Awesome sounding games

[bkrownd]

I played Defender for a while last night, and got re-acquainted with how much I love the massive sounds it makes. The lasers, the smart bombs, when your ship blows up, the enemy sounds, the "robot voice" sound, etc - GLORIOUS! Wish I didn't always get toasted on the 2nd wave of that game...

 

Tempest and Zoo Keeper are a couple more that are exhilirating to play with the constant loud racket coming out of the speakers. Also, when you blast away at a long line of mushrooms or centipede segments in Centipede.

[DaveD]

There were a few Williams games that had similar sound effects to Defender. Robotron and Joust come to mind and both sounded awesome.

 

The Atari system 1 games, in particular Marble Madness and Peter Packrat, sounded great too.

 

Gyruss had a killer soundtrack.

Edited September 21, 2014 by DaveD

[Rybags]

Defender was in some ways well ahead of it's time. Use of DAC for sound and a dedicated CPU to do playback in 1980 was otherwise practically unheard of.

I remember it being probably the most audible and distinctive machine in one arcade I went to a lot with about 20 in total.

 

Space Duel from Atari was a bit of a standout. Decent sound to go with the multicolour vector graphics.

 

Gyruss for sure - very few arcade games even into the early 90s could match it's music.

 

Roadblaster from Atari - the Atari games using the YM2151 sound chip were very distinctive.

[DaveD]

Another one that comes to mind is Nintendo's Space Firebird. I remember one near the entrance of an arcade back in the day. Very distinctive sounding.

[Cynicaster]

You can't beat classic Williams games.

 

Gottlieb has some cool-sounding games, too. Krull is kind of stupid, but the sounds are awesome. Mad Planets is an awesome game with awesome sounds.

 

It's cliched, but I've always thought the sounds in Pac-Man were awesome. We take them for granted now but it must have taken some imagination and creativity to come up with those bizarre noises and make them feel right.

 

Pengo has very cool music and sound effects.

 

Love the sounds in late-80s Sega titles like Golden Axe and Altered Beast, especially the music.

 

Zaxxon sounds awesome, especially the sound of your ship's engines.

 

You're never going to hear more bad-ass explosions than when you blow up a boss in DoDonPachi--freakin' awesome.

[VectorGamer]

Reactor

[Keatah]

Gyruss and Tac-Scan and DOT.

[ledzep]

I was always of fan of how Star Castle and Armor..Attack! sounded, the deep bass sounds and especially the squeaking tank treads and chopper sounds in Armor..Attack!. Robotron was another game that I loved listening to. And of course I sucked at all three of them, haahaha.

[Nesbroslash]

Not a video game, but Bally's Centaur has some of the coolest sounding effects and speech I've heard in any pinball table. Gotta love that reverby robot voice.