Faith West looks to boost mobile game audio
Royalty-free sound effects for developers
Faith West sounds like a long-forgotten chanteuse from the 1960s, or a daytime TV presenter. It's not though: Faith West is a Japanese mobile technology firm, whose US division has grand designs for mobile game audio.
What's that? You didn't realise mobile games HAD audio? Well, it's true that a lot of mobile gamers automatically play with the sound turned off – especially if they play mainly in public.
However, turn it on, and you'll realise that plenty of games are afflicted by audio that's plain weedy. This is where Faith West hopes to come in, with a new tool called mXMFTool (pronounced as if you're gagged, presumably).
The tool offers developers 125 royalty-free sound effects for use in games. They include animal noises, human actions, sports effects, weapons, vehicle noises, and environmental sounds.
Which is all very well, but we're not sure the problem with mobile game audio is a lack of available sound effects. It's more about the capabilities of handsets, and the problems of squeezing decent sound into games with a limited file-size.
Faith West does say mXMFTool enables developers to create MP3-quality sound in small file sizes, so perhaps it'll address the latter problem. We'll keep you posted.
