Gaming to the Beat

Music has always been an integral part of gaming. And I don't mean your namby pamby background music, I mean official songs from your favorite artists. Games that spent money licensing songs from the charts to have play in the game. Many sports series are the greatest contributors to the cause, my favorites include the Tony Hawk series, SSX, and the 'Street' series of sports games (NBA Street, FIFA Street, etc.)

My favorite sports game is SSX Tricky which was praised for how it integrated its music into the gameplay and I think that this deserves mentioning because I feel that many games are not employing playlists like they should especially with the dirge that is the new Guitar Hero games swamping the markets. The only game with a strong playlist within the last year has been Little Big Planet. And besides that there was Borderlands which used Cage The Elephant's "Ain't No Rest For The Wicked".




[It seems to rock around, to rock
around, it's right on time, it's tricky!]




This topic is close to my heart. I own a solid bit of video game music and I owe a lot of my music taste to video games. Without SSX Tricky, I would not know about Run-D.M.C. and I think I own every song that was in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4.

Everyone has read over the past year about Guitar Hero's contribution to the music scene. But with great power came little responsibility. On what could have been a new wave of popular music in video gaming, Activision and Guitar Hero along with Harmonix and Rock Band enveloped popular music as we know it, trying to lap up every single song it could and applying a note track to it. Now everyone from T-Pain to T-Sweezy can be heard along with the clackity-clack of plastic controllers that resemble the shape of instruments, reducing Guitar Hero from a dynamic experience to an advanced karaoke machine. And where the void was filled for music in video games, it then became extremely diluted under the weight of its own fat.

Games need music, and where many games create their own score, popular music or even local bands are available to fill the gaps where a total musical score isn't needed, Brütal Legend applies this viscously and Guitar Hero 1 and 2 were full of bonus songs made by people working on the game. It is publicity for the game and publicity for the artists involved. Not to mention bands like Freezepop, who followed Harmonix all the way to rhythm game domination. And it isn't just for sports games anymore, why can't we have a rail-shooter/puzzle game set in a dystopian New York about an ex-NYPD Officer who is trying to survive after dolphins rise up and enslave the human race while trying to solve the murder of his wife all set to a mix between The Flaming Lips, JET, No Doubt, and Johnny Cash? Huh?

Just, please, no more Aerosmith in our video games. We've heard enough from them (Attention whores...)

























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Reasons why games should make music. Well, more like reasons why music SHOULDN'T make games...