Meteos, Music, Awesome.

I've been playing a ton of Meteos on my DS lately. It's a puzzle game that thoroughly employs the use of the DS stylus to create an extremely enjoyable, and emotionally responsive game. The game's audio is so wonderful that I almost hooked the DS's headphone jack into a set of very fancy speakers which I have only used with one other DS game, which was Elite Beat Agents, and I only did that because there was Jamiroquai in that game and my balls weren't hopping around in my sack the way they should've been.

mmmmm.

METEOS!

Meteos has a wonderfully integrated musical accompaniment which is directly tied in with the gameplay. Whereas most games have a bell noise or a happy flute noise for when you do something right, Meteos has up to 20 different sounds which very clearly communicate HOW well you're playing the game. The humble goal of the game is to line up blocks, and if you line them up in a simple way, they blast away into space and somehow this all saves our universe from some evil planet akin to the Mr. Shadow thing from The Fifth Element. Whenever you successfully blast these blocks off the top of the screen, there is an accompanying 3 or 4 note melody which tells you in a very distinct video game way: "Great Job!".


This magic really reveals itself when you go into the extra features of the game and listen to all the little sound clips. Every level has its own style and melody, and there's up to about 60 different sounds for each level. 3 of these are the background music, and the other sounds are all there to signify different events in the game. Because Meteos can become a mildly chaotic game at times, these musical cues keep me from being lost in the haze of everything on the screen. Every little sound that is bouncing at me is telling me something about how I'm playing, and I believe that it makes me play the game differently at a behavioral level because I crave the excitement of a really good round when I'm playing well, and the music is speeding by with a huge assortment of frenetic sound effects.

This level of detail is something that needs to show up in more games. There's a lot of games out there which seem to want nothing more than to sound like a big budget movie, and though these game soundtracks have all the tension and dramaticism of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, they also have all the shallowness and emotional relevance of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. The sound design in Meteos is in a totally different direction. It relies on simple messages to convey complex meanings, which are crafted in great detail to respond directly to the interactive commands of the player, which is exactly how video games work best.