Thursday, January 14, 2010

DDR Zen

Where audio-visual memorization meets agility you get one of the most noble of all video game pursuits: DDR Zen.


If you haven't figured it out yet, I am a huge rhythm game junkie. Everything from Elite Beat Agents to Audiosurf to Taiko: Drum Master to Harmonix's older games like Amplitude. But the grandfather of them all is Dance Dance Revolution.

It was freshman year of high school when I first played DDR, it was during a swim team get together when I first set foot upon the plastic mat. I had seen it played before, but never had the urge to try it. While I tripped along on 'Light' mode, keeping my feet centered beneath me, hitting one arrow at a time, my opponent next to me was flying. He put on a mystifying performance of unfathomable foot-flying fury. Between his act, the hypnotic J-Pop, and the cheering of the onlookers - I was tranced. Hooked into the effect of it all. This person was a god among men.

DDR became the last half of my freshman year, and most of my summer. It was the reason that I ended up purchasing a PS2 (which was good for my dad since now he could play finish playing his Metal Gear Solid series). I wanted to get my chance in the light, to be a Master in the Art of DDR.



It was a long and uphill grind. After about a month I began to get comfortable with moving both of my feet and not coming back to the center of the pad after every beat, and that led to unlocking the next level of difficulty: Standard. Oh, the joy that there was when I started to learn the pattern to the cover of Phil Collins' "Against All Odds" From there it all started, as if in a Rocky-esque montage, I kept getting better and better running through all of the Standard level songs. Playing until my legs were butter, getting stronger, moving faster, memorizing the step pattern and working through the best way to hit all the buttons as if it were as natural as breathing. I was finding that Zen. People could watch me dance and say, "Wow, that is great!" (As long as I wasn't playing someone better than me.)








<--- Optimal physique for DDR.
<--- What I do not look like...
<--- :'(





It became that time. I had beaten almost all of the Standard level songs and was ready to transcend into the depths of the final difficulty tier: HEAVY. The sacred land where the notes no longer follow the rhythm but the melody as well. Where we separate the elite from the meat. "If you can learn heavy then you are the master." - was what I told myself. This was my Dolph Lundgren. I attempted to dance my way through the easier songs on the game: Genie In A Bottle, Get Busy, I Will Survive, Oops!... I Did It Again. Those simple pop songs that they put on the disc to advertise the game with their distracting music videos. But this was a different level, I limped my way through these so-called "easy" songs and called my E rating a victory. I won the fight, but I was losing the war. And the war was never meant to be won.

I had hit that wall. That evil wall that all athletes understand as the make-it or break-it point. However, there is a difference between sports and video games. Video Games change. Here enters Guitar Hero, the newest peripheral to entertain my fingers giving my legs the rest they deserve. My mats now rest in the corner of the room, shredded and taped up like a heavily loved pair of shoes. Dolph was left undefeated but my mind was elsewhere, my mind was more on Ozzy Osbourne then it was on the late Captain Jack and Smile.dk.

Heavy was left for Frankenstein on Expert but I still came back once in a while for later generations of DDR. When I look back now, I realize that I had found that DDR Zen the whole time. I was in good shape, had a ridiculous amount of fun, and I can still always go back to it if I want to impress friends. (Which I do sometimes since Guitar Hero no longer impresses people) In the end I got everything I wanted from it, and someday I might finish what I started, especially since I do want to get back in shape.




College knows how to make a kid fat...

Finally, for your entertainment: Meet Stepmania.

Friday, January 8, 2010

Street Acid

Jillian said...
Solon, make your own damn game. Right now.

Alright.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A New Hope:



You are Sam Gable, an ex-street racer with a shady past gone straight edge. You and your girlfriend of a year and a half are heading to the finest restaurant in town where you plan to propose to her. Her ring is in your pocket. You take pride in the fact that you saved up enough clean money to buy her the ring that she made subtle hints at wanting the most, four months ago when you went to the Jewelers with her. You're driving in your beaten up station wagon with your best girl in shotgun, it may not be much and at times it makes you sick to be seen in, but its better than stolen property.

You're on your way to the Poison Ivy when lights suddenly begin to flash brightly in your rear view mirror. You find yourself surrounded on all sides by dark cloaked men riding donkeys and on what is usually a busy highway, you notice that there are no cars around you other than these. Your crap wagon is being pummeled on all sides and you are quickly overwhelmed and ushered off the road into the ditch. The dark cars pull over beside you and your vision begins blacking out. Life is in frames right now. First you see dark men break open the car door. Then you see your girlfriend shouting while being pulled out of the car. You hear nothing. One of the men jumps back in the car, you see a terrible scar where his eye should be, and then you see his fist, and then you see lots of pretty stars. Finally, you see the ring on the floor of the car, opened and gleaming. You pass out.


You wake up, everything is blurry and your head is spinning. You haven't woken up feeling this bad since you were on the street circuit. As you get your bearings and your vision gets clearer, you notice that you are in friendly territory, but you can't remember why...
You hear a sultry female voice behind you that stings like a knife in your back.

"So the Phoenix is back from his ashes."

Liz... It all comes rushing back to you. She was your partner on the streets, she knew you better than anyone else could. She was your mentor and she has been around the circuit for a long time.

"It's been a while, Sam. Finally done sucking corporate cock, or did you just miss me?"
And to think. Her bite is even worse than her bark.

"What is going on?... Where is-"

"Hold on there hotshot. You've got a lot of questions. And I've got a lot of answers. So, instead of listening to you whine about your problems. I'm going to heap a ton load of shit on to you, and if your head doesn't explode after that you can feel free to finish asking your questions to someone who cares."

Yeah, and this is Liz when she is polite.

"Now, you've been banged up good, Sam Gable. And I mean REAL good. Physically, Emotionally, and Psychologically. You are in some tough shit. You're trapped right now."

"Yeah, trapped with you."

"Either me, or death. Now shutup and don't interrupt me again, or I'll cut you... You finished? Good. Now where was I..." "Those men that made off with your girlfriend? I think you remember them... The Bellacozzi? Or did they beat that out of you too?"

"Yeah..." You rub your head, the pain in your eye is piercing and the bright light isn't helping. The smell of your blood lingers, You really hope its dry by now... "The Bellacozzi are those assholes I used to race against back in the day. They always gave us trouble and we'd always show them who was the better racer. But I thought they were disbanded after some 'creative differences' at the top of the pile."

"Hah! That's what I thought too, in fact its been really boring around here ever since you stopped showing up - I actually had to keep up with my garage and fix real people's problems. You know how much I hate real people! Boy, did they rape us though. Turns out that the Bellacozzi never actually died but, in fact, went deep underground to organize something... Something big... And personal... They've got us by the balls right now, Sam."

Liz has only used that sentence two other times, and those were some of the most serious times in my underground life. When she says that they've got us by the balls. She means it.

"So. They took your girl, kicked you back to the curb, and I wouldn't be shocked to see some form of ransom note real soon."

"Kicked me to the curb?"

"Yeah. This is personal. Between you and them. They are still pissed about what you did to them years ago, and they want you to suffer. Right now, we are stuck playing by their rules and the only way to get your girl back is going to be beating them at their own game."

"You mean, racing, huh."

"I'd assume so."

"How do you know all of this? Where do you stand?"

"Fuck you."

No answer... I should've expected as much. She is a really private person but her eyes say everything. Something of hers has been taken, just like me.

"They wanted me to know all of this. They told me where you'd be, Sam. They told me that I had to get you. But that's all that they- "

'CRASH'

A small Asian man is thrown through the window. He is dead. His hat lies nearby and a note is stapled to his chest.

"ODDJOB! NO!" You shouted... He was a great friend. He helped you out of quite a few jams back in the day. It's been a while since you've seen him and this is not how you wanted to meet.
Liz makes no response aside from a light "Shit." spoken underneath her breath. She reads the note.

"How long has it been since you've been behind the reigns, Gable?"

"Two years and three months." A smile drifts to your face, but it quickly retracts and you wince with pain- everything still hurts. Deep inside.

"Shit. Looks like your back in. We're headed underground. I've still got the old mare. I've been keeping her clean and I'm sure that they want that still. They've always wanted to try to find out the secret of how I get that ass to accelerate so quickly off the line."

I find the ring case again when I bring my hand from my throbbing head into my jacket pocket. Liz always takes good care of me.

She looks you over one last time and shrugs disapprovingly. "The Phoenix flies again."

__________________________________________________________

"Street Acid"

A donkey racing game with a thicker than average storyline much in the same vein as Need For Speed. Fast and Shiny mares. You can tune and customize your very own ass with NO2, Neon, paints, engines, and suspension systems to make the fastest donkey on the street to save your girlfriend and take down the Bellacozzi once and for all. Crazy drifts and jumps with a simple online multiplayer racing mode make this the strangest and best racer out there today.

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Gaming to the Beat

Music has always been an integral part of gaming. And I don't mean your namby pamby background music, I mean official songs from your favorite artists. Games that spent money licensing songs from the charts to have play in the game. Many sports series are the greatest contributors to the cause, my favorites include the Tony Hawk series, SSX, and the 'Street' series of sports games (NBA Street, FIFA Street, etc.)

My favorite sports game is SSX Tricky which was praised for how it integrated its music into the gameplay and I think that this deserves mentioning because I feel that many games are not employing playlists like they should especially with the dirge that is the new Guitar Hero games swamping the markets. The only game with a strong playlist within the last year has been Little Big Planet. And besides that there was Borderlands which used Cage The Elephant's "Ain't No Rest For The Wicked".




[It seems to rock around, to rock
around, it's right on time, it's tricky!]




This topic is close to my heart. I own a solid bit of video game music and I owe a lot of my music taste to video games. Without SSX Tricky, I would not know about Run-D.M.C. and I think I own every song that was in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4.

Everyone has read over the past year about Guitar Hero's contribution to the music scene. But with great power came little responsibility. On what could have been a new wave of popular music in video gaming, Activision and Guitar Hero along with Harmonix and Rock Band enveloped popular music as we know it, trying to lap up every single song it could and applying a note track to it. Now everyone from T-Pain to T-Sweezy can be heard along with the clackity-clack of plastic controllers that resemble the shape of instruments, reducing Guitar Hero from a dynamic experience to an advanced karaoke machine. And where the void was filled for music in video games, it then became extremely diluted under the weight of its own fat.

Games need music, and where many games create their own score, popular music or even local bands are available to fill the gaps where a total musical score isn't needed, BrĂ¼tal Legend applies this viscously and Guitar Hero 1 and 2 were full of bonus songs made by people working on the game. It is publicity for the game and publicity for the artists involved. Not to mention bands like Freezepop, who followed Harmonix all the way to rhythm game domination. And it isn't just for sports games anymore, why can't we have a rail-shooter/puzzle game set in a dystopian New York about an ex-NYPD Officer who is trying to survive after dolphins rise up and enslave the human race while trying to solve the murder of his wife all set to a mix between The Flaming Lips, JET, No Doubt, and Johnny Cash? Huh?

Just, please, no more Aerosmith in our video games. We've heard enough from them (Attention whores...)

























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Reasons why games should make music. Well, more like reasons why music SHOULDN'T make games...

Monday, January 4, 2010

Gimmick This - Achievements

Achievements - everybody has an opinion on 'em. And whether you love them or hate them they are here to stay. The system makes sense- you do something special and we give you a prize for going out of your way while playing our [the developer's] game. (It's all about the meta-gaming, right?) Now, I think that there are a lot of good things about achievements in games:

+ They show users many of the different options outside of the main game that are available. Little Big Planet has a lot of achievements within its level designer and when playing other designed levels. Fallout 3 has trophies for exploring different areas and doing side-quests.
+ They condone my compulsions to explore. Yes, all of my World of Warcraft characters have the Explorer title
+ They give extra reward to hard working people. Because SOME games now-a-days are really easy. *cough*Left 4 Dead*cough*
+ They make up for a poor quality campaign and gives people reason to play a terrible single player mode. OR it's a reward for managing to get through many of the sad excuses for a single player mode that we now have. NOTE: Some games don't even bother having a story anymore, achievements are a good fill for this.
+ They have funny names! Thanks Valve!
+ Without achievements I would have never known how to flip people off while playing Mirror's Edge.

However:

- Many times they inappropriately break the fourth wall during powerful moments of stronger games. Games like Metal Gear Solid 4 and Dragon Age employ trophies and achievements because they have to. So they show up sparingly at the end of levels or specific areas mostly to remind you that you are playing a game. This frustrates me.
- Some people actually think gamerscore represents your value as a person.
- Others think that getting SPECIFIC achievements represent your value as a person.
- I'll randomly get an achievement with an obscure name and then have to stop gameplay to see what I did right just to find out that it was because I got my 327th kill on the game.
- The graphics for getting achievements on the Xbox 360 is annoying. Just sayin'.

It's a delicate balance and the list is equally good and bad just like there are games that use achievements well and other games that use achievements poorly. Steam and World of Warcraft have done a great job of using achievements in their games. Whereas many single-player console titles like Mirror's Edge and Braid (which I finally played the other day!) have trouble finding a happy medium between gameplay and story development, only to end up breaking character just to let you know you beat the third level. And with the slags who obsess over achievements it makes it even more difficult to care.

[[But then there is this...]]
It's all worth it now, huh?