I worked out how to play it on the guitar the other day (it isn’t hard), you see, and thought I’d see what else had been done with it. A search on YouTube brings up a lot of results, including various remixes and cover versions, a great instructional video by Sonic Clang (who recorded his version for the Classic Doom 3 mod) and a huge debate over which metal song e1m1 ripped off. This ranges from Metallica’s ‘Master of Puppets’ to Slayer’s ‘Behind the Crooked Cross.’ For the record, I own both these tracks and they sound about as much like e1m1 as the speaking clock. Sonic Clang feels the same way, to the point where he even went to the effort of filming his own short film to prove that the track was a rip off of Metallica’s ‘No Remorse’.

On the one hand this proves that there are a lot of obsessive weirdos on the Internet, and I count myself among them, seeing as I conducted the search in the first place. On the other hand, though, it also proves that a good computer game soundtrack can still be an Internet hit 15 years after it was first released. Why don’t they write good, catchy computer game tunes like that any more?

After this, I started to look for other good computer game tunes, and found various covers of the theme from Monkey Island, including this great piano piece. I was also reminded of the fun of playing through Quake II to Sonic Mayhem’s crunching techno metal soundtrack. There are numerous other catchy computer game tunes, of course, including the Bomb the Bass (aka a slightly faster ‘Assault on Precinct 13′) track for Xenon 2: Megablast, not to mention the theme tunes to console classics such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario Bros and the Legend of Zelda, all of which I’m sure you can whistle off the top of your head, whether you’re a seasoned console hater or not.

I tried to think of other good computer game soundtracks that have come out recently, and while there have been plenty of good, big-production scores for the likes of Oblivion, and occasional bouts of action music cropping up in Half-Life 2 and Crysis, there just isn’t anything with a simple, catchy soundtrack any more. Basically, there’s nothing that’s going to make it to an Internet video in 15 years time. Why is this? Are game developers too sophisticated for catchy game tunes now? Do we only get film-like scores at appropriate moments from now on?

The answer’s probably yes, but I’m not entirely happy about this. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for good, realistic games with appropriate music and cinematic cut scenes, but I also kind of miss the all-out ‘just shoot everything in sight’ approach of the Doom and Quake games, all to a stomping metal soundtrack that would be going on in your head all day. Is there any reason why we can’t have both?

Maybe Duke Nukem Forever will change this, but I doubt it. Doom 3 was rammed full of boring cutscenes, stupid stuff like PDAs and tedious levels, when it should have just been a fun, guts and glory shooter. Quake 4 was similarly full of marines talking gibberish, and pointless vehicle levels. I actually quite liked Quake 4, but I’d have liked it a lot more if it just involved shooting loads of stuff to techno metal.

And don’t even think about telling me that I should play Serious Sam. I like the idea of Serious Sam. After all, you’re a big guy with massive guns whose mission is to gallivant around ancient Egypt, turning harpies into bullet-torn heaps of feathers. But, let’s face it, Serious Sam was crap, and boring. You go into an area, it gets full of creatures and then you shoot them all, then move onto the next one. There’s little in the way of interesting map design, with cool, winding corridors. This is what Doom and Quake II had in abundance, but they didn’t ruin it by pretending to have a story, and they had great tunes too.

In fact, I’d often play the first few levels of Doom and Quake II for fun, even after I’d completed them on various difficulty levels – it didn’t matter about completing the game; I just wanted to shoot stuff. So basically, after all my rambling, I’ve come to the conclusion that I want a stomping thrash metal soundtrack to accompany a simple game where I just shoot loads of stuff. And, no, this doesn’t mean I want to play online multiplayer games – I suck at them. Bring back, cool, simple, catchy tunes. Do it, do it now!

a> I go mad staring at these four walls

b> I go mad watching Spode cycling around like a fool in the multitasking test video

b> Julie (our production editor) has a mental breakdwon for not finishing on time

d> Intel and AMD decide to launch any more CPUs

(more…)

According to games news site Gamesindustry.biz, the X-Fire servers recorded that Call of Duty 2 was played, on average, for a cumulative total of 173,355 hours per day, compared to 158,714 hours per day for Counter-Strike: Source.

This I find quite strange, since, in my experience, CS: S is massively more popular than CoD 2. Of course, these results are obviously skewed in favour of what X-Fire users play, although considering that there are now 8 million registered X-Fire users, you’d expect the sample size to be fairly representative of the ‘typical’ online gamer (especially since 60% of these users are based in Europe).

Nevertheless, these numbers fly in the face of what Valve (the developer of Counter-Strike) says about how popular CS: Source is on www.steampowered.com, which states that Source is played an average of 1,055,737 hours per day – nearly 7 times higher than the X-Fire statistic.

So, who is right? Is Source the Alpha and the Omega of online shooters, or is Steampowered hopelessly biased and X-Fire is right than CoD 2 is the mutt’s? Bet CT all…