i listen to a games original music until ive heard the same song for ten hours. i dont even listen to my FAVORITE music for ten hours
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see this is the problem
a jrpg will play you the same piece of battle music for ten hours but randomly an enemy you’ve never seen before will pop in and unbeknownst to you this will have a unique piece of music
spelunky hd actually has something like this - there are “rare drops” for music. some tunes only play at pretty low odds so you’ll have heard the main tune dozens of times before randomly encountering one of the alternates.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
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haha yes, nothing like listening to something else and pausing when you hit a new dungeon to make sure it doesn’t have new music
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This is a big one for me
Maybe bigger is making sure the music tone matches the scene’s intent; it’s really important to me to know if they intended the music to play towards or against the text of the scene. So much of a game’s storytelling is the environment created by mood and space and if it’s not working for me I feel the more honest response is to drop the game, or become harshly analytical.
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Arcade games, presumably because they’re designed to be played in distraction-filled environments, are almost universally good for alternate listening.
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yeah, the early-80s games whose soundtracks are entirely their sound effects are just perfect for this
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Robotron has such powerful sounds
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daphny clued me in on a cabinet in a nearby pinball bar that’s loud enough to perform dental surgery
it’s so rad
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we got really into making period-appropriate playlists for mgsv and ground zeroes to augment the ingame cassettes, fantasies about the kind of music big boss and venom snake were into at the time. it was fun trying to capture their respective forms of sensitive masc bullshit, imagining big boss vibing out in an ugly hawaiian shirt to bossa nova and early yacht rock in 1974 in between trips to fire island with the boys and the usual war crimes operations.
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Loop Hero is really doing it for me here! A little wind-up toy that you just prod at and manage as it does its thing. Its sound is not important at all (and I find its sound effects rather grating), so there’s no trouble muting it for my own music. It’s low key enough that it supports podcast listening rather well too. There is occasional brief story text, but not enough to distract too much from anything I might be listening to. For my particular purposes laid out in this thread, this game is a direct hit.
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Got a new one to add to the canon: Dome Keeper!
It’s sort of a hybrid between a tower defense game and a Steamworld Dig style mining/upgrading loop kind of game. I find both those genres extremely satisfying on a visceral level I can’t explain, so I was immediately interested when I chanced upon this game on the Steam store.
Basically, you’ve crash landed a cozy little dome on a hostile planet, and you’ve gotta protect it! Every ~5-7 minutes, a wave of monsters attacks and you have to go to the terminal in your dome and kill the monsters before they can break the glass. You start out with just a dinky little laser on your dome, but over time you can upgrade until you’ve got a whole bunch of ways to defend yourself.
To pay for these upgrades, you drill down into the ground under your dome and mine for resources, which you carry back up for processing.
It’s sort of a roguelite structure, but not entirely. The mine’s layout is procedurally generated, as are the monster waves. Aside from that, there’s not enough randomness for a full endlessly-replayable roguelite slot machine experience. Instead, whenever you beat the game you unlock new customizations you can apply to future runs – different kinds of dome with different defenses, new difficulty levels and sizes of mine, a different miner who mines differently, etc. These options do significantly change the feel of the game, but there aren’t very many of them.
But remember, we’re here to listen to music! This game isn’t perfectly mute-able – there’s a very helpful sound cue that announces when a monster wave is about it hit. With sound effects turned off, it’s a lot easier to miss the visual indicator and end up getting back to your defenses too late. I’ve had runs end that way! The game is still completely playable without that, though. It’s just the right level of complexity to allow me to focus on music or even podcasts.
Last time I posted in this thread, I was having a good time with Loop Hero. That game was really fun at first but it wore out its welcome very fast. I have a feeling this one won’t stick around in my rotation for all that long, but I like it a lot and I do think it’ll at least outlast Loop Hero for me.
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