I played it, it was kinda cool. Didn’t spend a whole lot of time on it, I was too taken by the abstract holistic beauty of Dotstream’s Formation mode
Araamov was also one of the first people to expirement with direct application in the optical sound area of film stock. Given the simple shapes that he and later people who played with this technique gravitated towards, you can argue he laid groundwork for chiptunes.
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Do you know what timescale that’s on? It almost looks like he’s describing square/triangle/sine waves but is that really on a kHZ level?
I’m not sure how exact he got, but those are shapes drawn on the edge of motion picture film where the sound form is printed.
Here’s an example from the early 70s: https://youtu.be/UmSzc8mBJCM
I don’t really like Assassin’s Creed but the sounds of steps on roof tiles and various swords and knives clanking against cloth as you walk and jump around are very comforting and only really noticeable when using headphones.
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As someone who has played through AC2 (and arguably regrets it), this is a surprise to me!
When i was trying to get into EarthBound as a teen, listening to it through headphones and realizing you could hear distant sirens during the intro really unlocked it for me (then, also, the rest of the uniformly excellent soundtrack). Even now i refuse to replay without being able to listen clearly to the music. i bought it for n3DS and i’ve tried to play it, but they don’t want to hurt delicate kid ears so the headphone volume is cranked way down D:<
Any kind of “immersive” adventure game, too. IIRC during the setup for Riven, you’re advised to put in good headphones for the full experience.
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i actually bought a headphone amplifier solely because i wanted to play earthbound on my wii-u pad
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I can’t play any of the Thief games without headphones. Couldn’t ever imagine doing it.
More generally if I want to ratchet up the tension I have to play horror games with headphones on to drown out the ambient noise of the harmless suburb I live in.*
(*The week I moved in a decapitated body was found in the woods nearby and the house across the street got burglarized but after that I’ve behaved myself it’s been just fine!)
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kentucky route zero is super ambient with good headphones on
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I want to elaborate on this more in the future but
I kind of operate on the axis of “intimacy” rather than “immersion” when I’m figuring out when to put headphones on for a game
it can mean a number of different things that I will vaguely summarize as your (the player) “closeness” to the proposed videogame space via means of interface
so like dark souls was brought up as an example of a not-headphone game and it makes sense to me because the “proposed videogame space” (whatever the fuck that means) is supposed to be unwelcoming and uncomfortable, creating a distance between the player and the space (probably on purpose)
and like, contrast this with monster hunter which has a pretty similar flow in combat mechanics – the proposed space wants to be much closer to the player and wants to draw you in (you spend a Not Insignificant amount of time just gathering) so it becomes much more of a Headphone Game to me
and I think there’s a distinction to be made between this and “immersion” because a videogame can be made more immersive by creating a distance between the player and the space
I know Thumper is a good videogame because I have no idea how I want to approach that game’s space
this doesn’t make any sense
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Man I would feel completely opposite about Dark Souls and Monster Hunter!
Yeah, I want to get ‘intimate’ with most games (note: Thumper + headphones + VR is a heart attack in under 30 seconds (and highly recommended)).
Souls is the sort of thing that should be good on headphones but the audio/SFX quality isn’t up to snuff; if SFX sounded more well-mixed with the environment and less canned I’d consider it a win
I’m too on edge playing Dark Souls and I don’t want skeleton and blob noises that close to my brain.
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red dead redemption is a good headphone game. I certainly zoned out a few times while playing it. maybe that is the opposite of a good headphone game, but I like things which make me sleepy
I feel I’m getting a little extra audio mileage out of Nier Automata with headphones. I pick up more enviromental sounds that kinda get drowned out by the BGM and any voice lines actively playing. I also pick up on more softer vocals that I didn’t notice before.
I kinda wanna go back to Dark Souls and try headphones in Anor Londo just to see how much more headphones would add to all those echo effects in those marble hallways.
Part of the Virtual Boy’s appeal to me was that I almost entirely used headphones. It adds to the “totally enclosed in a dark space where the only reality is this red shit” feeling.
Wario Land on the VB has a pretty sparse soundtrack that also fits this aesthetic
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Virtual boy has neat sounds, makes me think of a game boy with echo effects
What’s the sound chip’s heritage? It seems fairly primitive by the standards of 1995 but I like what comes out.
http://www.planetvb.com/modules/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=audio_overview
turns out the echo effects are actually written into the song! but the VB has more channels than a gameboy does so you can emulate that effect easier – I used a lot of manually-made echo/delay effects in my older game boy stuff but I couldn’t get them anywhere near as clean because I had to fit it all on one channel
since the VB has 6 channels, 4 of which have independent left/right volume, it’s essentially a game boy with added stereo width. DMGs have 4 channels, 2 of which do square waves, 1 that does PCM and 1 that does pure noise – VBs are the same except instead of the 2 square wave channels you get 4 PCM channels, another PCM channel that has more modulation stuff, and a noise channel. so it’s a “better” gameboy if you use the PCM channels in tandem with each other to get the width
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TLoZ: A Link Between Worlds has a sidequest where you find 100 little cute hermit crab octorok things. Most of them are well-hidden in trees and under rocks and such, and can only be found by listening for their plaintive squeaking cry, which makes headphones a must. Fortunately, the music of that game is essentially A Link to the Past: Symphonic Suite.
Oh, and Mother 3, duh.
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