Have we got the most incredible competition to share with you! With great thanks to EPOS Audio, we have not one, nor two, but THREE premium quality H6PRO closed acoustic headset units to give away!
These headsets are exceptional. As we noted in our review, they are ideal for everything from gaming, to enjoying your favourite music playlist, to movies and generally tuning out the world around you.
Each headset retails for $259. What’s more, we have consolation prizes! For those that don’t win the headsets, we have five “classic” mugs from the DDNet Redbubble Store (your choice of design), which are perfect for any gaming room up for grabs, as well as thirty issues of the most recent Dee Dee Zine. That’s a total prize pool of over $1,000 in value – this is the biggest competition we’ve run by far in the history of the site.
To enter, it’s simple: We want to know what is the best gaming soundtrack to listen to with a great headset… and why! You can tell us here or on Twitter, and the system is simple:
1) Sign up to our newsletter (here).
2) Either leave a comment here, in the comments below (using the same email address as you use for the newsletter – but don’t worry, your email address isn’t public), or you can tweet us @mattsainsb and @eposaudiogaming with your response.
3) We’ll announce the winners in the newsletter on April 25.
Winners will not be picked at random – we’re going to be giving the prizes to the people with the most interesting answers and explanations for why a soundtrack is their favourite. Get creative, and win yourself an awesome headset, courtesy of EPOS Audio!
The soundtrack to Metal Gear Rising is so good that it would still be enjoyable even if it was playing out an old gramophone, but a great headset makes this soundtrack incredible. When the chorus of Rules of Nature kicks in and that heavy metal guitar kicks in… Trust me, you’re going to want a good audio setup. Metal Gear Rising released nearly ten years ago, and I still go back to that soundtrack on a weekly basis.
The best soundtrack to listen to with a great headset is, to be honest, any soundtrack from a Gust game. However, if I have to choose more specifically, Ar Tonelico 2 is a real standout and a hidden gem. It has such a huge variety of song types, operatic vocal pieces, digital synths and real instruments, catchy tunes… I could ramble on and on about how amazing it is, but I urge you to go find it yourself (and the game too! There’s a stellar “re-translation” out there.) 😉
I know it’s a cliché but I love Skyrim’s soundtrack. I don’t even like the game that much but it’s the only soundtrack that I can hear over and over again and that gets stuck in my head years later even now and I’m still not tired of it.
PS, I should be subscribed to the newsletter now but tell me if that’s not the case please 🤔
Now that I think about it I have a better one.
A game that I actually loved too. Flatout. The first one specifically. Sequels good too, but the music was a bit more commercial. Who doesn’t love babies with two heads (I think that was the first game) am I right?
My answer in a haiku;
It’s Persona 4
A Corner of Memories
Always stays with me
The P4 soundtrack has such an amazing range of songs, I can’t help but get nostalgic for long gaming sessions lit only by the Vita’s screen whenever I give it a listen – takes me to a completely different place!
Ugh… my heart is torn between quite a few games soundtracks… I love Persona 4 soundtrack, but to be honest, the audio quality of it is not incredibly high, so I’m not sure it would be that great with high quality headphones…
I think I’ll go with Bastion! The music is varied, and I love the western/pop style of it. “Build that wall” is one of the best song (to me at least) I’ve ever heard in a video game!
Cheers !
The Elder Scrolls has always had a fantastic soundtrack (well, at least since Morrowind, which is where I jumped in). That culminates in Skyrim, which incorporates those early themes but goes far beyond them. Music creates a culture; music creates a world. Skyrim’s soundtrack has everything: the male voice choir in a powerful theme song, tavern songs, battle music. I guess my favorite stuff is more minimalistic, though, more nuanced. Skyrim has a fantastic number of ambient pieces, some suited to exploring during the day, and some for exploring at night. Or, just sitting on a rock somewhere and observing high peaks, elk exhaling steam in a cold grassy lea, the transit of a couple of overhead moons.
To me, it’s the OST to Shin Megami Tensei IV. The title track hits you from the start with a mix of heavy piano chords, rock guitars, and synth-wave music. It tells you all you need to know about the game’s mood. Throughout the game, the music keeps that same tone. Many tracks seem out of a dystopian cyberpunk film. Rock tracks accompany the rhythm of the most challenging boss battles, and there are tracks inspired by traditional Japanese music, which is fitting, given the game’s Tokyo setting and how much Japanese culture influences and is represented in the game.
Given the weight players’ choices and alignments have in the game, it’s appropriate that each outcome has a suitable track. For instance, entering into spoiler territory, one of the most impacting moments in the game is reaching blasted Tokyo for the first time. You, as the player, feel that the annihilation of Tokyo was of your making. While absorbing that, you’re hit with a chaotic and depressing track that mixes heavy beats and bass with the sounds of cold metal and anguished back vocals. It makes your choice all the more impacting. Ultimately, SMT IV’s soundtrack is a fantastic JRPG soundtrack. However, it vastly extends out of the trappings of the genre and becomes a great music album to listen to on sad rainy days, whether you’re a fan of game OSTs or not.
The Bubble Bobble theme. I once put it on top of that famous early murder scene in The Last of Us Part 2, and it finally acquired the meaningfulness it always deserved but sorely lacked. I suspect the Bubble Bobble Treatment(tm) could do wonders in making many more gaming money shots reach their full potential, but i need a new, nice headset to fully reap the benefits in all their glory. My current one is falling apart.
Sometimes it takes a specific instance of media to open your mind to its genre. 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors on the Nintendo DS opened my mind to visual novels as a compelling video game genre and narrative experience. Shovel Knight’s soundtrack helped me appreciate chiptune music.
The depth Yacht Club achieves in both the scope and arrangement of the soundtrack forced me to shrug off the unfair assumptions I’d made about chiptune music; it being a niche genre devoid of talent that existed solely to allow others to linger in the past. Instead, I found the soundscape was another medium with which to paint already exquisite songs with a warmth one might feel when reminiscing on the time period the game seeks to place itself in and grounds itself there through that artistic choice. It’s sensory wizardry as you get to experience the joy you believe an alternate you might have had at a younger age without having the curtain pulled away from the fact that the audio you’re enveloped in could not have been generated as is on older hardware.
This soundtrack takes me to a place I remember instead of a place I once was. Thankfully, it gave me the opportunity to then expand my exposure to artists like Chipzel, Disasterpiece, Danny Baronowsky and many more.
Shovel Knight’s soundtrack doesn’t require high-end headphones to move you but it is enriched by them as much as any other great work of art.
I didn’t get a newsletter yesterday so I don’t know if I won.
The newsletter should have been sent out on Saturday (23rd for you, being in Europe). Prizes will be announced this week 🙂
OK. Thx.