What's the best sound you've heard in a game?

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ballpoint

Gawd
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Mar 30, 2006
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Which computer game has the richest, most believable sound field that you've heard? For me, it's between the HL2 games, Quake 4, and Battlefield 2. The more I turn up the more speakers, the more detail I hear. Stuff I never noticed even in my headphones.
 
I'm actually a pretty big fan of the work done for the original Thief and its sequel, Thief 2. Despite certain audio being fairly low quality (though still technically uncompressed), the quality of sound events, dialog and effects (to a degree) and their clever usage in-game is almost enough to completely remove me from reality. Thief: Deadly Shadows is a fairly good sounding game as well, but some of the sound design there lacks "class", for a lack of a better word.

Doom 3 and Quake 4 would have been winners in my book were it not for the horrendous overcompression. More often than not, aliasing and compression artifacts are clearly audible, completely ruining the otherwise good use of sound and sound design. The original Quake is probably the best in the series as far as sound design is concerned, thanks to Reznor's fairly unique way of approaching design.

Oblivion's another good pick. The sound engine's pretty rudimentary (no fancy EAX or effects), but the sound design is pretty stellar and generally high quality. The deal breaker with Oblivion is the inexcusably overcompressed and horrendously acted dialog. Creature effects aren't stellar, either, and there's some pretty heavy repetition.

HL2 pulled off that kind of "in your face" sound off pretty well, I think. No fancy effects here either, though some of the software filtering/event blending is excellent (distant gunfire, underwater explosions). Overall, HL2 sets a pretty high bar for sound, though, again, there's audible compression artifacts with dialog.

I was pretty satisfied with Prey, but not particularly blown away. The sound design mostly lacks consistency.

Not many other games worth noting, really. For the most part, sound seems only intended to work acceptably. Very few people in the industry really try to push the envelope. There are probably a large number of games I've missed out on as well, as I'm not really a console kind of guy, and console games typically have the highest production values.
 
HL2 is the only game I know where explosions actually sound believable. I've never heard a real explosion, but these sound pretty good to me.
 
Nothing is motivating me to get my own stand-alone house more than the desire to hear game and movie surround sound at really high volumes, so that I can hear every nuance of the sound. I think I'm going to become a mid-level audiophile once I own the space to design around. Right now I live in an apartment building. I haven't had any noise complaints but I really want to turn it up louder and add some bass to the mix.
 
Max payne 2 was pretty amazing for sound...

COD2 isn't too bad either..


the quality of sound for me seems to be very subjective on teh game content, a good cinematic game like COD2 and MP2 just have to have better/immersive sound than say a MP game like BF42/BF2..
 
Company of Heroes has damn good sound.

Red Orchestra and a BF1942 mod called Forgotten Hope have great rifle cracks.
 
H-street said:
Max payne 2 was pretty amazing for sound...

COD2 isn't too bad either..


the quality of sound for me seems to be very subjective on teh game content, a good cinematic game like COD2 and MP2 just have to have better/immersive sound than say a MP game like BF42/BF2..
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i have to agree, the COD franchise has some pretty compelling audio
 
Vampire The Masquerade,it got really good for me in the first Tremere Chantry in Prague
with EAX2 and a Audigy.

Cutscenes sound was also well done.as well as the Thief series,and System Shock 2 of
course.All great games with excellent sound.Alice was pretty good,and Sanitarium was great for sound,and allot of other things.! :)


Edit: Oh yeah ! Grim Fandango had wonderful sound effects.
 
Here's some of my favorites. Some are great both in technical and artistic quality, others excel morre in one of those aspects. Obvioustly the artistic part is highly subjective.

Halo series (good effects, good ambience and the score follows the action well)
Gears of War
Project Gotham Racing 3
Burnout Revenge (360 version has great sound effects)
Oblivion (agree with the points above)
Dreamfall The Longest Journey (only weakness is the non-natural way that character dialog has to load)
Smash Bros. Melee (great effects)
Metroid Prime (great all around although I'm sure they could benefit from less compression)
Rogue Squadron (the Gamecube version)
Goldeneye
Perfect Dark

There's a ton more (and as you can see I've been much more of a console gamer).
 
Just about any sound in Battlefield 2142, except maybe for the voices, which get a bit old, and the voss, I hate that thing:rolleyes:.
 
FINAL FANTASY

All of their songs, pretty much. Would waste dozens of minutes listing them.
 
ballpoint said:
Which computer game has the richest, most believable sound field that you've heard? For me, it's between the HL2 games, Quake 4, and Battlefield 2. The more I turn up the more speakers, the more detail I hear. Stuff I never noticed even in my headphones.
Click to expand...

I wish I could just pick one but can't. One has better explosions while the another might have great Gunfire sound. Others have mid-raged Game Sound and excellent sound tracks.

Retro!
System Shock
Incoming (A3D)
Quake 2 including Addons. Killer sound tracks, well of Hard Rock like NIN is your thing?
Forsaken Hip Hop meets Acid Rock.
Heavy Metal Very good surround.
Unreal

ALL of the War Games LOL, MoH, CoD, and etc....
Half Life 2 best sounding non EAX game and IMHO doesn't suck like Oblivion:rolleyes: sorry!
BF2/2142
Prey
Thief series
PainKiller (both)

Least recognized for great sound effects and helped put OpenAL on the Map? America's Army. Honestly, folks at Creative Labs should have shipped a free copy of this game with their cards. It alone won over at least 6 of my Buds who had sworn off Creative Labs sound cards and called OpenAL a Gimmick, hehehe! This was back when I used Logitech 560Z Speakers. Oh and I have most of the Music (ripped) from Incoming, G-Police, Forsaken and Quake 2 all of the add-ons. Awe, the good old days before DRM.
 
Donnie27 said:
Least recognized for great sound effects and helped put OpenAL on the Map? America's Army. Honestly, folks at Creative Labs should have shipped a free copy of this game with their cards. It alone won over at least 6 of my Buds who had sworn off Creative Labs sound cards and called OpenAL a Gimmick, hehehe! This was back when I used Logitech 560Z Speakers. Oh and I have most of the Music (ripped) from Incoming, G-Police, Forsaken and Quake 2 all of the add-ons. Awe, the good old days before DRM.
Click to expand...
I personally thought AA had horrible sound effects.
 
Eagle156 said:
I personally thought AA had horrible sound effects.
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To each his or her own:) It worked great for me. It was the first game to truly make the sound seem like it was localized to the player. I played with a Force Feed Joystick. A buddy thought the Joystick was making the M16 gun shot sounds and it bucked and jerked. He didn't believe it when I told him the stick was silent. The look on his face was priceless when I turned off the speakers and the stick continued to jump and shake!
That was with my Audigy 2 and Audigy 2 ZS before I bought my X-Fi LOL!
 
Hmm this is a good one.

Well I think BF2 with an X-fi on some more than capable speakers (read not computer speakers) is a really good combination.

Company of Heroes with the sound up really drives the point home.

COD series always had an enveloping effect on its sound track.

Good and Evil had a great positional sound feel to it.

Dig Dug (yes the original) because it was of the first games that I could not stop from singing the song to the game regardless of situation. It just kept going off in my head.
 
Battlefield 2 - X-Fi mode is pretty cool.

Call of Duty series

WarHammer 40k RTS series - the sounds are very impressive when a huge firefight breaks out. Big arty hitting, lots of ballistic and laser weapons going off, big robots and vehicles thumping around. Very nice with the base and a good sub. You can even hear the Imperial Guard foot soldiers traveling through the underground tunnels.
 
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