Burned out on Christmas music? We've got you covered! Music and sound design are very important yet underappreciated aspects of game design. I mean, we can't touch, taste, or smell games (yet), so the auditory feedback is half our of experience playing games. We'll save the more intricate discussion of sound design for a rainy day. For now let's just enjoy the music.
Music is used for a variety of purposes in games. In some cases like with racers, it doesn't have much use beyond giving us something nice to listen to while we smash into walls, but when implementing effectively it serves to communicate the emotion we should feel. Joy, sadness, panic, anger, and feeling like a badass are all emotions we feel while playing games, and while we don't need to entirely rely on music to tell us that it certainly helps.
Music also serves as a cue to how to play. The drowning music in Sonic gets you to hurry the hell up and sends you into a panic. The safe room music in Resident Evil lets you know you are no longer in danger. Game music is at its best not only when it sounds good and is used to these ends, but when it also is in harmony with the look and feel of the games aesthetics and (if applicable) animation. The music in Mario never outpaces the speed at which you run, and music in Banjo Kazooie seems as though it made to go to the beat of Banjo's running animation.
In picking our favorite tracks of 2016, we chose only original songs created for the game; no licensed songs. I decided to do individual songs rather than full soundtracks this year considering some games have one or a few great songs, but perhaps not all-around fantastic soundtracks. Here's our picks, and please do share your favorites as well!
via destructoid http://ift.tt/2hwQKFm