Lots of people will have nostalgic memories about game music, at least those of you over the age of about 20 probably will do. I still ten years on hum the music to Sonic 2 every now and then Kirby's Dreamland as the first game I ever owned still warms my heart with the 'Doodle oot doot doo, doodle oodle oodle oo' noise I so fondly remember from it.

However, now with the moving on from MIDI sequenced music from the era of tiny carts and the ease of adding mp3 files to your latest snazzy game on DVD the musical quality of games has changed fairly substantially. There are now some games that have licensed music as a soundtrack in them, or in the Case of Guitar Hero/Rockband are actually the whole point of them. Even RPG games are not immune to this with the advent of Eternal Sonata and Chopin being strip mined for music.

We even have events like video games live to celebrate the audio of our favourite games in a more traditional listening atmosphere and like the film soundtrack the game soundtrack is becoming more and more common an occurrence.

What I can't help wondering though is if sound designers are resting on their laurels somewhat for the vast majority of games. While we don't expect the latest filth to spew out of EA's Sports franchise hole to break moulds in any way one might hope that they could at least be counted on to attempt some form of music creation to back their offering rather than simply buying a load of tracks.

There are some brief glimpses of hope out there, the often lauded (not just by me I might add) Shadow of the Colossus did music really excellently, and partly it succeeded so well because there wasn't a permanent barrage of sound to cloud the mind and it really ended up being more punchy because you got so used to places where there was barely any sound at all.

Other games work more on audio for specific emotion in certain places, most usually the cutscene. Final Fantasy X is a great example of this with its ongoing themes for certain characters making it in part almost operatic in nature. (If you think about it a good long RPG almost IS an opera, just with more fighting and fat monsters instead of women. Remind me to patent the idea of opera gaming)

In part one can forgive designers for often placing audio at a disadvantage, most of their audience will probably be more interested in the look of a new game and its playability over the audio quality, especially if you're someone who likes listening to music at the same time as playing a game. I have often been guilty of simply muting any game playing and putting on the radio and thus losing a whole chunk of a game being offered to me.

You have to make the player want to hear the sounds being offered to you, and with repeat events such as battles or being stuck in one area of a puzzle it becomes very easy to get intensely irritated with the same sounds looping over and over and over (and over). This can be a necessary evil but with the rise of services such as microsoft/nintendo/sony 's online offerings one would think that they might make a greater use of this to improve the audio content of some of their games. The PS3 and Xbox especially could deal with alterations as they have the disk space to accommodate changes.

So a plea to those of you out there with working ears, listen to your games and appreciate good music. You have tastes in normal music, so why should you have to make do with mediocre game music?