Hi Tom.
that is all absolutely true, however sometimes I do wonder if there are more
creative solutions to those sorts of problems such as those followed by
graphical indi developers.
As you know, I am a huge fan of the Turrican games, a set of 2D exploration
platform shooters originally for the comador Amigar.
With the creator's friendly permission, turrican has now very much been
taken over by fans and new levels or even games are being produced every few
months.
turrican has always been famous for it's exceptional soundtrakc, so of
course to be propper Turrican games, the fan projects had to have decent
music. The designers of the various fan projects therefore located
composers, either fellow fans or musicians who work in their spare time to
create some exceptional music for the projects.
Indeed, here is a collection that I wripped from the games and have zipped
up for other Turrican fans to download:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/s4kp18
it often seems however that some people working on audio games aren't
willing to go outside the community or ask around on sites like
www.songplanet.com to see what is available, ---- and a state of affairs
where a graphical game has better music than an audio game, and a graphical
game produced with just the same low level of resources and in a person's
spare time what's more.
to take another example and actually make a practical suggestion. Obviously
you don't have either the cash or resources to have a ful scale audio
commentary in the wrestling game, however that doesn't mean you can't have a
small number, ---- say ten or twenty, especially dramatic ring announcer
quotes recorded to play at significant moments during the match and add to
the atmosphere.
So to take your slam example, even if you can't record goodness knows how
many ways of saying person x scoop slams person y, you could get a "Oooh!
and he's down!" or "she's down!" to play at that point, just to bring home
to the player that significant damage had been done, with the sapi
description filling in the details.
"Ouch! that's gotta hurt", "right off the top!", "One in the kisser!",
"right in the bread baskit" etc.
The game smash Tv for the Snes did a very similar thing. Even though Snes
hardware couldn't cope with many sound clips, sinse the game was themeed
around a deadly game show and they wanted an annoying host to give comments,
they just recorded a few phrases such as "I'd buy that for a dollar" or "big
money! big prizes! I love it!" which really did a lot for the atmosphere of
the game and introduced the host as a completely irritating person without
requiring massive amounts of sound clips.
I'd offer to do the short announcer comments myself, accept that you'd
really want an American for that sort of thing, and though I could possibly
fake an accent it wouldn't obviously be as authentic as if you got a real Us
actor from the correct region of the states.
That's of course assuming that you can't find actual samples of that sort of
thing kicking around on wrestling fan sights somewhere.
Beware the grue!
Dark.
---
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