fight over graphics versus gameplay, or whatever you want to call it, has somehow intensified, and a number of people have already written about it. I’ll admit to being on the side of gameplay, and I have some concerns about the direction the debate is taking.

High-definition graphics look great. There’s no denying that. What I can disagree with is the concept that they are necessary when standard definition graphics often suffice. The example that everyone brings up is of course Okami, as well as a few others I haven’t played but look fine to me. While it’s always nice to have more detail, often it isn’t a realistic assumption. As is often the case, economics has a role.



The cost of HD graphics to the developers is actually higher than we would expect. We as players don’t see the strain developers have to go through in order to perfect graphics. The first thing to be finished is usually the mechanical systems, making the game at least playable at conventions. Story, advanced mechanical changes, and graphics are polished up later. Notice that a game appears to be completely playable at twenty percent completion and yet looks like a twenty-minute sketch. We all expect it to improve radically by the release date.

My point is that if all this time and energy needs to be spent on graphics, it’s no wonder that developers sometimes skip the HD idea altogether. You’re perfectly welcome to call this cheap, but often it’s the only smart financial choice. When these kinds of amenities are demanded by the players, the developer usually ends up delaying the game, which is expensive (software programmers cost an incredible amount of money) and infuriating to the fan base. As long as it looks finished, I’ll take what they’re able to give.

Even more frightening then the idea of a delay, however, is the possibility that the developer WILL be cheap and sacrifice other portions of the game to focus on graphics. I’m certain we all immediately think of story and gameplay in this case. I’m not going to name names, but we all know of games that failed despite their cinematic-quality appearance, because they were a bore to play. Likewise, the opposite is also true.



That's what simultaneously frightens and confuses me. I don’t get why gamers as a whole haven't made this connection before, because if they did, I’m fairly certain they’d rally around gameplay as the critical factor. If all we wanted was pretty colors, we’d all switch to film for entertainment, and the PS3 would be nothing more than a glorified Blu-ray player.

I’m not going to sacrifice the experience for a little extra detail on a uniform or a few individual hairs on a monster’s fur. This isn't a universal value judgment. It's a logical conclusion. There needs to be some sort of balance that is profitable for the developers and enjoyable for the players, whatever that would be.

If we take the extremes, it will be the high-end wares that need a shovel.

This post is a response to Tubatic’s excellent “Nothing Is Sacred” blog entry, which I enjoyed reading but disagreed with completely. (After it got promoted, I couldn’t keep commenting directly, so I had to write this.) It’s not nearly as good, but it invites discussion. Thanks anyway for making me think.

The use of HP is a mechanic that appears in every genre of game, from RPG to RTS, so it’s not surprising people are getting tired of it. Alternate methods I’ve heard of mostly try to imitate real-life physiology by tracking damage to specific parts of the body or by recording loss of vital fluids. The advantage to this appears to be that the game no longer appears to be an artificial construct and instead a living, breathing, and, most critically, bleeding experience. (Not trying to offend any British readers.)

I’m challenging this on two points. First, regardless of appearances, numbers still rule the game. You just can’t see them. Has anyone here played a paper-and-pencil RPG before? If so, you’ll know just what can happen when every possible damage mechanic is tracked: the sheer number of mechanics and, yes, numbers balloons. Dungeons and Dragons version 3 was infamous for this, with nonlethal damage, separate ability damage for all six abilities, more or less “permanent” damage that could only be healed under specific situations, damage resistance, damage reduction (which is completely different), and more damage types than the average console RPG has font colors. Damage to specific body parts was also in there, but it got stuffed into a sidebar in the second rulebook. That’s how complex it can get. Obviously, realism isn’t simple.

My second point, which I first stated in Tubatic’s blog before it made the front page, was that the Health Bar was the ultimate abstraction, reducing all life functions to a ratio between current state and peak ability. I can see why this tires people, since it leads to the insane possibility of being one hit away from death and still capable of striking as hard. But it also has the advantage of eliminating much of the distraction that comes from monitoring multiple indicators of well-being. I’ve noticed that once you have more than three constantly changing values in a game, it bogs down. This number can be increased in turn-based games, but it still divides the player’s attention.

Hiding all these numbers doesn’t make sense because that makes maintaining a character’s health that much harder, unless you’re good at memorizing everything. I didn’t have a problem keeping track of all the different healing spells and items in Neverwinter Nights (which is incidentally based on D&D v3 mechanics), but my sister couldn’t master it, and she completed the game faster than I did. And that’s with numbers visible. Once they’re gone, it’s not always clear what part of you is hurt. A lost arm is easy to spot, but an injury to the hamstrings isn’t. You’d be left guessing in many cases. Keeping some variant of the Health Bar, even if tucked in a dialogue box somewhere, will make playing the game more streamlined.

This does not mean, however, that the Health Bar concept can’t be played around with or improved. Most RTS games include some damage types that deal differing levels of damage, so a player can severely damage, say, a siege tank, with anti-armor weaponry. Some conditions, such as poisoned, might alter how you take damage or cause damage at a specific rate. Conditions, in fact, are probably underused. My point is that the idea is next to impossible to eradicate completely, so we might as well make use of its potential.

The best spin I’ve seen on the Health Bar idea would probably go to Okami. The game had both an exceptionally abstract health system as well as three design improvements. First, health worked differently for Amaterasu and her enemies, with the wolf getting the more simplistic system and the monsters slowing down when severely damaged. Second, the player received an auditory cue when badly wounded, making constant glances at the indicator unnecessary. Third, numbers never showed up on the screen: health was purely visual. I thought that the visual system needed work (no more fractions of Solar Energy), but the effects speeded up the game. I never felt that it was a purely mathematical experience, since I never really had to worry about it that much in the first place.

The fact is we’re always going to need some abstraction. And maybe a bigger screen.

If you think this post is itself shovelware, I don't blame you.

I had to look up the term "shovelware" before writing this to prevent a serious waste of time and server space, but it turned out I knew what I was talking about. Apparently the term has existed for a while, first being used to refer to floppy-to-CD data transfers. It slowly evolved into the modern usage, though even now it has multiple definitions depending on context. Check Wikipedia for a full explanation.

Right, now for the important bit. A number of our more vocal commentators have been shouting about the quantity of shovelware that has come out for the Wii. Which is interesting because I don't remember buying any. Come to think of it, every game I purchased had won Game of the Year, Best Adventure Game, or something equally distinctive. I bring this up because of an obvious fact that some people just don't get: buy what you like and there's no such thing as shovelware. Really, just because it's selling for half price at Target doesn't mean you have no choice in owning it.

All systems have their share of filler, like the lettuce I mentioned in the title. When looking for additions to your collection, eat the whole salad. It isn't going to kill you to at least look at some of these titles, and some of them may even be worth buying for your less-than-knowledgeable friends and family.

If I was going to target systems for shovelware cleanup, I'd go after the DS or Windows. But I don't because what other people pay for isn't my problem. Besides, software, including the mass-produced titles we can't stand to play for fifteen minutes, does and always will follow the systems. The DS is one of the most affordable and common gaming systems, and everyone with a job owns a PC. I don't see people running off to buy Macs because Windows is so supportive of shovelware.

And this is where the console wars come in. The software does not determine the hardware, and in fact the reverse isn't true either. Designers will port their software to wherever they can make a quick profit, so don't blame Nintendo. Even if the accusations that the proportion of low-quality games is higher on the Wii ... well, that means your library will have some holes in it, but it doesn't make those remaining titles any worse. With consumer goods, no one cares how picky you are, so stick with your favorites. They're in there. (And I apologize if I just compared someone's favorite game to a cucumber.)

I loathe shovelware as much as the next guy, but people pay to eat at salad bars because they want the crunchy bits. Why should gaming be any different?