Over at MTVNews.com I have an interview with Ivan Pavlovich the main guy at Rockstar Games responsible for “Grand Theft Auto IV“’s 214-song soundtrack.

When I met with him last week he was able to tell me things such as:

• How and when Rockstar assembles a “GTA” soundtrack
• Why rap music is the most difficult to include
• What 50 Cent thought of being asked to have his music in the game
• How Pavlovich felt when soundtrack details leaked (”My heart died”)
• The obvious and not-so-obvious ways “GTA IV” presents and mixes music differently than its predecessors

But he dodged telling me:

• Whether Rockstar would include new radio stations with the exclusive upcoming Xbox 360 downloadable content
• How many songs are in the game (I counted them in the instruction manual instead.)

You can learn plenty more about the musical makings of “GTA IV” in my article.

There is, however, one thing you won’t learn:

• Why doesn’t Niko Bellic have an iPod or a Walkman or any portable music device?

According to Pavlovich, a feature like that was considered, but he didn’t have the information about why it didn’t make the cut.

I haven’t touched a “Gran Turismo” since it was the thing to play on PS One. But I absolutely, positively had to download the copy of “Gran Turismo 5: Prologue” that Sony sent me for one reason: I’m a Weezer fan.

The band hasn’t been that great since “Pinkerton”, but once a fan, always a fan. When I found out Weezer contributed “Automatic” from their upcoming album (it’s actually a remix of that yet-unreleased song) to “GT5: Prologue,” I had to check it out.

The result: I’ve so far put over two hours into “GT5: Prologue” — earning gold trophies in almost every “C Class” race — but haven’t heard “Automatic” playing over my speakers. There’s no sound test, so I have no choice but to keep racing. Good thing “GT5: Prologue” is so gorgeous to look at.

Ever played a game for a reason completely unrelated to the game itself?

Coupled with this week’s announcement of “Rock Band” for the Wii was the fact that the Wii version will come with five exclusive songs. Readers, the question is simple, what five songs should be included on “Rock Band” for the Wii? Let us know what you think. We don’t have any insider info, so here are our picks….

“Super Mario Bros. Theme” (translated) as sung by The Tokyo Cuban Boys
“Milk Bar” (band song) from “Majora’s Mask”
“Ashley’s Theme” from the “Warioware” games
“DK’s Rap” from “Donkey Kong 64”
“Totaka’s Theme” (I know it’s super short, but it could just be a bonus, at the end of another song.)

Today, Harmonix announced the details about a major patch for the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of “Rock Band” that includes a new in-game music store. The update will be available this week for both platforms, according to the developer.

The Cambridge-based studio, which is owned by MTV Networks, also revealed today that six million songs have been downloaded since the game’s November 20 launch.

MTV Multiplayer was able to see a demo of the store’s features earlier this month in New York. The new music store is accessible through the main menu listed after the “Community” tab, and the purchasable songs are categorized by new releases, song titles, song packs and albums. Albums are not available yet, but are indicated to be “coming soon.” You can also sort the downloadable tracks by artist name, genre, difficulty and year.

New tunes will be marked with “New!” and the store will recognize if you’ve already downloaded a song by marking it as “Sold” to prevent you from accidentally acquiring the same song twice. Within the store, aside from pricing, you’ll also be able to preview the songs and see the album artwork.

Another addition to the music shopping experience is the denotation of difficulty for each track; on a nine-point scale, players can see a song’s difficulty for each instrument as well as the band as a whole. I wondered why they chose a nine-point scale. “When I asked ‘Why not out of ten?’ [The developers] were like, ‘Because it’s out of nine,” Harmonix rep John Drake told me at the demo, laughing. When I asked if the handy new difficulty ratings would be retroactively applied to the on-disc tunes, he said, “That’s something we’re looking into, but it’s not planned at the moment.”

The music store patch also includes several fixes to the game. Read on to see the revisions as well as screenshots of the new music store. Read more…

Will Wright’s modus operandi for “Spore” has always been about empowering the user to have a personalized experience from start to finish.

Such ambitions extend to even the game’s music. Electronic Arts Audio Director Kent Jolly and Composer Aaron McLeran, who temporarily came in to work on “Spore’”s musical implementations, discussed the execution of their hard work at last week’s GDC.

“Spore” uses what’s called procedural music. The sounds generated are executed through processes designed by a composer. In this case, the composer is musician Brian Eno and the processes hidden in the various editors (creature, ship, etc.) found in “Spore.”

Jolly’s team has incorporated most of the user-influenced music into the game’s creation editors (some bits show up elsewhere, such as the civilization building era), but it wasn’t until Eno arrived that the team became really jazzed about the prospects.

“[Eno] was a very inspiring person,” recalled Jolly. “He came and really just got everybody pretty excited about the idea of doing procedural music and I think that’s one of the things that’s just amazing about him as a person.”

When McLeran came on board, he worked with Jolly on tools for Eno’s procedural ambitions to be realized in “Spore.” When the player is using one of the creature editors, building a UFO or alien or what have you, the ambient music alters based on the player’s editing work. Moving the mouse over different icons produces small, but noticeable, alterations to the music, while placing a piece on a ship causes a much more substantial change.

Music is best understood heard. Click the player below for a quick example. Here, McLeran is building a ship in the same editor pictured above.

“Hopefully, the average user might not even notice that it’s procedural music. In fact, if they don’t notice, then I think aesthetically — and they still like the music — we’ve achieved something that’s pretty awesome,” concluded McLeran.

I have no musical talent, but “Spore” seems to take the hard part of creativity and make it an organic process without the user aware it’s happening. There’s something very compelling — maybe even unnerving — about that.

One of last year’s greatest games was, arguably, the MTV published “Rock Band.” The greatest song of last year was, undeniably, “Portal“’s “Still Alive.” What happens when two of the biggest things to happen in video games collide? People get happy.

“Rock Band” forum member/developer hmxsean (he’s one of the guys that announces the weekly DLC) is reporting that earlier this week, at Valve’s GDC party, it was announced that “Still Alive” as performed by GLaDOS, will soon be appearing as “Rock Band” DLC.

As you may remember the song was penned by the genius Jonathan Coulton, who we interviewed about the song last October, and can be heard over the closing credits of “Portal” (as well as on the iPods of most of the Multiplayer staff). Date and pricing have yet to be announced, but rest assured it will show up soon, and then you too can feel like you just survived the Aperture Science Enrichment Center, while hitting the high notes, and not eating cake, because, of course, the cake is a lie. (Has that gotten old yet?)

San Francisco — Games became bigger than music last year, Microsoft exec John Schappert proclaimed as part of his keynote address Wednesday to kick off the Game Developers Conference 2008, adding that every monetary measure attests to that fact.

And with that bold statement out of the way, Schappert (the corporate vice president of Xbox Live) and a variety of developers argued that the Xbox 360 could make a good run at YouTube, not just with the likes of “Gears of War 2″ — which was not quite properly announced during the keynote — but with a suite of new Xbox 360 functions that are designed to enable the (almost) average person to upload games to the 360 for friends to rate and play.

The YouTube target was made clear throughout the presentation. Shappert claimed that in any given day there are 30 percent more pieces of user-captured content uploaded from “Halo 3″ to that game’s official site than there are new videos on YouTube. And the flow works the other way too: In an Xbox 360 developer’s reel, MTV’s Harmonix revealed that consumers had already purchased more than 3 million downloadable songs for “Rock Band.”

Microsoft’s more interesting — and most YouTube-esque — reveal of the keynote came at the start. Chris Satchell, the company’s head of XNA game-development tools, said Microsoft was ready to embrace indie games. XNA is a free toolset for garage developers that has been available for more than a year but hasn’t supported an easy way to get playable games to the public. Enter Community Games, a new feature for their Xbox Live online service that makes games produced with the indie-focused toolset available for download to the more than 10 million Xbox 360 owners.

Naturally, one would wonder how Microsoft intends to open the floodgates without the 15-year-old boys of the world immediately taking advantage of the newfound openness.

Read the rest of the story at MTVNews.com

“God of War” and “Twisted Metal” creator David Jaffe didn’t grow up a rap guy. But now he’s listening to a lot of it, especially the more aggressive stuff of the 90s.

Why?

Consider it emotional research for Jaffe’s next game at his studio Eat Sleep Play. Late last week he told me that “Come Sail Away” from Styx was his unlikely soundtrack of inspiration for “God of War.” Now he’s on an N.W.A and Public Enemy bender.

I joked that that must mean he was asked to help out on the new “Saint’s Row.”

Completely wrong, he said.

Instead, he caught me by surprise by delivering an unusual theory about how video games should relate to music (hint: he says “NBA Street” gets it very, very wrong). In the process, he talked about why “Shadow of the Colossus” didn’t make him cry, what game developers could learn from Martin Scorsese, and –because it’s what must happen at least once a day in any true gamer’s life in 2008 — we chatted some “Endless Ocean.”

How do you give gamers the feeling of a rap song without putting a rap song in a game? Read on for one of my favorite chats with a game developer so far this year.

Read more…

Have you ever been playing a game and heard church music? Or any other completely unexpected style of music?

I was doing some deep-sea diving in the Wii’s “Endless Ocean” this past weekend, exploring some ruins. And I heard “Amazing Grace,” as sung by New Zealand classical soprano Hayley Westerna.

Really? “Amazing Grace” in a video game? Check out Hayley’s website, scroll through the media player on the left and listen to the snippet they have of the song. It’s not what you normally hear in a video game, even a deep-sea diving video game.

The thing is, it works. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me…. should have nothing to do with my efforts to snap photos of stingrays and swim through a diving flock of penguins. But it somehow comes together. It creates the proper gentle, relaxing mood. Good thing a great white shark didn’t show up.

Unusual song selection also worked in the Atari / Marc Ecko graffiti game “Getting Up.” That game played an old blues song — “I Smell A Rat” by Big Mama Thornton — during a boss battle. If memory serves, I was punching an evil factory boss, while Big Mama belted out the tune. It was different, and it was wonderfully angry and frantic in a way I’d never heard before. When I asked Ecko about it a couple of years ago, he said that it was his idea and that it had been a hard sell to his game’s creative team. (Listen to a sample of that song on this page.)

I’ve been sent reeling by speed metal in “Sonic” games and rap music in “Donkey Kong 64.” I was surprised by the closing song of “Portal,” of course. And there was that “Gears of War” commercial’s unusual choice of the mournful “Mad World.”

But I don’t feel like I’ve been shocked enough by the soundtrack selection in games. Do we need more church music? We need more surprise, at least. I hope to hear more.

(Recent thing I’ve also done: Cancelled My ‘World of Warcraft’ Account (And Had Fun Doing So)

After two weeks of updating the Rhythm Game Track Finder we continue to roll in the games you’ve been asking for. We are making some pretty good headway.

This week’s update covers a couple of the “Karaoke Revolution” titles (as requested), as well as one of the most unique PS2 rhythm games “Mad Maestro!” We also present your weekly dose of “Rock Band” DLC. If there are any titles that you think are still missing, let us know, and we will do our best to get them added as quickly as possible.

So head over to trackfinder.mtv.com to find the following new content…

Karaoke Revolution Party (Gamecube, PS2, Xbox) 50 Songs Added
Karaoke Revolution Volume 3 (PS2) 37 Songs Added
Mad Maestro! (PS2) 34 Songs Added
Rock Band (Xbox 360, PS3) 6 songs added (Oasis’s “Wonderwall,” “Don’t Look Back In Anger,” and “Live Forevever,” as well as the OXM Xbox 360 exclusive songs Freezepop’s “Sprode,” Bang Camaro’s “Rock Rebellion,” and Count Zero’s “Shake.”)

The Track Finder will be updated regularly and we’ll be telling you about all new addition via Multiplayer. So keep checking every Monday.