Week 18!

Whether it be voice acting, soundtrack or sound FX, Sound is an imperative part of games. It can provide important cues to the player as to how they should be feeling, what is happening and provide essential narrative clues.

Although this is similair to other media types the added level of interactivity of games can mean that playing a game with the sound off could result in the player missing sonic cues, points etc.

Sound helps to provide real moments and can, for some, spark vivid memories of games gone by.
A few that spring to mind are the discovery of a secret in the original tomb raider, sends a shiver down my spine even now, or the sudden introduction of godsmack's "I stand alone" in prince of persia: warrior within, signaling it was time to haul ass because the dahaka was soon to be pursuing your royal blooded avatar to name but a few.

Some game soundtracks have taken on almost iconic status. Most people will be able to recognise the Tetris theme. Mario's theme is also fairly recognisable and more recently popular music artists are becoming involved in the sountrack to games and its not uncommon to find current chart songs featured in the sountracks which then themselves go on to sell impresive quantities.

There are a number of video game composers and the capabilities of todays consoles has really enabled them to produce scores on a much more dramitic and larger scale.

As for "good times" being one of the most influential recordings in the 20th century im not sure about that but is certainly one of the most sampled in music history.

Week 17! When a bird gets sucked into an engine they call it "bird strike". It's not bird strike, it's "engine suck"!

The game engine, the heavy lifter of all the tech involved in game making. The game engine is the software responsible for managing the various functions of a game. The engine has a list of functions to perform such as a physics, animation and rendering to name but a few all which come together in a glorious crescendo enabling you to shoot a bad guy in the face on your favorite games!?!

With beginnings in games such as doom and quake in the 90's the game engine was soon on many developers shopping list. Rather than starting from scratch many developers will buy in an already existing engine. This provides a number of advantages such as quicker production times and a reduction in the production costs. This does however mean that any problems may need to be referred back to the engine developer and therefore another party then becomes involved in the production of the game.

The game engines employed in today's current generation of consoles are increasingly more sophisticated and there has been a separation in the different functions often running individually. An example of this is in racing games where the physics thread will be running at a different pace to many of the other core functions. This is a small example of some of the changes that have had to be made to how the game engine operates in order to incorporate the increasing need for realism in today's games.