In a move you’d expect from the Umbrella Corporation, Valve is trying to merge two zombie concepts into one multi-headed brain-devouring chimera. Marketing VP Doug Lombardi told totalvideogames.com that Valve was “trying to work out the details” to make it possible for fans of the first game to play alongside their sequel-adopting counterparts. This decision [...]

I have to level with you; I listen to video game music. Even I get waylaid into visiting the grocery sometimes, and it’s just not enough to spend my leisure time playing the things and writing for this blog. So I fill the gaps with accoutrements of the medium. This creates problems, however, because it really gets in the way of ice-breaking chitchat.

It’s easy to see where this goes wrong if you imagine that we’re having that conversation. Once we’ve gotten past the what’s-your-job phase, we wander into hobbies. It has become more palatable to bring up video games here as they’ve become more mainstream, so no trouble here. However, the conversation almost inevitably runs aground when we start talking musical tastes and I have to revisit the gaming trough and end up looking more one-dimensional than I really am (cough). It certainly doesn’t help that famous musicians have recently been whining that video games are incapable of teaching you anything valuable about music.

So whenever someone asks me what kind of music I like, I just mumble something about “eclectic obscure stuff,” and try to divert the conversation down a different path. It’s a shame too, because game soundtracks really have a lot to offer; it just seems like so much trouble to describe. If only I had some kind of soapbox so I could explain it once and for all.

Puzzle

Portal

These are games where the player is provided with a set of unfamiliar tools and then asked to explore their uses. Sometimes these tools are falling blocks that you must organize into lines, and other times you’re given a portal gun that lets you explore complex environments. So the role of player agency in puzzle games is to learn the nuances of the core tools so that you can use them in increasingly sophisticated ways or under greater pressure.

These games tend to fall into two major categories, though neither is sufficiently distinct to merit a subgenre. The first and most typical type includes relatively short affairs that rarely last more than a few minutes. However, their short length is usually balanced by a random element to them that makes them more or less infinitely replayable. The latter type of puzzle game is longer and more elaborate, but the puzzles themselves are typically setpieces with one real solution. So once you’ve finished the game, there’s not much point in coming back.
Notable examples
• Tetris
• Portal
• World of Goo

Adventure

Day of the Tentacle

It might appear that adventure games are a subgenre of action adventure (or vice versa) because both involve exploration and item collection. However, where action adventure games populate their worlds with enemies, adventure games use puzzles, and that proves to be a game-changer. In adventure games, the fobs you collect are used to solve the puzzles, so if you don’t have the right stuff, you can’t really play the game. So genre entries end up being more about scouring the environment for any interactive item, no matter how small, and then puzzling over the random debris in your pockets (in case it’s not intuitively obvious to you that the best way to traverse a zip line is using a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle).

Notable examples
• The Curse of Monkey Island
• Day of the Tentacle
• Professor Layton and the Curious Village