Music

In write-up of Daniel Benmergui's talk at GDC, it's mentioned that a "friend" showed him the poetry mechanic that he adapted for his game. That friend was Agustin Perez Fernandez and I know because I was there in the room rolling a J. His latest work could be his most defining yet, at least in terms of its artistic poise.

El Beso ("The Kiss") is a sort of performance art art-game, you wield the mouse as a lure for a sort of ethereal fluke draped in ribbons of light, trying to kiss against red squares to turn them blue and then grey, harvesting points. The dynamic is that these squares come in all sizes and vectors, overlapping and forcing you to dance your way through them. The opera track highlights this dance while sometimes giving an apophenic sense that the music is somehow responding to your actions, some actual procedural sound would have been an interesting feature to explore but it works. The opera also lends the game a certain air of, as the French say, "I don't know what". It's almost enough to make you pop your monacle.

After your first play through you'll notice some more things that make it come together as being more than just another experimental Jackson Pollack love explosion. The game times your overall session and doesn't really penalize you in a "game over" sense, but instead just slows you down, which affects your performance. So the better you dance with the mouse in-between the cascading overlaps of red squares, the better your score. You are the opera. Give that fat lady a kiss.

Hit or Not is a social network game on Facebook. It works like this: You listen to a clip of music from a band, and rate it. You lose or score points by how close your rating is to the average rating of other users. If you like, you can "sign" the band (the fantasy being that you're running a label), and if the band "does well" (rises in ranking) you gain additional game money. You can also "sell" acts you have "bought" for a one-time gain, a "predictions market" effect.

Think of this as the game equivalent of a webcomic. To follow this train of thought, the advent of the internet allowed cartoonists free reign in their work. It's like making an underground zine where everybody is a potential reader. All someone needs to make a webcomic is a scanner or MS Paint, but it wasn't till recently that Flixel was released and game developers were given the tools to rapidly create short, online little games. Developer Pixelate set out to make four of these experimental webgames for every week of December, and this is the fruit of his labor.

09 IGF Winner for Excellence in Design

Musaic Box marries a conventionally tedious hidden object (i.e., "hunt the pixel") game with an original and engaging tile puzzle game tied to music.

I advocate the use of certain mind-altering substances, particularly in collision with art. I'm open about this because I believe I'm right, the enrichment of the mind and spirit from these experiences vastly outweighs abuses in less meaningful contexts. The experience gains a holistic value from the altered chemistry, and the perspective is presciously unique. I once asked Mark Healy (of Rag Doll Kung Fu fame, now Little Big Planet) why designers seemed to do drugs less, on average, than other kinds of creative magnates.

This past Game Developers Conference, Synaesthete took home the Independent Games Festival's award for Best Student Game.

Synaesthesia, for which the game is most likely named, is a rare condition in which different sensations run together. Basically, a person with synaesthesia may be able see a word in colors or be able to taste a sound. Mind blowing, isn't it? True to its name, Synaesthete's visuals achieve an almost blurring interpretation of the synaesthetic process in its unique combination of both audio and visual stimulus. The game's abstract quality perhaps surpasses that of Rez, the acclaimed trance rail shooter that Synaesthete so fondly reminds me of.

Audiosurf is nominated in three categories for this year's Independent Game Festival Awards; grand prize, audio, and technology. It's an interesting combination of a music visualizer and a match-three game, with elements of a racer.

When you start a game, you're asked to select a piece of music, with the application defaulting to your "My Music" folder (but navigable anywhere, including to, say, a CD in the drive). Once selected, it builds a race track from your music track; I'm not clear on the algorithm involved, but "intensity" corresponds to slope. The point here is that the same piece of music creates the same track, so that if you select, say, "It's Better at the Matinee," the track you're presented with will be identical to the track generated by someone else who selects the same song on his own machine.

"I wanna be a rock 'n' roll star." Surely there is hardly an American -- indeed, a citizen of the Free World -- who hasn't thought that, from time to time. And since games are what let us play out our fantasies, it's a wish that's obviously a strong one to build games on.

Yet the single mainstream title that succeeds in addressing this fantasy is a simple beat-matching game with a fancy UI device -- Guitar Hero. It's an excellent game in its own limited purview, to be sure--but its limitations illuminate the intellectual bankruptcy of mainstream games.

Student Showcase Winner, 2007 Independent Games Festival

In Opera Slinger, you sing opera--into a microphone. It's a quasi-beat matching game, but your score depends on hitting the right notes as well as singing them at the right times; before you play, you choose the male (tenor) or female (alto) role. Your "opponent" is controlled by the AI, and the game's conceit is that you are competing with him or her for the regard and adoration of the audience--which changes more in your direction the more accurately you sing.