Loose Threads: Handheld game music...

After politics and religion, there are few topics that divide people so completely as music does.

For some, listening to the Ting Tings is like the audio equivalent of an orgasm. For others, it's like listening to someone stapling a cat to the face of a hyena (guess which camp we fall into). Sorry, but we couldn't bring ourselves to squander such an obvious opportunity to take a cheap pot-shot at an annoying band du jour.

Anyway, it's relevant because handheld game music has been on our minds of late, and it's on our minds because of Reset Generation's excellent 8-bit Weapon soundtrack. Which got us to thinking, couldn't lots of handheld game music be a good bit better than it currently is?

That's a bit of a loaded question so we decided to be a little more vague and introduced the topic 'Handheld game music…' (never before has an ellipsis bore such weight) to you last week. Here's what you had to say…

Track one belonged to Mandark:

"I'm sure that it will become quite common for a band to score the entire soundtrack of a game. It makes sense in many ways. The game can be marketed as having an exclusive soundtrack by an artist and the artist can market the music as being exclusively produced for the game. I can see unknown artists bidding to produce the music for well known mobile gaming brands and unknown game developers trying to sign up well known bands."

You see people, you know it makes sense, our forum members know it makes sense, or at least Mandark does. hunter_alien was a little more sceptical:

"No doubt sooner or later this will become a fairly popular situation. But to be honest I don't think it adds a lot to the value/quality of the game. Until now, many games have older tracks, popular ones, but none made specifically for them. And you know what? Never did a Burnout game disappoint me with its soundtrack. Nor the Need for Speed games, often the soundtrack being actually better then the rest of the game combined.

"Also, I would not like for a game to have music just from one band. The style would be way to similar, so a multi-band approach is better suited for an experience that might last hours/days/weeks or even months."

Oh how we beg to differ hunter-alien, at the expense of teetering towards the embarrassing end of culture worship, we have to, yet again, mention how awesome Reset Generation's soundtrack is (all scored by one band and great for it).

danskmacabre had something to add:

"The first thing that springs to mind for me is Quake and Nine inch Nails doing the score for it. Very atmospheric and worked very well. I also remember way back a game on the Commodore 64 using a track from one of Jean Michel Jarre's albums for it's soundtrack. I think the game was Yie Ar Kung-Fu, but I could be wrong. That was a great effort too.

"I think using one band/composer or whatever for a game COULD work, but whoever did the soundtrack would need to keep in mind to keep their music appropriate to the game in question. With most games though, I just turn off the musical accompaniment if possible after the first few times I've heard it coz it just gets boring after a while at best, intrusive and annoying at worst."

Which is all the more reason that developers should solicit great bands to make soundtracks that don't tire so quickly, no? Next up, some sort of super-brained stallion had a short dalliance with the debate:

"Personally I can't stand the Burnout soundtracks, they are almost always filled with 'respectable music to pretend to hate your parents to' (it's a real genre, honest). I did love the Me and My Katamari soundtrack and I seem to remember that though Miami Vice on the PSP was a bit of a work-a-day shooter, its soundtrack was particularly atmospheric (I think Mogwai scored the film but I haven't seen it so I don't know if it was the same music in the game or not).

"I really think that what 8-bit Weapon did for Reset Generation was a great step forward though, there should be more of that sort of thing going on. Handheld games are still, even today, bordering on being a niche interest, so obscure/offbeat/alternative musical references fit in really well. There are plenty of handheld games that could make smarter use of the soundtrack as a selling point.

I would love to see a band like Battles do the soundtrack for Urban Attack 2 (don't know if there even will be an Urban Attack 2, but there really should be) in a stripped down, blippety blop kind of a way. Blippety blop? That's the second genre I've invented in this post!"

I admit it probably won't catch on. Last to this week's debate was a face we haven't seen in a few weeks, SetsFireToPoshHammer:

"I'm with you on the Burnout issue, but I have to say, I don't know how much of a selling point music is for handheld games, even in the case of Reset Generation. They definitely add to the experience and can make a good game even better, but from a development point of view, a soundtrack scored by a hand-picked counter-culture artist is a bit of a luxury and most studios will probably be more inclined to spend resources on making their game look better.

"Unless you have the sort of development budget that Reset Generation had, putting the necessary research and money into getting the right artist for the job (never mind finding one that will agree to do it) is pretty much impossible, at least in the mobile space. It would be great to see some of the bigger budget DS and PSP titles take a more forward thinking approach to this however. What about some sort of ambient score by Boards of Canada for fl0w or something, that'd definitely work I'd say."

Dear lord SetsFireToPoshHammer, do you really have to live quite so relentlessly in the real world, can't you let us dream just a bit? Hmmmm?

Anyhoo, that about wraps up that topic (for now), but it seems that elsewhere on the forum, we have some dissenting voices. Ahri wrote in 'Suggestions and Feedback':

"Please can you stop using an animated site icon? It's really very annoying and benefits nobody. Have you tried opening up a few Pocket Gamer tabs in firefox? One alone is annoying, but with multiple tabs running it's patently ridiculous!"

And apparently he isn't the only one who doesn't like it. Therefore we thought it only fair to give it some coverage here so that more of you can let us know what you think. So, are animated tab icons really such an annoyance?

On with next week's topic, which is going to be:

Tying up loose ends…

As we mentioned last week, a round up of revisited threads is long overdue, so next week we are going to comb over the most popular topics we have had, and see what fresh insight has cropped up since we last covered them. It could be messy, it could be fun, it could mean that we need to talk about World of Warcraft mobile again, but in this gig that's an ever present risk.

So you can comment on whatever you feel like this week folks, which we hope you do anyway. That's it for now, remember to click 'Track It!' to be sure to catch next week's Loose Threads.