This post might need a little bit of explanation to go with it, first. I've sometimes had to post jaded observations on how some things are awful. This post is not intended as a flame; the point is that this is an observation.

And the observation is that I've grown tired defending the Ultima series. Now, don't get me wrong... I'm just admitting excess zealotism, and is a part of healing process.

Here's a bug report I filed a while ago. It looks like the game developers are acting on it. I sure hope things do get improved.

But I'm getting cynical on the topic.

Game music doesn't get enough attention.

Sure, you always hear how Nobuo Uematsu's stuff sells like popcorn. But now, I'm talking about slightly less known music.

And especially music very close of its native format.

The bug report above is for Battle for Wesnoth, one of the coolest strategy games I've played, and also one with some amazing music. (Check out Zhay Music - some really cool music that has been used in some other open source games too, like Adonthell and such.) It's a great game, yep. But when you load up the .ogg files from the music directory to the music player - whoops, you see the exact same mind-numbing problem you see with commercial games.

Stated plainly: the tagging sucks. It sucks in free games, it sucks in commercial games, it's pretty damn awful in some really high-budget games.

Now, I think Nobuo Uematsu makes pretty good music (not the best game music ever, but definitely from the better half). But I really how the big gears behind Square's music soundtrack machinery crank out what I, as a game music consumer, really like: Distinct tags. Identified songs. And most important of all, distinct song names.

Whereas here, I'm looking at a bunch of files pulled out of Warcraft III. The game had a couple of different composers. The good news: Songs have distinct names. The bad news: Not all tracks have artist names. So here I was: "Ho-hum, this bloody well sounds like Glenn Stafford to me, say, 75% probability. Damn, it does sound like Warcraft II, at least!"

And now, here, I was with Wesnoth. Currently, 12 music tracks. Few have really good tags.

Title: battle for wesnoth - strategic plot
Artist: http://zhaymusic.com/

This is not what your mother would want you to send to AudioScrobbler. This would, however:

Title: Strategic plot
Artist: Joseph G. Toscano
Album: Battle for Wesnoth

Why do I care? Well, primarily thanks to me using AudioScrobbler now. I just heard how some people have noticed how people start paying attention to what they watch on TV when TiVo builds a profile of them. The same with AudioScrobbler: I don't want crappily tagged music appearing on my Last.fm profile. Before, it was just a little bit of internal crying and whining in silence when I couldn't even find the damn artist for the track, let alone figure out a good name for the track; Nowadays, it's a frigging public issue. I want to show the world that yes, I listen to this particular game's music, I like the composer of this track, blah blah blah. I can't. The music isn't identifiable.

We just need the game music tracks to be properly identified. All I ask is for some distinct names. If I see yet another track titled "Title screen" I'm going to explode, or just get annoyed anyway. And if you have six composers on the project, tell us who did what. Grr.

Now, it'd be cool if I could find out who the hell composed the title music of Deus Ex...

End of rant.

Update: Scary how some things get uncovered if I try hard enough. Deus Ex musicians are unmasked. =)

Here's something weird. I happened to find an old issue of Finnish computer magazine Hakkeri ("Hacker"), which was published in mid-nineties by Casamedia. I used to be a regular at the CasaBox.

This particular issue was 1/94. It had weird game-related news like "Doom has been released" and "A new version of the Commodore 64 emulator has been released". (Umm, yeah. The new version of "the Commodore 64 emulator". In retrospect it's pretty hard to guess which emulator that was, but I take an educated guess it was CCS64. There pretty much weren't other C64 emulators then! [Or was it this? My memory is a bit hazy.])

The most important thing, and probably the most educational piece of news in retrospect, was, however, an article titled "Commodore takes it like a man."

"...if the numbers have any other basis in reality aside of the market leader's hallucinations, the company seems to be doing just fine... ...the current sales... are approximately 30,000 per week, the total being close to 400,000 units already... ...is selling up to four times more than Sega's similar offering. The company has... heh, a 'problem': [David Pleasance says] 'Our problem is that we aren't manufacturing enough of the machines [to meet the demand]...'"

Sounds interesting, huh?

Now, you may think that's just a typical marketspeak, and you may have heard similar speak from most of the major console manufacturers of the day when they spew ramblings of their own consoles.

The bit I omitted in the dot-dot-dots was the fact that they're talking of Commodore CD32.

Which, you may be aware, didn't quite live up to the hype what comes to the sales. (Nor, exactly, did Sega CD, but that's just a small detail.)

People, please, remember this. Don't believe the hype. Here we see a company spinning "yeah, we're doing fine", and if you look at them a decade later, the frigging company doesn't even exist.

This is exactly why I hate the marketing bullshit that's being spewed around the new consoles. I hope this small example was enlightening enough in this respect.