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Audible Words, Pt. 1: 'Developers, Meet Your Reviewers'
Schneider concurs. “Editors spend considerable time playing and evaluating games on smaller screens and via headphones. We take the actual player into account when reviewing audio.” The VerdictInevitably, it all comes down to the final score. So what separates a 7 from a 10? Again, both organizations had similar ideas. “An audio score of 7 would apply to games that have competent audio with some obvious flaws,” explains Schneider. “These flaws could include boring compositions, issues with voice acting, mismatched or delayed sound effects, or crackling audio. A 9 gets you into ‘fantastic’ territory. Things really have to come together for the high scores. Any game getting a 10 in the audio department nails all aspects of the package. The audio presentation would have to be technically proficient as well as perfectly match the gaming experience.” Gerstmann adds, “Fidelity also comes into play. As a recent example, Driver: Parallel Lines uses pre-rendered cutscenes, but also has in-mission dialogue. In the cutscenes, the speech is crisp and clear. In-mission, it sounds grainy and lo-fi like, as if they dropped 8-bit 22KHz samples in there. That’s probably an exaggeration, but the dramatic difference in audio quality becomes quite glaring over the course of the game.”
In the end, “there’s no mathematical formula for figuring this stuff out,” says Gerstmann. “It’s really a matter of weighing the good against the not-so-good and figuring out where it falls.” ### |
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