I was playing Night in the Woods with my “nice enough to make me broke for a bit” headphones. I refuse to play NitW without headphones. I thought about what games are better with headphones, and I’d liiiike to believe it’s not just as simple as “good tunes” and “everything’s better with them.” Please justify this thread with your experiences.
I remember getting really into Pokemon Pearl in high school, and I wore some for the full forty (?) something hours. Similarly, I loved Pokemon Sun, but it didn’t really suck me in until I put headphones on before going into that canyon with the fourth Kahuna. Then it got Real.
games that rely on heavy-sfx often sound pretty poor on my very clear headphones; the foley is exposed and you can hear them loop. Souls games in particular suffer from this. However western shooters don’t suffer from this; or, high-budget modern ones have put so much energy into making gunsound that it’s varied, rich, and interesting.
Anything with real instrumental music is helped, or something designed for the music to be high in the mix.
I wonder what the state of horror sound was before Eraserhead. It seems unfathomably influential; is there earlier stuff he drew on that I should be aware of?
To me that sounds like early synth noodling, though, not the many-layered industrial noises that seem so natural in horror.
I feel like that was created in search of an ‘alien’ sound unlike normal human noises. But the Eraserhead pattern is to layer and distort everyday sounds until they become alien, yet retain their connection to our life, making them uncanny.
zelda: breath of the wild is just fine w/o headphones, but the few times I played it with headphones it made me realize just how much ambient noise is in the game, and immersed me into it way more
unfortunately, on wii u, the music will sometimes cut out for a few seconds, and it can ruin the mood!!! it also makes me wish I could turn off the music altogether, I would love to know what the game is like without it
sirens have an uncanny power over my emotions and always have; I find them beautiful and terrifying in equal measure
The buildup of the humongous choir intensified by the train is intense and thrilling and horrific in light of the power of the state;;; of being pulled by by irresistible forces much larger, much stronger than you, as it catches up to the rhythm, surpasses it, dominates it
these are deep currents
(I’m also shocked by the audio quality on this recording from 1922!)
Soundvoyager was the bit-generations game for the GBA in Japan that was designed to be played based solely on audio cues, many of them with no visual feedback and all completable without having to look at the screen.
At some point you unlocked a kind of endless mode where you wandered around in space looking for bits of music to add to the ever-expanding music track; I used that to help me fall asleep for a bit.