56.53 MB

• Billions of islands to explore
• Create unique environments
• Will your tribe prosper?

Luckily, there's some other stuff in here to make your brains explode less, including the latest instalment of the adorably quiffed Kenka Banchou series, classic Chris Crawford game box scans, the case against art games (rise up, artisans!), and quite a few others besides.

Man of mystery:

NCSX Import Video Games & Toys: Kenka Banchou 3: Zenkoku Seiha - New Import, In Stock
An interesting cult schoolyard brawler series that's Japan-only gets a third instalment: 'The new protagonist in Kenka Bancho is a fresh-faced youth named Takashi Sakamoto who's living on the wrong side of the school yard. He's tough, fast, and has got a serious problem with authority figures. To that end, he gets into fights with other toughs and bristles in the presence of teachers.'

Old Paradigms and a Podcast | How They Got Game
The Stanford Cabrinety Collection has some really interesting scans of early Chris Crawford simulation games for Atari - not just Scram, which was the nuclear-related one I knew about.

Feature: 15 Indie Games for the Holidays - Big Download Blog
Great selection, and another example of people caring about the indie scene, hurray.

One more past blast: Enigma - The Gameshelf
Andrew Plotkin knows good puzzles when he sees them - so I direct you to Enigma, an update of Atari ST puzzle classic Oxyd.

gamebunny » Blog Archive » Otherland: What In The World?
The PC Gamer screenshots/info made it look MMO-bubble cuckoo in the best cyberpunk ways: 'Singapore-based developer, Real U is bringing author, Tad Williams' sci fi novels to life, where varied virtual worlds are lorded over by the super rich. One moment you are traipsing across a “steampunk Mars world”, the next, a “Through the LookingGlass” environment where Oz is “over-industrialized” and out of control.' [UPDATE: Wait, GamesRadar has the preview up, with suitably Bladerunnerneon screenshots.]

Game Design Advance » The Case Against ‘Art-Games’
It's sorta fun we're having this discussion, even if it all seems a little definitionally random: 'The prevailing wisdom may be that games have not achieved the vaunted status of ‘art’, but perhaps the problem isn’t with games. Perhaps the problem is with our own ability to recognize their artistic merits.'

GAMBIT: Updates: Introducing Ochos Locos and the Locos Engine!
'Ochos Locos is a tiny game with a tremendous goal: get players of all ages and nationalities playing and, eventually, creating together. Developed in Python, Ochos Locos was originally created for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO laptop and is also now available for Windows and Linux environments.'

Free Pixel » Looking into Shadows - should Machinima be interactive?
Excellent piece on the PS3 demo: 'Linger in Shadows tries to make exactly this activity, the play with the material of the projected image, accessible to the player. When I shake the PS3 controller, I shake the image, break the sound and continuity of the “film” clip, and find the space in-between. Like the momentary blackness between two projected film images we explore the space between individual visual
moments.'

Johns gave her the basics of how he’s approaching the game:

“Lots of gamers create their own characters. Everyone knows Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, but this game gets you more entrenched in the universe. You meet the Metal Men, or Doom Patrol, and everyone gets a chance to embody something different. I like the idea that your secret identity is really outside the computer. You’re a normal guy, and then when you log on to the game, you become the superhero.”

Good enough. But that was the easy part. How about a weirder question?

I asked Jennifer to ask Geoff if he was tempted to script the idea of DC’s parallel earths into “DCUO,” given that DC’s parallel Earths concept is very similar to the idea of server-based sharding in MMOs. Undeterred by the geekery of such a question, Jennifer asked.

Said Johns:”Each player represents a parallel Earth in a way. I like that idea, when you’re entering it for the first time. There are some major storylines that you can play out and live.”

And how about an update about the game’s release and his progress in the assignment?

“It launches I think in early 2010, it could be late 2009. I’ve written the overall story and the path that gets you into the game and the areas of the universe and how to explore them, but not every line of dialogue. That’s a fulltime job, it’s too frigging big, too intense to write every line of an MMO. I’d probably jump off a building.”

Check out more from Jennifer’s interview, covering “Smallville” and the Legion of Super-Heroes over at MTV’s Splash Page comics-crazy blog.

Related Posts:
Sony Online: ‘DC Universe’ To Be Female-Friendly, ‘EverQuest’ Returning, Console MMOs On The Rise, More
Sony Online: Patching Concerns May Prevent PS3-PC Compatibilty For ‘DC Universe Online’

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EVE Evolved: Exploring New Eden originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Following the release of Mega Man 9, the Inti Creates sound team developed an arranged music album composed of remixed songs from the NES-style platformer.

Produced by Ippo Yamada, who participated in a Siliconera interview last month on the subject of the original soundtrack, the new album includes the participation of composers from Capcom’s 8-bit era and other musical guests.

Here Yamada offers an introduction to the arranged album and the process behind its creation, this time joined by Inti Creates composer Ryo Kawakami and guest arranger Akari Kaida, whose songs can be heard on the Breath of Fire III and Luminous Arc soundtracks, among others.

The discussion offers an informal look at how videogame composers consider the context of their music and the process of adapting in-game tunes to other genres, including classical, hard rock, fusion and jazz.

Thunder Tornado, Mega Man 9 Original Soundtrack

See the translated track list. Hear other samples at Inti Creates.

Interview by Jeriaska. Translation by Ryojiro Sato. This text is also available in Japanese on Game Design Current and in Portuguese on Bem Vindo a WarpZona!

GameSetWatch: Thank you for joining us for this discussion of the music of Mega Man 9, original and arranged. Could you tell us a little about your background in writing music for the Mega Man series?

Ryo Kawakami: I’m Ryo Kawakami. I started working for Inti Creates in November of last year. I’ve written songs for a few games previous to joining, including Mega Man ZX and Mega Man ZX Advent. Recently I composed songs for Mega Man 9.

GSW: Which songs that you have been responsible for composing for the Mega Man series stand out in your memory?

Kawakami: Previously I have written quite a few songs, but maybe the best known is the Prometheus and Pandora Battle Theme “Trap Factory” from Mega Man ZX and “Trap Phantasm” from ZX Advent. For Mega Man 9, I wrote the opening, the title song, the themes for Magma Man, Plug Man, Wily Stage 1 and the Special Stage.

GSW: Were any of the songs you just mentioned composed in collaboration with other musicians?

Kawakami: Those songs I wrote independently, though I received a lot of good advice.

GSW: Which of your songs for Mega Man 9 are you particularly proud of?

Kawakami: I’m really pleased with how the atmosphere of Wily Stage 1 turned out. The sun is setting, thunder is echoing… it’s got something of the feel of Mega Man 2’s Wily Stage 1. For Plug Man, I wanted there to be something of an electrical static to the song, kind of like the high frequency sound in Quick Man's stage from Mega Man 2. I thought it turned out pretty well.

GSW: What were the songs that you were involved in reinterpreting for the second soundtrack?

Kawakami: For the arranged album, I remixed three songs total. The opening and ending themes have received piano arrangements. How might you describe the Plug Man remix? It’s kind of an electronic, progressive rock song with keyboards at the forefront and live drums.

Akari Kaida: I’m Akari Kaida. I joined Capcom in 1994 and have written for a variety of projects, but as far as Mega Man is concerned, I wrote songs for Mega Man and Bass, Mega Man ZX Advent, and Mega Man Battle Network 1 & 5. I went freelance in 2005, and joined the arrange soundtrack for Mega Man 9 this year.

GSW: You are often credited as Akari Kaida Groves. Is this your formal name?

Kaida: Yes, my husband is Australian, so I compose music under the Western surname of Groves.

GSW: Mega Man & Bass is one of the few early Mega Man titles not to be localized for English-language territories, only receiving a release years later for the Game Boy Advance. There were various musicians who contributed to the soundtrack. Which songs were yours?

Kaida: Let's see, I think they were Cloud Man, Ground Man... and Tengu Man, I'd say. There may have been others, but it's hard to remember.

GSW: What was your contribution to the arrange soundtrack?

Kaida: For the arranged album, Yamada-san suggested I write something stylish and easygoing... a kind of European, French-style scat vocal. The state I was looking to capture was laid back and untroubled. Because quite a few of the other arrangements involved electronic instruments, I was going for a more acoustic sound by comparison. There’s an acoustic guitar in there if you listen closely. It was fun to write.

Ippo Yamada: I’m Ippo Yamada, sound producer and sound director for Inti Creates. I did not focus so much on composing this time, writing two tracks total—Tornado Man and the Staff Roll theme. I really would have liked to compose more, but my hands were full serving as the producer. In addition to working on the game itself, I produced the original soundtrack album along with the arrange soundtrack.

We wanted to do something different in terms of style of music, while retaining the quality of the original tunes, or perhaps preserve the quintessential images from each of the stages and robots. The Magma Man arrangement is interesting. Magma Man resides inside a volcano, so the track features a passionate Spanish style sound with a furious rhythm. I asked Uchiyama-san, who worked on Mega Man 8, to write a dance tune that retains both Tornado Man’s characteristics and the melody line itself. It was asking a lot of him, but he sure did a great job.

Kaida:　That one is very cool.

Yamada:　 Weren’t you surprised? It sounded really fresh to my ear when I first listened to it. The entire idea behind this arrange album was to enjoy the music in a different light.

Magma Burning, Mega Man 9 Arrange Soundtrack

See the translated track list. Hear other samples at Inti Creates.

GSW: What can you tell us about Inti Creates'... well, creation?

Yamada: Inti Creates started off with eleven employees. Everyone chipped in on the work programming, designing characters, planning the scenario… it felt less like a company than a small team. In fact, it was a company founded on teamwork. We were young and skipped meals, working twenty-four hours making games. While I had gathered some experience while working for Capcom, here I was involved in every area of the creation process. It was a learning experience. We ensured the highest quality possible and got a lot of pleasure out of investing as much substance to the game as we could.

GSW: Does the arrange soundtrack for Mega Man 9 differ from previous music albums made by the company?

Yamada: Past Inti Creates albums have been developed along different lines than Mega Man 9 Arrange Soundtrack. Previously the original soundtrack was not published, so to remind listeners of the original, we stuck close to the source material in the instruments that we used. This time, however, an original soundtrack has been released, so the remixes ought to be something new and different. For this reason we hope people will find it interesting to compare these two versions.

Manami Matsumae of Mega Man 1 & 2 (also known as CHANCHACORIN MANAMI) has arranged Shimoda-san’s Wily Stage 2. In addition to this track, BUN BUN of Mega Man 3 [Yasuaki Fujita] remixed Kawakami-san’s Special Stage theme。 You might think of it as a kind of Breath of Fire-style orchestral track. It has a symphonic sound and a fighting spirit to it. Then there is Makoto Tomozawa, who I worked with on Resident Evil and Mega Man 7. He arranged the Wily Machine song.

After that, there is Luna Umegaki, a composer on Mega Man Zero. She provides a soothing arrangement of Splash Woman’s theme. We were also joined by a musician that has no prior experience with the Mega Man series. Guitarist Toshiki Horizawa arranges Wily Stage 1 in the form of a Jeff Beck-style power ballad featuring a suitably dramatic performance. In that sense, a number of artists have contributed a variety of styles to the album.

GSW: When did you first start becoming interested in videogames?

Kaida: It’s hard for me to recall the game titles, but I often played when I was in elementary school around 10 or 11 years of age.

Yamada: NES？

Kaida: That’s right. The 8-bit era. It’s probably the same for everyone, but I started out with Super Mario. To tell you the truth, I never dreamed of making videogame music. I often played games, and especially enjoyed trying them out on my PC. It was only after entering music school that it even occurred to me that this could be a job.

Yamada: That’s a common story, though. For myself, I had the vague notion that I wanted to create music, but it was not as if I had this insistent notion that my destiny was to write game music.

Kaida: It wasn’t sought out.

Yamada: Game music, that’s something you think of as fun. Games are all about the interplay of action and reaction. That dramatic component of the experience needs to be reflected in the music. That might be what attracted me to this field in the first place.

Kaida: That sounds about right. You are given a certain theme to work with, and discover how to endow the scene with that feeling. I like that challenge.

Yamada: You are also working with data. If you lose sight of that, the consequences can be devastating. Back then, it wasn’t like now where you can make music using a Mac or PC—you really needed to know how to program. You had to know about compiling and decoding data and be able to discern what was going on within your program. Making videogame music would be very difficult if you did not have much practical knowledge on those subjects.

Kaida:　There were also size limitations, forcing you to think about how much information you could include before running out of space.

Kawakami: 　The music this time around was designed so that even if some of the sound gets cut off due to the emulated limitations of the 8-bit hardware, it would not interrupt the musical flow. The music still sounds good, even if one or two instruments are interrupted by sound effects every once in a while.

Yamada:　You know, I recently was listening to CD recordings of Dragon Quest and Bomberman. It was shocking—Bomberman only uses a single line for the music!

Kawakami: Complicating the melody sometimes distracts from the gameplay.

Yamada:　 The trick is to write a strong melody line that drives the music forward regardless of sound loss in other portions of the song. NES music is very particular in that sense.

Kaida: This title intended to imitate the NES, so the sound effects do cut off certain part of the music. If there were the chance in the future, I would want to further explore that aspect of composition.

From left to right: Inti Creates designer Yukimasa Tamura with musicians Ryo Kawakami, Akari Kaida & Ippo Yamada.

[Images courtesy of Capcom and Inti Creates. Photos by Jeriaska. Mega Man 9 Arrange Soundtrack is available for import through VGM World and Amazon.co.jp.]

Some NBA teams are using NBA Live 09 as a testing device to explore the potential impact of trades and other front office roster decisions. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Rockets GM Daryl Morey said that he uses it to gauge team effectiveness when certain players have the ball. He elaborated with an example:

... you can tell how often, if [Kevin] Love throws an outlet pass, how often his team scores on the possession. You can tell how often [O.J.] Mayo goes right versus left, how effective the team is with Mayo pulling up and shooting versus when he pulls up and passes instead.

The article goes on to state that up to 15 teams are currently using Electronic Arts’ latest basketball product to their own advantage. What makes NBA Live 09 better than the competition, NBA 2K9, is a feature called Dynamic DNA. Essentially, the DNA system is a statistical aggregator that feeds new information such as shot and scoring tendencies directly into the game. The reason why GMs would want to use it is that it is constantly updated and directly affects gameplay.

The one thing Dynamic DNA can’t do is stop Ron Artest from beating up people who care enough to show up for a basketball game. It also can’t stop Shaquille O’Neal from rapping, or the Pacers from being terrible.

[Via Kotaku]

Some NBA teams are using NBA Live 09 as a testing device to explore the potential impact of trades and other front office roster decisions. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Rockets GM Daryl Morey said that he uses it to gauge team effectiveness when certain players have the ball. He elaborated with an example:

... you can tell how often, if [Kevin] Love throws an outlet pass, how often his team scores on the possession. You can tell how often [O.J.] Mayo goes right versus left, how effective the team is with Mayo pulling up and shooting versus when he pulls up and passes instead.

The article goes on to state that up to 15 teams are currently using Electronic Arts’ latest basketball product to their own advantage. What makes NBA Live 09 better than the competition, NBA 2K9, is a feature called Dynamic DNA. Essentially, the DNA system is a statistical aggregator that feeds new information such as shot and scoring tendencies directly into the game. The reason why GMs would want to use it is that it is constantly updated and directly affects gameplay.

The one thing Dynamic DNA can’t do is stop Ron Artest from beating up people who care enough to show up for a basketball game. It also can’t stop Shaquille O’Neal from rapping, or the Pacers from being terrible.

[Via Kotaku]

Some NBA teams are using NBA Live 09 as a testing device to explore the potential impact of trades and other front office roster decisions. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Rockets GM Daryl Morey said that he uses it to gauge team effectiveness when certain players have the ball. He elaborated with an example:

... you can tell how often, if [Kevin] Love throws an outlet pass, how often his team scores on the possession. You can tell how often [O.J.] Mayo goes right versus left, how effective the team is with Mayo pulling up and shooting versus when he pulls up and passes instead.

The article goes on to state that up to 15 teams are currently using Electronic Arts’ latest basketball product to their own advantage. What makes NBA Live 09 better than the competition, NBA 2K9, is a feature called Dynamic DNA. Essentially, the DNA system is a statistical aggregator that feeds new information such as shot and scoring tendencies directly into the game. The reason why GMs would want to use it is that it is constantly updated and directly affects gameplay.

The one thing Dynamic DNA can’t do is stop Ron Artest from beating up people who care enough to show up for a basketball game. It also can’t stop Shaquille O’Neal from rapping, or the Pacers from being terrible.

[Via Kotaku]

According to hollywoodinhidef.com, Blu-ray had its best month of sales ever in October, with over 2.3 million disks sold, marking the first time Blu-ray’s sales had topped 2 million units in a calendar month. Compare to the sales from October 2007: 470,000.

Earlier in the year, the future of Blu-ray was in question. It had triumphed over Toshiba’s HD DVDs, sure, but still faced stiff competition from downloaded and streamed videos. Players were also expensive and somewhat problematic. Plenty of critics remain, but the numbers send a strong message. Blu-ray is slowly becoming mainstream.

For all the PS3 fans, this is good news. The larger demand for Blu-ray should lead to more sales of the PS3, a price drop, and most importantly, a stronger online community. Ok, maybe I’m being a tad optimistic about the price drop, but more players can only help. Games like LittleBigPlanet only work because thousands of players contribute. If just 1000 more people buy the PS3 because of the larger demand for Blu-ray, then that’s 1000 more potential players grappling in Resistance 2 deathmatches or 1000 more original levels for everyone’s favorite Sackboy to explore.