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Life & Arts

'Guild Wars' music is to die for

Leet Speak

Derek Lanphier 

Personally, as a gamer, one feature I enjoy more than any other in a game is a good soundtrack. If a game has a good soundtrack, it usually means the creators spent enough time developing the game to make it an enjoyable experience. If not, the music can still be enjoyable, and that helps the overall experience of the game.

I say this next statement loosely, but Guild Wars is one of those games. For the uninitiated, Guild Wars is an online role-playing game. 

You can't really consider it a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) because it lacks the normal foundations of one.

It's a good game but not a very deep one. It is great for casual gamers who don't have the time or money to devote to games like World of Warcraft or Everquest II. The game focuses more on player-versus-player elements and some modest questing.

However, it is in no way a bad game. One reason I occasionally come back to it is because the music is incredible. Jeremy Soule, the man who composes all the music for the game, is a musical genius. 

If video game music were a category at the Grammys, this man would win every year.

Recently NC Soft, the game's publisher, announced it's coming out with the first expansion to the game. That got me interested again and even caused me to re-surf the Web site, www.guildwars.com. Soon, I stumbled upon an interesting link called www.directsong.com. Evidently, this is a Web site that gets the old composer of a game, has them make new music for the old game and then sells it as downloadable content in what they call a music expansion.

This is a neat idea for someone like me who enjoys games with good music. The creators even have ways of making sure the game can access the music in your computer files as if it were included with the original packaging.

Other than Guild Wars, the popular games The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and Prey are included in the new music lineup. The music upgrades are pretty cheap at about $5, and you really get a ton of new music for each one. 

You can even download a free mini-pack for Guild Wars, which includes nine new songs all composed by Soule and can be used alongside the original Guild Wars soundtrack.

I hope this idea will catch on because I can think of some other games that could use a music upgrade.

Send comments to dcshobiz@mail.uh.edu