2010 AG Awards: Best Soundtrack or Sound Design

Feature from Nat - Wednesday, 15 December 2010 @ 1:34am

The 2010 AG Awards #3: Best Soundtrack or Sound Design

Possibly one of the most self-explanatory categories from this years awards ceremony, this award celebrates the best soundtrack or sound design within the year of gaming.

The AG Nominations:

Heavy Rain was a game that got me hooked by the soundtrack alone. I started getting pretentious, thinking about the "journey" the soundtrack was taking me on and just the atmosphere it managed to evoke had me creeping around completely innocuous scenes. It made me paranoid, high strung and extremely involved in every decision I made. I felt that beyond anything else in the game, the soundscape it provided really brought the quality of the game home for me. No matter what frustrations I had with the game, I had to come back to what I considered too be the strongest sound design of the year.

Jason? Jaaasooon? Undeniably, Heavy Rain was one of the greatest sounding games of the year.

Audio’s most valuable purpose on any medium is to create and build mood, and New Vegas is stuffed with so much atmosphere that it could send a ripper rusty. Disorientating drug trips, the sick splat of a bone suddenly becoming several bones or the screech of a radscorpion right-fucking-behind you. That’s not even mentioning the tension when approaching what you’re certain isn’t a ghost town, but is deathly quiet after the last few miles of utter wasteland. Then, there’s the actual soundtrack of iconic songs of the era, all with a Vegas twist in juxtaposition with the wastes around it and the slightest hint of a dark undertone. This game takes everything from Fallout 3 and serves it up triple distilled on a bed of rice. What? That’s not what normal folk have for dinner?

Haunting and oddly jaunty, the Fallout: New Vegas soundtrack is every bit as brilliant as it's predecessor

This one was easy to pick. It isn’t just the songs and mixes that go well for this game, it’s that the songs are fresh, the mixes and wildly hot and all the sound effects in between have been a pleasure. It’s kind of cheating putting a music genre game into this award but because this style of music (flavours of hip hop, R&B, rap, pop, trance and house) is just too good to pass up. Great work FreeStyleGames on getting such a great track listing and making it work so god damn well in a game.

DJ Hero 2, well and truly one of the best soundtracks of the year

Some of the most memorable gaming experiences I’ve ever had can be attributed to an atmospheric soundtrack or the right licenced track. The theme music for Max Payne still gives me chills, the tunes from the original Metroid levels get played at the Mana Bar, and goddammit if I didn’t have the Halo theme on my iTunes playlist back in the day.

What gets me the most though is that one song, that one moment in a game where the music transcends a scenario to greatness. Does anyone remember Prey? No, but I bet you remember that opening sequence where the Blue Oyster Cult’s ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’ kicked in as the aliens ripped up the bar.

In the same vein, my pick has to goto Red Dead Redemption – the only game to give me a similar moment this year. The first time you set foot in Mexico, your horse slowly plodding up the hill as the sun comes up over the ridges – the José González song ‘Far Away’ kicks into gear, and it set the mood just right. Of course, the soundtrack for the whole goddamn game is perfect as well, but it was that moment that sold it for me.

Entering Mexico is one of the most profound and memorable video gaming experiences I've ever played.