Like many videogame commentators, I am sometimes guilty of writing as though the entire industry exists only for the sake of that handful of “AAA” games every year that, flawed or not, loudly push the envelope of what is possible in our medium. On the one hand, there is of course nothing wrong with celebrating the achievements of such games as Halo, Ico, Rez, MGS2 and so on, because it is these games that (we hope) are dragging the industry kicking and screaming into a brighter and more creative future. On the other hand, referring exclusively to the merits of such a quartet (replace any with your own favourites, naturally) tends to undervalue the pleasant surprises that, now and again, can crop up in games that may otherwise be overlooked as “mediocreware”. So this month, as I’m feeling in a generous summer mood, I’d like to celebrate a couple of excellent things in second-tier games.

The genre of American sports games is not exactly one of my favourites, so there was no instant thrill of anticipation the day NBA Inside Drive 2003 landed on the doormat, courtesy of the generous folk at Microsoft. In fact, it lay gathering dust in the “to be played, one day, maybe” pile for a good few months. Then one evening, when a friend was staying, I loaded it up in the mild hope of some quick disposable two-player entertainment. It turned into a long night, and then into a long weekend. On the Sunday we even played it for breakfast: most unusual for this cynical old hack. I actually came to learn the rules of basketball, which had never previously struck me as a necessary or life-enhancing thing to do.

Why is Inside Drive so moreish? The character models and animation are good, but not spectacularly so. The controls are fine, if a little confusing in heavy traffic. But what makes the game so richly entertaining is the audio commentary. Now, we know that commentary in sports games is usually a compromised thing. We laugh indulgently at the appalling efforts of the Pro Evolution Soccer series (“The sun is beating down, and the wind is whistling through the stadium” – again?). The Fifa games do it better, but not brilliantly. We get used to delays in commentary response, a small pool of repetitive prerecorded one-liners, and commentators who, in blissful ignorance, often flatly contradict what is happening on screen, with a mildly amusing effect of unintentional humour. The compromises have become comfortable.

So that when a game like Inside Drive arrives, it’s a minor revelation. It has the best videogame commentary I have ever heard: better, in fact, than I had assumed was currently possible. The three men in the booth not only describe the plays with pinpoint accuracy and comment on the game performance of specific players with praise or snide remarks, criticising shot choice and lauding team tactics, but also launch off on little riffs of comic interplay and spin elaborate metaphoric fantasies. The contribution of ex-NBA player Kenny “The Jet” Smith is particularly funny, especially when he is reminiscing about the days of chain-link baskets and making a demented “ker-ching” noise; and meanwhile, the stadium announcer is saying subtly surreal things over the PA, which you can only just hear over the crowd noise. The sheer quantity of audio is staggering – we must have logged 30 hours on the game, and we were still being distracted from slam dunks because we were laughing too hard at new jokes.

Commentary this good is not just a cosmetic device; it adds another dimension to the game atmosphere. The commentators sound like they are really watching – and being entertained by – what you are doing. Which means you have more fun doing it. The possibility of impressing the commentators seems to exist, and so it adds another layer of motivation to the game.

My second small epiphany recently has been with SOCOM: US Navy Seals, but not in the way I expected. The online component is certainly entertaining, if glitchy. (In one of my first games I happily ran rings around five Seals and shot them all to death, only to be vigorously abused by an orthographically challenged chat-typist after the game for cheating: apparently, from the point of view of my victims, I was stuck inside a wall and couldn’t be shot. I suppose that’s called using the environment to your advantage.) Arguably, few people would bother to look twice at SOCOM if it lacked the online component. Nevertheless, it was in the single-player mode that I was most impressed: by the little-remarked fact of its voice recognition.

The headset that comes with the game of course enables voice chat online, in a manner that is familiar to Xbox Live users, but it seems to me to be more revolutionary that it can be used to command NPCs in single-player SOCOM missions. Being able to shout “Bravo, deploy frag!” and receiving a Marine “hoo-ah” in response, watching your soldiers do just that, and finally having the radio crackle to life again with “Deployed, sir!”, deepens the immersion considerably. Since you can interact with your computerised comrades through the natural medium of the spoken word rather than struggling with command icons (as in, say, Conflict: Desert Storm), they seem intuitively more like real people, and in consequence the player feels more satisfaction in leading them. The workmanlike nature of the rest of the game, in architectural and tactical terms, may easily be forgiven. But after this, one can easily imagine such a facility appearing in a really top-notch squad shooter, or something like Halo 2, and setting new benchmarks for a sense of military involvement.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that both of these small videogame wonders – Inside Drive’s commentary and SOCOM’s voice recognition – work in the realm of sound. Musical score aside, the auditory experience of videogaming is often taken for granted – you can’t hear it in screenshots, after all; and one generally notices it particularly only when the sound is unusually good or bad. But these two touches of brilliance show that what may be to come in the relatively immature field of “interactive audio” can enhance the videogaming Gestalt at least as much as the next generational shift in visual aesthetics.