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If it calms you, gradualgames, i picked up a switch with BotW, and the music is quite catchy. I find myself humming and whistling and doing things rythmically with these earworms in my head even though it often takes a week between finding the time to play a few hours.

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I'm more optimistic about BotW than 99% of all modern games that are out..I'm probably going to pick it up at some point.

I actually find the more realistic a game looks the less realistic they look, particularly faces. The whole "uncanny valley" thing. 3D faces always freak me out. They keep getting further and further up the asymptotic graph towards "actual reality" but somehow I feel they will never actually reach it, it'll always just look weird like some satanic puppet that has come alive. Keyframe animation and movement in particular ALWAYS looks fake to me. Too smoothed and tweened. I'll take hand animation and pixel art any day over this kind of stuff...

So when games intentionally remain more fantastical, like Zelda, I appreciate it a lot more because it isn't TRYING to look real, so it doesn't freak me out and it remains appealing.

Would you prefer, say, the Cyanide & Happiness style of faces?


And if so, are you more a fan of Kris, Rob, or Dave?


Is the Kingdom Hearts version of Pinocchio also "satanic"?


Watch 30 second cutscene

Definitely satanic!

Leaving this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

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http://www.frankengraphics.com - personal NES blog

I like both of those, they are each cartoons not trying to look realistic at all.

When there is music.


Splatoon 2 is part of the 1%, right?

When isn't there music? Every village has its distinct theme (those are the best IMO). Fighting big baddies like stone golems and ogres has a memorable hook. Riding has a song (this gets old after a while if you ride much). Stables have a song. The labyrinth and dark forest have a good common song. There's the shrine song, the tower song (this one is maybe classifiable as a long fanfare, but memorable all the same)... Even cooking/brewing has a memorable drum jingle. The bard plays songs, naturally.

The region songs are a bit toned down, leaning more on ambience.

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This video of the new Samus Returns game perfectly illustrates my problem with modern game soundtracks, contrasting it with Metroid 2 on the gameboy. (or some remake of it I guess)

I would take the fascinating, otherworldly, engaging and heroic melodies of yore 1,000x over the ambient soundscapes of today. My guess is Full Sail or others have graduated 1000s of people who are like "HEY I CAN CLICK IN MUSIC SOFTWARE AND ACT LIKE I AM A GAME COMPOSER" but, very very few of them are actually composing music. Oh well...I'm old, maybe melodies are anachronistic anymore...movies largely have the same problem. Everything just putters on with something recognizably played on instruments but, where's the next Star Wars theme? Where's the next Indiana Jones theme? Where's the next Super Mario Bros. theme? Where's the next Star Trek theme? Where's the next Labyrinth soundtrack? Where's the next Dark Crystal? Where's any music at all?

Maybe its lack of piano lessons? No idea. But it appears to be a dying art. (even though there seem to be thousands of people writing chiptunes, their talents don't wind up in modern games for some reason)

I just don't understand. It's not like having a greater palette of possible sounds makes it impossible to write melodies. Composers just aren't doing it. On the whole, anyway. Shovel Knight is a rare exception. OH! And Undertale 's soundtrack was utterly amazing.

It's probably more a trend than anything else. I hate trends.

I understand what you're saying in general but you maybe picked the worst possible example? Aside from the opening theme, most of Metroid 2's (incredible) soundtrack is atonal noise.

Good lord, when it was announced i was looking forward to play it, but when compared to the original, i couldn't help notice how much more direct and playable the original felt. so i looked at my gameboy sitting in the bookshelf and thought i don't need anything else.


Enter Wall of Sound. According to that article, phil spector said he"(...) was looking for a sound, a sound so strong that if the material was not the greatest, the sound would carry the record."

Basically - drown it (a mediocre melody/lack of motif) in ensemble instrumentation, textured layering, and overdubs. Or rather today, drown it in preset soft synths and samplers and fx plugins. This can sometimes lift a mediocre song. But it's not a guarantee. That depends on your skill.

Someone like phil spector would work with a song writer or artist who introduced some melodic input or other. But when you're left to your own devices and have learned audio engineering/studio production but not necessarily music theory or have practiced an instrument, you're worse off. You can handle the tools but you don't necessarily know how you should handle them.

I love producing sound. I had a creative block and was not able to produce music all together for several years, but i was happy singing in a choir and producing distinct bell sounds using various synth techniques. So it's not like i look down on sound production. It's a craft in itself. But it's not enough in itself for something like a soundtrack.

Ultimately, i don't think it's just the soundtrack producers/composers' fault. It's more likely the fault of creative directors and trend sensitive advisors.


Metroid 2 isn't really atonal, but it's incoherent from a traditional melody perspective. It doesn't play anything close to cultural expectations. It's a bit hard to melt, predict and relax to. They went dead hard for something alien feeling, and they succeeded, for better or worse...

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http://www.frankengraphics.com - personal NES blog

You might be right. I never got very far in that game, I just checked it out. I'd take atonality on 8 bit over ambient soundscapes in modern games anyway,I actually composed an atonal tune for one of my homebrew game dungeon areas.

I don't doubt it takes craft to build ambient soundscapes, too. They just totally don't move me at all. They *sound* like zero effort went into them, even though that may not be the case. I just find melodies about six hundred and eighty trillion times more immersive than wwwwaaaoooohhaahhhwhhhhhh.................wwweeeeeoooorrrwwwwww.........*BOOM* *boom* wwwwwowoo SHUT UP ALREADY AND PLAY ME A FRIGGIN MELODY!!!!! ARGH!!


....You know what's one weird exception for me? The Quake 1 soundtrack. I liked that one for some reason. It's mostly ambient. Maybe I really am just old.

Here's another funny example where I felt like it was a bait and switch. This game's trailer had a neat soundtrack, but then the game itself? That melody is nowhere to be found.

You're terrible at picking examples of modern games.
Maybe that's why you feel they all suck. There are so many great modern games out there, and they come in so many shapes and sizes it's impossible to generalize.

Yeah, I mainly have a problem with Western games. America has always been un-creative when designing Video Games. They make a whole bunch of shooter games because they sell well, and are afraid to try anything new. I mean, we have Halo, Call of Duty, Overwatch, Gears of War, Battlefield, and Destiny. American Video Game companies, who have billions of dollars, are scared to have 1 game fail. What happens if the mass gets tired of shooter games? These companies will have already based their entire company off of shooter games, and they could possibly all fall under.