Music and Video Games - Stuff I'd have never heard if I wasn't a gamer.

When it comes to music, I like a pretty wide variety of different things, but I don't spend a whole lot of time listening to the radio or watching music channels on TV (not that most of those ever have any music anymore.) As the content of this blog would suggest, I spend quite a bit of my time playing games. Going through the contents of my iPod, I realized that the source of a lot of my favorite music is something I liked when hearing in in a video game once, and then I looked up the artist and purchased albums or individual tracks. As soundtracks for geeky films and TV can only provide so much in terms of exposure to new music, and tabletop roleplaying and fantasy novels don't (typically) have a soundtrack at all, I'm glad to have so many artists that I was introduced to primarily through PC and console games. I'd like to run down a few of those now.

Artist/Song: Bang Camaro - “Push Push” (Lady Lightning)

Game: Guitar Hero 2

"Trogdor" was another great bonus song from that game, but I was already aware of it at the time.

I was first working at a video game store when I encountered the Guitar Hero games, and I was terrible at them. When Guitar Hero 2 was released, our store got a preview copy with a few songs for the in-store demo station. In times when business was slow, I played the hell out of those few songs, and ended up pre-ordering and purchasing the full game when it released for the Xbox 360. I carved through the catalogue of songs in that game bit by bit, unlocking all the bonus songs and being able to play almost every song on Hard. One of the more fun ones to learn was the Arena-rock styled song from Bang Camaro. I don't play much guitar hero these days, but I still listen to that song now and again.

Artist/Song: Louis Armstrong - “A Kiss to Build a Dream On...”

Game: Fallout 2

I'd heard of Satchmo before Fallout, of course, but in the same way I'd heard of Jelly Roll Morton, Bing Crosby, and other artists who I could name but didn't really “listen to.” The amazing opening for this game impressed me so much that not only did I reload it many times to watch again, but I eventually picked up a CD of Louis Armstrong's recordings from the Decca sessions. This CD is representative of a lot of the commonly recognized “greatest hits,” and though I've ripped it to individual MP3s by now, I can say that the gravelly voice and amazing trumpet skills of this musical titan are a major part of any shuffle rotation.

Artist/Song: Alizée “J'en ai Marre”

Game: World of Warcraft

Yep, that is a specific dance move from a specific singer.

Funny thing about this one is, I didn't encounter French Pop star Alizée through her music, at least not initially. As people (or at least, most guys) who have played WoW for any significant length of time would likely recognize, the French pop singer is the inspiration for the female Night Elf dancing animation. In one of the many videos showing the WoW dances and their real-world counterparts side-by-side, I noticed this one and curiosity sent me to Google to find out who she was and what her music sounded like. Surprisingly, I found a few songs I liked quite a bit without any videos of her dancing required, even though I don't speak French near well enough to understand them.

Artist/Song: Poets of the Fall - “War” and “Poet and the Muse” (as Old Gods of Asgard)

Game: Alan Wake

I've mentioned these guys before. Since encountering their music in Alan Wake, the Finnish rock band Poets of the Fall has become one of my very favorite bands of all time. I haven't been to a concert in years, but if these guys have a tour that takes them anywhere near Chicago, I may have to clear my schedule and score tickets. They appear throughout the game both as themselves, and performing two songs as the fictional Nordic Metal Band from the 1970s called Old Gods of Asgard. (Video above is an "Old Gods" power ballad.)  Most of their stuff sounds like a blend between Jethro Tull and Queensryche, clean vocals and dark undertones in the music. Outside of the songs from the games, I am a huge fan of both the newest album, Twilight Theater, and Carnival of Rust from 2006. They also wrote and performed the closing credits to Max Payne 2.

Artist/Song: Jonathan Coulton - “Still Alive”

Game: Portal

Even people who have never tried Portal have likely heard the closing credits song over and over again. The clever lyrics, darkly humorous and in keeping with the tone of the game itself plus the incredibly catchy tune got many geeks to play the song to death and memorize all the words. Mr. Coulton wrote the song, but didn't perform it himself. A little digging online reveals a career built on funny songs with geeky themes, from Zombie Office Workers trying calmly to draft a memo to get the humans to let them in (RE: Your Brains,) to a young nerd who dreams of the day in the future when he can become a cyborg supervillain with a lab in space, because he is humiliated by a girl he likes now (Future Soon.) I've heard most of his albums, and the songs are catchy, well performed and genuinely funny throughout, so long as your sense of humor is twisted.

There are scores of songs from the music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero that I left off, mainly because most of my favorites from that genre are tunes I already knew about before the games featuring them. Also worth a brief mention is the track from Portal 2, “Exile Vilify” by The National. I played that song again and again to the point of my wife yelling at me right after hearing it. More than one of the Skateboarding games on consoles have had songs on their soundtracks that I've since tracked down, and the Grand Theft Auto series has great music on the various in-game radio stations as well.

Fallout – Mutants and Radscorpions and Ghouls, Oh my!

War. War never changes. From those four words, fans of the franchise who hadn't read the title of today's post would still know what I'm writing about. I've had a long and complex relationship with Fallout, most of it good, soured near the end, but with hope for a happy reconciliation someday. I already talked about the only blemish on the franchise in my experience here, (basically, the ending to Fallout 3 practically ruined the game for me) so I can devote the rest of this article to the good times.

I still reinstall and play this and Fallout 2 every few years.

Black Isle Studios was a development house, frequently confused with BioWare as they both produced RPGs for Interplay in the late 1990s – early 2000s. They are best known for PlaneScape: Torment and Fallout 1 & 2. Due to differences of opinion in how the team should be run between team members and Interplay, key members of the dev team left to form Troika Games in 1998, leading to the rest of the division being laid off and Black Isle was officially defunct as of 2005. The inspiration for the first Fallout game, released in 1997, was an earlier Interplay RPG called Wasteland, released nearly a decade before.

The pen and paper RPG roots of Fallout are apparent in the character creation and improvement screens, and feeling like a tabletop roleplaying game was by design. Initially, the developers planned to use Steve Jackson's GURPS for character creation, combat and skill resolution, but the amount of violence in Fallout was a primary factor in the licensing agreement falling apart. Instead, the developers came up with their own in-house system, named SPECIAL (an acronym for Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck, the primary attributes of any character.) In addition to purchasing points in these attributes, a character had to spend initial character resources to buy ranks in skills, and one or more “perks” which gave a character abilities not covered by his/her skills and attributes (not unlike feats in D&D or talents in WoW.)

PiP-Boy, the Fallout series mascot (and whipping boy for some of the more gory perks.)

The post-apocalyptic wasteland in the Fallout titles gave the character an overall goal with a time limit, but beyond that, a great deal of freedom in choosing how to complete that goal, as well as other side quests and subgoals encountered during play. Many challenges could be completed with stealth, violence or smooth talking, and consequences for attacking or allying with any of the various power groups out in the wastes would have an effect both later in the game, and on the ending (at least in Fallout 1&2). In the first game, the player takes the role of a dweller of a vault, a self-contained “bomb shelter” of sorts that insulated itself from the apocalypse, but exploration becomes necessary when the water purification chip in the vault becomes defective. The 2^nd game features a descendent of the original Vault Dweller, now living in an imperiled village out in the wastes.

Many elements of style, from the Iconic Pip-Boy to Nuka-Cola (a bottled soda whose caps become the default standard of currency) and iconic creatures like genetic mutants and the radioactive Ghouls persist throughout all Fallout titles. Bethesda Softworks (of The Elder Scrolls games) acquired the rights to develop new Fallout titles, starting with Fallout 3, which dropped the top-down isometric perspective in favor of a first-person view more in keeping with their other games. Though the thematic elements were in keeping with the original games (your character in Fallout 3 is, once again, a Vault Dweller on a quest), series purists derided the newer games as “Oblivion (Elder Scrolls IV) with Guns.”

These games actually got me into listening to Louis Armstrong.

The combat systems in the original Black Isle titles and the Bethesda games were significantly different from each other. Fallout 1&2 featured turn-based RPG “action points” style combat, controlling multiple party members from a tactical perspective. Fallout 3 and later Bethesda titles did away with this system, preferring instead combat more like a first-person shooter, with the ability to zoom in and use “action points” to target specific creature body parts to allow a weapons skill roll to handle to hit and damage calculations, with a lot of extra damage assigned for hitting a vital spot. Both combat systems had their own advantages and disadvantages, the degree of precise control and tactical perspective in earlier games appealing to RPG gamer not fond of first person shooters, and the faster pace and improved graphics appealing to gamers who don't mind action elements in an RPG so much.

I really hope that this game is as good as I've been hearing, it'd be nice to look forward to Fallout titles again.

Overall, I prefer the older titles to the newer offerings by a wide margin, even though I don't mind RPG-action hybrids in the slightest. I appreciate how much work went into the newer titles to do a classic setting justice, but I fear that in the rush to modernize the franchise that some essential depth was lost. I've heard very good things about Fallout: New Vegas, in particular that it addresses some of the specific concerns of fans of earlier games with regard to deeper storytelling with more choices and potential consequences. I'll be sure to give the newer games a look once I can manage it. Bethesda obviously has a lot of respect for getting the Fallout “feel” right, and now that they don't have to completely reinvent the wheel, maybe they can recapture some of that Black Isle magic.

Can't Stick the Landing – RPGs and poor endings.

 Not so long ago, I wrote about Dragon Age 2. I read a lot of reviews of the game, and ended up liking it in spite of some of the things others mentioned that bothered them. Yeah, the same few areas were re-used over and over again. Yep, game was too damned short. And it sure would have been nice to get out of Kirkwall just a little bit more.

What bugged me most, and almost enough to wreck the game for me, was the tepid final act. The ending was abrupt and seemed forced, with characters behaving in ways that were supposed to be designed to make final choices difficult. The problem is, a good ethical/moral conundrum should not rely on all sides being equally unpleasant. “You're all jerks, but I hate this guy a little less, so we go with him.” That's not a well-written morality tale, it feels more like the attitude of the average apathetic American voter.

Don't give me that look, You know what you did.

This isn't the first time that a game I've played has had an incredible buildup, only to let me down at the last moment. The most striking example I can think of is Fallout 3 (to be fair, I've played NONE of the expansions or DLC.) Throughout, Fallout 3 had an engaging experience, your choices seemed to matter and I was having a good time. Then, you get to the ending, and you are forced into a “this or that” choice, both of which aren't very good... and you can't even back out and decide later. I gritted my teeth, unhappy but resolved to see it through, and then got the ending. I'd beaten previous games in the Fallout series, and expected to see the consequences of my decisions and how they affected the world. Not so. The vast majority of the decisions I made turned out to be utterly meaningless as far as my ending.

This ruined the game for me, and is the reason I didn't continue on with any of the additional material.

War. War never changes. And neither does the ending, aside from 2-3 choices you made.

Thinking back on it, a lot of the Final Fantasy games were like this, too... the ending got so weird that I disconnected with what came before and stopped caring about the story. What is it about so many modern RPGs that have great beginnings, great mid-game, and then completely fall apart somewhere in the Third Act? There are a few things that will utterly ruin a game if included in the ending.

1. Radically changing your storytelling right at the end: This includes not only the “we're all in a dream/the afterlife/the matrix” or the sudden inclusion of aliens or magic “a wizard did it”, but establishing one kind of pace and one standard for player input for the game, and another for the ending. Talk about ruining suspension of disbelief.
2. Huge buildup to a climactic conclusion, and insufficient closure before providing a cliffhanger. Cliffhangers are annoying enough in games, but they really rob the player of the experience if after hours and hours of struggle, there's no moment of “victory.” If you take away the feeling that a hero's fight accomplished something, who cares what happens next?
3. Cardinal Sin: Do Not, I repeat, DO NOT let a character other than the one the player controls swoop in to be the deciding force in victory. If this ultra-badass is the real hero of the day, why did anyone else bother to show up? Thanks, I always wanted to play “unintentional sidekick.”

Almost everything listed above, in one game.  The ending is somehow less comprehensible  than being an underwater soccer star whose father becomes a Satan Whale.

What games really infuriated you with a letdown at the end? Was there one in particular that everyone else seems to hate but you actually kind of liked the ending for? Let me know.