Top games for your home theater

I thought dead space had really horrible sound mixing....I'd strike that right off the list. Same with gears of war 3. It's like they brought the "loudness wars" thats ruined music to games. Both had really poor dynamic range, and that's no way to show off a real home theater. Turn it up and it just sounds fuzzy and loud, not clear and powerful.

Castlevania lords of shadow is a rather meh game, but it has a truly incredible soundtrack and visuals.

Mass Effect 3 finally instituted a HDR option, really great effects and LFE.

Cod Black Ops (and presumably blops 2) also has great dynamics, although its a very "clean" sound.

The ultimate is still BF3, along with BC2 and MoH to a slightly lesser degree. Once you set it to home theater, it's in a league of its own. It's a very reverberant sound, but it doesn't feel artificial. With the right equipment its just spectacular.

Honorable mention to NFS shift, which is to Forza as BF3 is to Cod. Forza sounds clean and clear - in shift, engines roar, tires screech...really just sounds awesome.

BF3 sounded ok but I have yet to hear one that really impressed me. Too many movies with stunning lossless audio tracks to get excited over a low bit game track.

Yeah, in general, games still have a long way to go. And audio always gets little attention, as well as the short end of the stick when it comes to CPU cycles, compared to graphics.

They need to enforce better standards on game audio. Cinema doesn't play around in this regard, but gaming is all over the place. Seems like they're often more concerned with sounding decent on a TV speaker, at the expense of sounding great on a home theater.

Or so-called "5.1 & 7.1" 2 ch headphones:rolleyes: but yes, agreed it is obviously not a priority which is too bad. When playing solo I always use my HT and enjoy the realistic staging much more than headphones for campaigns.

Yeah, and speaking of headphones, there is absolutely zero reason we should need to use decoder and virtual surround boxes for next gen consoles. They should be able to virtualize via HRTFs entirely on a system level, instead of squeezing the 3D audio space into 5 channels, losing all the height cues, and then virtualizing those 5 channels into 2 channels. Its a ridiculously complicated and inefficient way to do it.

It should go straight from 24/96 3D audio, right into headphone virtual surround without any intermediate steps, boxes and/or dongles in between. My sound blaster from 1998 could do this, why can't current gen consoles do it?