Almost all of our sources for Game Audio related news have dried up recently. Why? I can only blame Grand Theft Auto IV. Something two of our members are also locked into. We have a aG Flashback review coming early next week for Valve’s Portal, and as soon as Miguel and I finish GTA IV expect to see an aG Original Review on that as well. We’re still in our early stages and our original content IS growing, but right now GTA IV has sort of frozen our updates.
The Dark Sector Audio Dev team is back, this time with video. The video features some great comparisons of recorded vegetable beating to in-game carnage. Alongside the video is a nice little write up on their preparation for the record session, and the funny looks they got at the grocery store.
Wayne Santos recently wrote an article for HighDefDigest about four games that excel at creating an interactive and dynamic environment through the use of audio. Now there’s definitely more games out there that are worth mentioning but this article focuses on these four, which is just fine. The games mentioned in the article are: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Condemned 2: Bloodshot, Rock Band, and Prototype.
Bloody-Disgusting.com isn’t exactly the first place I go to to find breaking gaming news, it’s not even in my top ten….ok, so I’ve never even heard of them! But that doesn’t matter, because they just managed to get their gore-stained mitts on a very informative, very exclusive blog post from the Lead Sound Designer of the space horror game “Dead Space”, Don Veca. He touches on pretty much every aspect of the game’s audio design, and he even throws in a couple of amusing anecdotes just for good measure. It’s well worth the read.
I recently stumbled across an interview with the Sound Director and the Lead Sound Programmer for the IO Interactive game, Kane and Lynch: Dead Men. And who conducted this interview? SoundBlaster. I guess that kind of makes sense, kind of. It actually is a good read though since the Sound Director, Frank Lindeskov, covers a lot of ground about the audio in the game. It isn’t the most detailed of interviews, but it’s still a good read.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is coming out soon and I think everyone has pretty high hopes for it. It’s been a long time since those days of playing a dark one in KOTOR. Aside from the obvious qualities SW:TFU will have, we’ll also be able to look forward to some great orchestration. Music4Games recently got a chance to sit in on one of the recording sessions for SW:TFU. They were also able to speak with the Composer, Mark Griskey, and with the Music Supervisor at LucasArts, Jesse Harlin. They have a pretty good article that describes some of the variants of the original score that they’re making as well in order to have recurring themes without playing the same song every time.
AnimusSonitus over at the Stargate Worlds Developer Blog wrote up a small post about how the general public perceives sound design in games, and how to try and rectify the situation. The way he speaks about it makes me believe that there’s going to be a lot of exceptional audio concepts floating around their offices, at least during the development stages of the game, which is always a refreshing. Let’s hope he sticks to his guns and delivers something special, but more importantly, I hope it inspires some of you future designers to give it your all! Flip mode!
The people over at GamesRadar managed to get a Q&A session with three senior members of the Rockstar North Audio team. One of the coolest things they discuss is the sheer volmue of audio content created for the game. Touting that the game has “four-and-a-half thousand individual sfx in the game, which are combined into around 19 thousand different combinations.” Pretty ridiculous.
