Games have long aspired to to being cinematic: cinematic this, cinematic that. It’s as if everyone who works in games wanted to make films but never quite made it. Cinema, with its flashy movie sets, big name stars and award ceremonies that even normal people want to watch. Games on the other hand are like the unpopular, self confident geek child trying to avoid a beating in the playground by proclaiming their own merits. “We can be cinematic too” the game industry whines as it slaps down another throbbing slab of techno-garble about polygons and “cinematic editing techniques” to compensate for their lack of comparable glitz. Like the bassist in a band who really wanted to be the lead guitarist who compensates by brandishing a larger instrument.
I started my career in music and sound by brandishing my large instrument as a bassist which is probably why I think DICE’s Stephen Strandberg made one of the most important statements in game audio in recent times in a Sound of Battlefield 3 interview for game informer when he said:
“I don’t think it’s wise chasing after a movie soundscape, it’s not what it is. There’s a lot of things to learn from Hollywood… But we’re good at what we are making here.”
This is a man of foresight. Like the playground geek who won’t pander to the desolate, finite landscape of school social affairs in the realisation that in the end he’ll come out better and not end up spending the rest of his life picking mushrooms out of chicken shit for Waitrose or making bricks. This is a game guy saying, “hey fuck you, I want to make games and I’m proud of it, and I’m good at it”.
It’s an industry which started off with spotty, greasy, overweight anti-socials, seeking nourishment from doritos and swigging on cans of coke hiding away in their darkened bedrooms furiously tapping away on computers with tape drives. I think we’re still suffering a hangover from these stereotypical images, ironically emphasised by the films and television shows that play up to these out-of-date cliches. Now those with the talent to create a game are still hidden away in dark rooms, but they have a public facing marketing department with an understanding of demographics, trainers and Apple products that boast a higher IQ than their own. They all wish they worked in marketing in the film industry.
So in the run up to the Max Payne 3 release I couldn’t help but shake my head as someone who thinks he knows better when seeing promotional videos stating their cinematic intentions with overtly melodramatic voice overs from some hollywood rejected, cardboard, no-face actor who awkwardly spurts mis-elocuted nonsense with pairings of words as clumsy and cumbersome as “presentation innovations”.
Next Generation Presentation Innovation
So with my cynical and twisted perspective explicitly smattering the introductory paragraphs of this article like an erratic defacement of the morning porcelain, I’ll tell you why I believe Max Payne is “worth hearing”.
30GB download. 30GB. Do you know how long it takes to channel that much data through a bastardised BT phone line? I don’t either, but a rough guestimate would put it in the region of way too long. So what’s that 30GB made of? A vast amount of detail has been laboured upon in the environments and the sound is no exception. It’s an “immersive experience” alright with a healthy does of “the cinematic”. The cutscenes are slick and in the most part seamlessly transition to-and-from gameplay.
The dialogue is well acted and well placed in the environments during both cutscenes and gameplay. Although the script tends to be a bit cheesy, it hits the mood of the game perfectly and is entertaining enough to not become irritating in the most part, which is pretty impressive seeing as it is practically continuous through the whole 14 hours I spent on it. It’s a bit like a thoughtless, less poetic version of Bastion, but unashamedly so. I say not irritating “in the most part”, as picking up bottles of painkillers was almost always met with the line “one vice at a time”, although they had put a lot of contextual, level specific variants in an attempt to reduce the monotony which is a level of detail that steps beyond most.
“I had a hole in my second favourite drinking arm and the only way we were likely to get Fabiana back was in installments”
Rockstar have always been good at creating prickish, irritating and hateable characters (especially in Bully) and this iteration of Max Payne is no exception. The New Jersey gangster kids in chapter IV are particularly beatable and my enthusiasm for the game was cemented as I watched slow motion projectiles burst through their smugish, chump faces as volcanoes of blood erupted between their pokey features. In fact the slow motion moments sound great. The mix focuses in on sounds important to you. Your own gun sounds dominate and enemies sound weak and pathetic as they get perforated with torrents of gunfire. As the game slips out of bullet time a transitory whoosh masterfully masks the mix change as the environments come back to life with enemy gunfire, whizzbys and shouts. It’s an incredibly clean implementation that seems to work in just about every scenario even when game metamorphosises to cutscsene. It’s not just the mix that contributes to the sonic changes in the slowdowns and they haven’t just decided to pitch everything down in the hope that this sort of audio fumbling would provide the solution they needed. Instead a number of sounds feel like they’ve been re-designed for playback in bullet time, for example the gunshots themselves carry far more weight and synchronise well with the slower gun animations as the mechanisms flick back and forth ejecting casings and muzzle flash.
As we mentioned a few weeks back in the original review of the game, the environments are incredibly detailed. Specific elements are not simply baked into a doughy representation of what you might hear should you be in the environment, but a detailed representation of a world that is alive around you. As gunfire rips through a calm environment in the game the ambience reacts to your presence in the world. Babies start crying, sirens start wailing, dogs start barking. You disrupt the environments with your own auditory presence. The favelas section of the game was a highlight, with a strikingly detailed sonic backdrop with some awesome use of music both in a diagetic and non-diagetic sense.
“No one would be rebooting his system, poor bastard”
So with all this going on a good mix is pivotal to the whole game sounding great and this is perhaps one of the strongest points of this game with regards to the audio. The mix is sparse yet informative; it never seems to have a huge amount going on at any one time without sacrificing the tension and drama. Despite this the duckers kicked in hard and fast to ensure dialogue was prominent in the mix whenever present. Although important in terms of the game experience and the narrative, it was too much in some cases, especially when ambiences were quiet (such as indoors) as they would end up slamming everything into the ground. Occasionally the mix would seem to focus on a very unusual sound, such as an air conditioning unit or physics impact that didn’t seem to hold any greater relevance.
So all-in-all an amazingly innovative, interactive, cinematic audio presentation. At times I felt like I was watching a film when I was in fact meant to be playing a game. I felt engaged in the environments, and my character felt powerful and had a significant influence on his environment. The narrative (although cheesy and cliche) drew me in and perhaps there was even a level of emotional attachment to my empty, polygonal companions. But the one thing that really didn’t engage me was the gameplay and despite the beautiful transitions that would look and sound fluid to anyone watching the game being played, it felt as if the gameplay had been crowbarred into a presentation innovation rather than being part of a single entity.
The sound of Max Payne 3 really did blow me away, but left me with a question. How can game sound designers keep banging on about cinematic sound design in games (i.e. how it supports narrative and emotional envolvement), when games haven’t really been able to create a cinematic experience within themselves as yet because quite simply: games are not films.
They’re presentation innovations.
