Best game soundtracks: your pick

GERARD CAMPBELL

While for me engaging gameplay is the draw card of a video game, strong audio also helps immensely in creating that all-important immersion, drawing the player into the gameworld.

If it's done right, in-game audio can catapult a game from just OK to stellar. Take Xbox Live Arcade darling Limbo, which I'm playing at the moment. It has minimal sound but the audio is so crucial in creating the game's haunting atmosphere that it deserves to be turned up loud to get the full effect.

Other personal favourites that had brilliant audio that set the mood and created tension are Bioshock, Dead Space, Uncharted 2, Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 but game audio also includes soundtracks.

No stranger to good in-game soundtracks, Rockstar has just released a video of an accoustic performance by Swedish indie-folk singer Jose Gonzales of his track Far Away, which features in Rockstar's blockbuster game Red Dead Redemption. The song plays when the games protaganist John Marston first reaches Mexico, riding along a trail between towering red cliffs and the San Luis River. You can find it here

If you've played the game you'll no doubt remember the point where the song kicked in. I do but what game or games get your vote for in game audio and soundtrack?

Finally, yesterday I promised New Zealand pricing for Kinect, which I was told would be known today, but alas, we will have to wait until next week - Microsoft isn't ready to announce the price just yet.

PR for Xbox NZ contacted me this morning saying both Xbox Australia and New Zealand were not ready yet to reveal the pricing of Microsoft's entrant into motion-sensing gaming.

Time to crystal ball gaze and make a prediction: I'm tentatively hoping that the final price for Kinect in NZ will be $150, pretty much what gamers in the United States will be paying for their Kinect, rather than the $210 rumour floating about. Hopefully I'll be proved right next week (fingers crossed).

UPDATE: It seems my prediction on the NZ pricing of the Kinect has been proven wrong already, with Xbox New Zealand just announcing NZ pricings a few moments ago. The Kinect will cost $229 (bundled with a copy of Kinect Adventures) or $499 bundled with a 4Gb Xbox 360 console, Kinect camera and Kinect Adventures.

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