Music while I game.

Whatever happened to the ability to play Last.FM while playing a game on Xbox? It used to exist! Sure you can still play music from a flashdrive or music installed on your system while you game, but getting to that point is nothing short of a hassle.

I got 100% of Oblivion completed, and probably only listened to about 1/8th of the game. I also managed to watch the first 3 seasons of Deadliest Catch while playing Oblivion. How you ask? Well, I had Oblivion on one screen, and Deadliest Catch coming through the headphones from my computer. Made time fly. I got to the errands and collection quests of Oblivion and knew I didn't need to hear anything, so I listened to something else.

Even today I listen to podcasts while playing games that lack strong audio like Borderlands and Brink. Both are fine games, but the in-game music, and occasional dialogue cues often make me wonder why I'm even listening to anything in-game. It's partially killing two birds with one stone (I have thousands of podcasts still to listen to) and it makes the errands and boring travel in the game seem less.... boring. Nothing against any of the games, and most of them have excellent audio... they're just missing something.

Fallout 3 spoiled me. Three-Dog and his interruptions to the radio to announce things that my character was or was not influencing were brilliant. Assassin's Creed did the same thing, sort of. You could hear people talk about my recent exploits and adventures. Maybe it's come from years of playing games in a silent apartment or room, but hearing just the music is sometimes unsettling.

If this were 15 years ago, I'd probably be going insane. Games back then rarely had in-game voiced dialogue, and even if it did it was usually just during cut-scenes.

More to the point though, games like Fallout and Oblivion have excellent in-game music. Games like L.A. Noire have amazing in-game dialogue and meaningless conversations. It's sad to see games like Borderlands where it completely lacks any strong musical cues. Gearbox knows in-game music. Black Mesa had awesome musical cues. But this isn't to bash Borderlands, they're just the first example I could think of where the lack of any sort of audio seemed prominent.

I get their artistic choice to have little music. They're trying to create a desolate and deserted atmosphere. I can totally dig that. Your first few hours in the vast stretches make you think you're the only one around. Problem is ,Borderlands, after a while you're forcing me to run errands. I don't mind it, I know it'll pay off in the end. I just would like to hear some music while I work. So instead I silence the in-game audio and listen to podcasts, or Pandora or what have you.

The Xbox still has the feature to play music off of a flash-drive, but I'm surprised to see they haven't really changed/improved it since that. Of course if I had a Zune I could link my music. But how many people do you know have Zunes? I know of 3. GameStop used to sell them. If I had a Windows PC I could stream my music to my Xbox. But if I had a Windows PC I would be complaining about a lot more than lack of in-game music. (Zing).

Dungeon Siege is coming out soon. Dungeon crawling at it's best. The demos out too. You'll see what I mean. From years of playing D2, Baldurs Gate, and Torchlight I know how boring it can get without some interesting musical cues. I might just have to make a dungeon crawling playlist. I made one for UT2K4. Of course UT2K4 had an in-game music player that would search your computer for all of your music. Now that was a music player you could hang your hat on.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to listen to/yell at this weeks "This American Life" while I search for more badges and film reels in 1940's LA.