As we all know, Mona Mur did the soundscapes for the masterpiece Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, but she’s also done other videogame work.
Velvet Assassin was a 2009 stealth game about killing nazis inspired by Violette Szabo, made by a short lived german developer called Replay Studios.
The last level has nazis torching a village, people screaming, etc and when you start shooting this industrial hammering starts up, with dog growling noises on top. also when you stealth kill enemies in this level instead of your normal animations you start stabbing guys 9 times. and the gun sounds: perfecto
unfortunately the soundtrack version doesn’t have the weird growling sounds.
She also did the music for all walls must fall and music and an appearance in culpa innata ii, a game that never actually came out.
It’s so rare for sound to be treated comprehensively mood-setting like this in mid-to-high-budget production (horror, especially Silent Hill and its descendants like Siren are clear exceptions). Aggressive and surreal soundscapes are one of the clearest ways indie games can be definitively better than mainstream games.
is there a place i can hear the general sb consensus on the cool things about kane and lynch 1 and 2? cause i keep hearing good things but i don’t wanna watch a longplay or let’s play or buy it. i remember seeing ads for it in game magazines when i was a kid and it looked pretty neat! and when i see it brought up here people usually sound like they’ve talked it to death and don’t want to be specific.
The first one is an interesting artifact if you’re into shooters but not essential in any way.
It’s the second that’s sb canon. It’s literally like five hours long, if you can get it cheap just play it. In super brief: it is the only game that says “shooter protagonists are automatically sociopaths” with anything approaching aesthetic coherence.
I would add that it feels dirty in a way that’s not possible other than at a mid budget and which requires an aesthetic commitment that just doesn’t exist for 95% of the industry
as IO are the most Michael Mann devotees among games, so is Kane & Lynch 2 the biggest-budget game to respond to Mann’s digital camera aesthetic in Miami Vice
Only game About Violence that just dwells in itself instead of Didactically Screaming In Your Right Ear The Whole Fucking Stretch To Make Sure You Get It.
No one ever sits Lynch down for an after-school special re: you’re freaking out about your ladyfriend being dead but all of this started because you callously murdered someone, idiot. You just live in/with these gross people, the first and only vidcon protagonists to casually make perfect sense doing shooter game things and if the cat was stuck in a tree they’d save it so they could eat it right after.
All of what has been said about Dog Days so far is true. Also, the gameplay is just delightful. If you complain that you can’t hit things with pixel perfect accuracy then you’re not getting it. The shooting feels completely unique and like you’re playing as a deranged lunatic who’s not all that well trained. It results in gameplay that’s mostly about hurling a lot of bullets in the general direction of enemies and hoping something hits. There’s a lot of back and forth and it looks/feels super cinematic and tense because it’s a bit unpredictable.
It’s always a hodgepodge of tricks that bleed in and get reused without thought or understanding of the physical machines they’re emulating, but shutter speed and focal length are absolutely standard controls of HDR tonemaps and depth of field shaders, and discussions around field-of-view.
A huge number of games have hosted discussion around this and will have a person or two who care about the presentation matching signifier film aesthetics, but it’s usually not maintained and controlled. Like most aspects of huge productions, the passions of a few get muted by the demands of the mighty ship. Games like Mass Effect (1) work to replicate the color and film texture of '70s stock, Alien: Isolation runs a similar game; Red Dead 2 is very concerned with a mid-60s film stock (and likely this focus prevent them from delivering an HDR presentation).
So Kane & Lynch 2 stands out for that tight control, but small games with the ability to focus on it include a bunch of indie or mid-size horror games, like Outlast and its digital camcorder aesthetic aping Blair Witch and the like.
This makes me consider the move to replicate old monitor tech through shaders and pixel/early 3D art styles as in a similar sphere as film techniques on camera – games looking to games as visual inspiration rather than film. The clearest example is Paratopic – horror (as usual, the tightly controlled nature of a horror game sets it up for aesthetic control) driven by the aesthetics of early 3D, not film or VHS as we more commonly see.
Mechanically Dog Days also has astounding level design that is all about presenting cover fire so your co-op partner can flank. The game doesn’t tell you this, it has KnL scream it at each other at various points.
Also despite everything when your partner goes down it says HELP BUDDY.
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