One of the most enduring relationships I have is with four men I’ve never met. Seven years ago, Hiroshi Iuchi, Atsutomo Nakagawa, Yasushi Suzuki and Satoshi Murata created Ikaruga, the spiritual successor to Treasure’s majestic Radiant Silvergun. Ikaruga is what some people call a top-down, vertically scrolling, combo-based, arcade shoot-’em-up. What I call it is art.
Now, the whole ‘what is art and are we it yet and if we are can we have a cookie?’ is one more futile arguments generated by videogames. It’s not a useful question, for many obvious reasons, but there is one answer to it that I rather like. It goes like this: the hallmark of good art is that every time you go back to see it, it’s changed. Or rather, it hasn’t, but you have, so through viewing it you’re able to measure and identify the changes within yourself. It’s as good an answer as any other to the great unresolvable what-is-art conundrum, and if you apply it to videogames, then my Mona Lisa is Ikaruga. Beautiful, enigmatic, alluring and unmasterable. (more…)
So it was with great excitement that I woke up to an email from Daniel Pemberton (of the Daniel Pemberton TV Orchestra) with news that Little Big Music, his own collection of 18 tracks composed for the game, was nearly due for an iTunes release. Most notably, Pemberton is the man behind ‘The Orb of Dreamers,’ the warmly angelic dusty-vinyl ambient track that marks your entry into the game.
Even better, Pemberton has partnered with Offworld to give you the first listen to the album with ‘Horny Old Man,’ one of the seven ‘b-side rarities’ on the collection that didn’t make it onto the final release of the game, but may be used in the future as the Planet evolves and expands.
Somewhat akin to Montreal DJ Kid Koala, the song’s a romping bout of ragtime/big band turntablism, and my favorite on the album outside of ‘Dreamers’. Without further ado, then, here’s that track, which you can also download directly here:
‘Little Big Music: Musical Oddities From And Inspired By LittleBigPlanet’ is due to appear on iTunes by December 15th (we’ll link you to it again when it goes live), and you can hear more from Daniel on his debut album TVPOPMUZIK, which includes some tracks later reworked for the game as well as ‘Pip Pop Plop,’ the theme song for the first season of Offworld favorite British comedy Peep Show.
Clearly still struggling through Infinite-Jest-esque urges to purchase beauty-enhancing video phone masks and the anxiety of talking to yourself while staring into a tiny, lit, terrifying Hal 9000 eye-hole, I’ve made my official non-gnome deathknight debut on BBtv.
In it I recap what we’ve been doing on the site (most notably, the debut of Monster Mii), recommend Dr. Awesome, the first game that’s felt to me like a proper ‘iPhone game,’ versus a game that’s merely been made for the iPhone, and let you know what’s happening on the site in the coming weeks.
Bonus points for recognizing any of the ephemera in the background, and, as usual, a direct download link so you can blow it up full screen and shoot suction darts at my scruffy mug.
As we’ve been following closely, fan-made LittleBigPlanet social networking site Sackbook was recently shut down just days after it kicked off at the behest of Sony’s legal team. Today, in the midst of a roundup of various community concerns (including the ongoing moderation guideline debacle), Sony assured everyone that it had only proper privacy concerns in mind:
An impressive community fansite popped up last week and we were all impressed, but we’ve been in discussions with the site owner and requested the site be suspended. Chris, the site owner, was happy to work with us on this. Our intent is to be able to offer everyone the choice of whether their shared data is visible or not in order to protect everyone’s privacy, and while Sackbook was doing nothing wrong in the way it presented information and had no access to any personal data, we believe this additional option is important.
Good news, then, and happy to see everyone as impressively impressed as I was, and looking forward to its relaunch in the near future.
InstantAction is somewhat the runt of the online games litter, and a bit unjustly — like the Unity player, IA’s plugin lets you play 3D games through the browser, and, better yet, the company has just done away with its pay-for options and opened up the entire site for free play.
Why should you care? Along with Stubbs the Zombie/Hail to the Chimp developer Wideload’s decent puzzle game Cyclomite, InstantAction’s main draw is third person shooter Fallen Empire: Legions, which, if you squint, you might call a not-too-distant cousin to PC cult shooter Tribes. That’s no accident — InstantAction’s branch on the family tree is just a few short leaps away from Tribes developer Dynamix, by way of IA’s parent company GarageGames.
InstantAction also has a number of games on the way: “Ace of Aces (aerial dogfighting), Lore: Aftermath (big time mech action), and BLUR (arcade racing),” which they’re giving people who’d already paid for game passes early access to as a token of appreciation.
What’s Steven Spielberg know about games? Quite a happy lot, it turns out: Tom Chick has just published a new interview with the filmmaker turned gamemaker for Yahoo, where he waxes on the staying power of his first collaboration with EA, Boom Blox (still a family favorite it turns out), and notes that it was his idea to include the “peanut gallery” of animal observers to cheer the player on (something we’ve touched on here before).
Spielberg then turns his attention to storytelling and says:
You know the thing that doesn’t work for me in these games are the little movies where they attempt to tell a story in between the playable levels. That’s where there hasn’t been a synergy between storytelling and gaming. They go to a lot of trouble to do these [motion-capture] movies that explain the characters. And then the second the game is returned to you and it’s under your control, you forget everything the interstitials are trying to impact you with, and you just go back to shooting things. And that has not found its way into a universal narrative. And I think more has to be done in that arena.
That, as we also pointed to before when Jordan Mechner similarly discussed letting each medium do the job of the medium, is a very salient point and obviously something we very much agree with.
Chick has posted the full unedited exchange via the Quarter to Three forums, my favorite part being the implied ubiquity of games when Spielberg says “of course” he’s played Half-Life.
As I said there, Stories takes the best parts of Cave Story (the similarly excellent freeware game), particularly the joys of its pure platforming and exploration, and Ico/Shadow of the Colossus‘s “propensity to strip away all of a game’s unnecessary layers until its shining core is revealed,” both of which Rosen expounds upon nicely with his attention on Knytt‘s smart handling of “progression” and control.
The air’s a bit thick with irony with the announcement that publisher dtp and developer Spellbound will be releasing a new version of The Great Giana Sisters for the DS, Nintendo having, on original C64 release, pressured the game off the shelves for its overt similarity to Super Mario Bros.
For its part, the new version looks to have rightly ditched its Mushroom Kingdom garb entirely, and honestly sounds like a labor of love, having tapped composer Fabian Del Priore — known in classic computing days as ‘Rapture’ and now part of the Play! game music/symphony tour — to remix and update its soundtrack.
Just appearing online is Edge magazine’s excellent ‘making of’ article on Dune II — the game that would essentially birth the real-time strategy genre — with the magazine noting upon a recent replay that “the same basic viewpoint, interface, controls and gameplay underpinning Dune II are still being reused today, with only the most minimal level of evolutionary advancement.”
Most interestingly, the feature goes on to quote producer Brett Sperry, who reveals that the game was less inspired by Herzog Zwei, as is often reported, but rather something much more mundane:
“Herzog Zwei was a lot of fun, but I have to say the other inspiration for Dune II was the Mac software interface. The whole design/interface dynamics of mouse clicking and selecting desktop items got me thinking, ‘Why not allow the same inside the game environment? Why not a context-sensitive playfield? To hell with all these hot keys, to hell with keyboard as the primary means of manipulating the game!’”
