Unit 73: Examining Sounds for Computer Games

Note - use time stamps

Task one:

Compare and contrast the following console game music, you can consider other pieces of music/FX from the same game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y97u-U0nvJM
(the last of us theme song)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCxv2daOwjQ
(halo 2 theme song)

The main theme from the last of us:

The last of us main theme sounds like it wants to have a suttle and calm sound about it, its trying to get you in the mood for a fast paced and calming game so that you can feel a sort of atmosphere come off it, in my opinion the music to this game is quite calming and soft like it would be almost a natural sound to hear throughout the whole game and that's what makes it sound so nice because its a nice calm sound unlike most games where its trying to get you pumped up for the whole game giving you more and more rock and electric guitars to make it sound good where as the last of us theme only has an acoustic guitar to stay calm the only part where the music changes is where your either in a quick time event or your in the middle of fighting someone but whenever your exploring the world or finding something to do you get this beautiful sound of calm and soothing.

Task 2

The playstation has a lot to give and it does by giving you more memory and quality of the game and it also gives off better sound then an original Xbox, the playstation has far superior memory and sound quality where as the Xbox gives you more graphics quality, the amount of data you can get on a blue ray disk is unbelievable meaning you had more space to place music that is uncompressed and with better quality. so the more space you have on a blue-ray disk the more space you have to place more content inside the game like little details such as sound effects, music, clothes customization, weapon skins and maybe a bit of an open world giving you more choices so if you start off with a empty blue-ray disk you will have quite a bit of space on there to add a bunch of details and sound into the game it could be something else like add-on content to the game maybe you could give them a whole blue-ray disk full of the games sound track, with Xbox your stuck with normal CDs were that only gives you so much data and hardly anything is uncompressed, playstation have thought a head and given you the blue-ray disk mean a bunch of new things and more and exciting stuff, the playstation has a higher bit-depth and it the sound you can use on it can either be surround or stereo plus the playstation has a higher RAM because it uses blue-ray disks instead of normal disks, they also used multi-track recording to so they can record multiple sounds at the same time or add them in when they are finished. 

The main theme from halo 2:

The main theme to halo 2 is more exciting to your ears because its trying to get you excited and pumped up for the game full of action and killing  but the music also tries to make you feel hyper trying to get you full of energy giving you more stamina to beat all the levels and kill more things, in my opinion the halo 2 sound track is quite upright and sounds great it makes the game come to life with the 3D effects and the way the game handles with the music it works so well and the game graphics look so beautiful with the music as well as soon as you start halo 2 the music kicks off with electric guitar slowly starting off in the background getting more and more intense as it goes through the song and the drums start about half way through the song making it more intense and awesome giving you more energy and getting more pumped to play the game.

Task 2


The original Xbox doesn't have a lot to offer because it was the first Xbox that was made meaning there was hardly any space, music or graphics to be given to the players but there was still a little bit to give, it wasn't much but the data it had on it was a lot at the time you couldn't do much on the games and the graphics weren't that great but some music was uncompressed but most of it had to be compressed but there was still a lot to do on the original Xbox from all the games it had on there the music wasn't the greatest but you could still hear it and you could still make out what they were saying in that song but the music was still compressed on most of the games but the sound quality is still good. Because the original Xbox was the first Xbox to be made it didn't have much to offer in RAM because they used normal disks at the time but now because we have better games and higher memory consoles the original Xbox seems like nothing to what we have today, the original Xbox would have had to use analog or a software sequencer to try and get the sound right to fit to the game most of the sound files would have to be compressed and there wasn't hardly enough RAM to support that many games on the Xbox it would either use a stereo or mono sound to it because we didn't have surround sound when the original Xbox came out which would have been quite good to listen to when you have a electric guitar playing all around you willing you in from every corner of the room.