I turned to my coworker this morning and told her I was writing an article on mobile game soundtracks. Her response was “Oh, I always turn my sound off when I play my mobile games.” As I’ve been researching stats and information about mobile game soundtracks, I’m stumbling upon this sentiment quite frequently. Some folks prefer to listen to their own music while they tap through their handheld platformers, puzzles, and card games. Some silence their phones so not to disturb public areas. And some players just find that most mobile game music is not terribly exciting. Back in 2013 a survey was conducted by a company that made it easier for devs to add sounds to their apps. Not surprisingly they found that 73% of mobile game users play their games with the sound on. Obviously I find this study suspect. However, this was the only data I could locate on the topic. So, I ran my own little informal study. 100% of my respondents (roughly 50 people) said that they typically turn off music whil...
Shacknews started as Quakeholio, a Quake fansite (obviously). That means our roots in FPS games go deep, far deeper than one shooter from id Software. Doom is Quake's antecedent, so, naturally, we hold that franchise near and dear to our hearts as well. This week, we reflect on our earliest memory of Doom, or our fondest. What's yours? Let us know in the Chatty thread below. What is your earliest, or fondest, Doom memory? My earliest and fondest Doom series memory is one that goes way back to the 1990s. It was December of 1993, and my friend down the street just received a brand new computer for his birthday. It had a brand-spanking-new Pentium processor which was several generations ahead of my family’s shared PC. The closest thing I had to a gaming PC in those days was an NEC that had a 386 CPU and no sound card. I was a buster. It was either serendipity, entropy, or some sort of act of God that led to Doom’s shareware being uploaded the weekend of my friend’s birthday party....