Infinite Lives

The other day I was making the usual internet rounds, and came across some people on a retrogaming site talking about an upcoming Wii Ware title, called Bit.Trip Beat. I was intrigued, and went looking for the trailer they mentioned.

To me it looks like what Space Invaders Extreme was to Space Invaders, only in this case, to Pong. I’m a fan of those games with dynamic soundtracks, like the aforementioned Space Invaders Extreme, Orbient, or Rez. And the total late 70s/early 80s graphics are just too awesome to someone whose earliest memories include playing the family Atari.

• Aksys Games – Bit.Trip Beat

by John Bardinelli

• Bardinelli.com – Cave Story wall “mosaic”

Something I’ve noticed in a few puzzle games that came out last year, such as Strange Attractors 2 and Orbient, is the focus on gravity and velocity. In both games you are completely at the mercy of these two forces of nature, and you can only indirectly interact with objects around you.

In a sense these games, as well as a few other examples, owe a great deal to arguably the first major game, Spacewar. Spacewar was initially released in 1962 by a group of computer hackers at MIT who, upon getting access to the university’s fancy new PDP-1 computer, proceeded to pool their efforts and write one awesome head-to-head game. The premise is simple enough—each player controls a ship and tries to blow up the other guy while utilizing a limited supply of fuel and ammunition.

What makes the game interesting is the role of gravity. The ships are circling a star, and crashing into it will destroy you. The star’s gravity will pull you in or fling you out, depending on how well you can utilize it. Though you do have direct control over your ship, your thruster isn’t good for much more than maneuvering. Firing the rocket long enough to actually move independently of the star will drain your fuel in about 28 seconds. The winner is the person who can keep gravity from becoming an enemy.

I love vintage children’s instruments, and I try to collect them. (It goes along with the edutainment thing, I guess.) I really like miniature accordions, toy pianos, and different types of glockenspiels.

Usually I troll YouTube for ukulele covers, but tonight I figured, hey. Ukulele is stale. I ought to listen to melodica covers instead.

Now, the melodica is an interesting instrument. It looks like a child’s instrument, like some common recorder or penny whistle, but it has a really warm, organic sound that hints at its relation to the accordion and harmonica. But it doesn’t sound quite like any other instrument—the melodica is inscrutable. With both the melodica and the accordion, you get the sound of breathing, of little air valves pumping, which lends these instruments a “voice” that you don’t usually get either with wind instruments or with keyboards.

And that is why I like the melodica.

With no more ado, here are a handful of classic Nintendo songs as played on the melodica.

This is the Super Mario Bros theme.

Over at Opposable Thumbs, David Chartier writes,

Nonprofit organization Games for Change (G4C) is continuing its march to save the world through gaming. Aided by some vicarious funding from the AMD Foundation, G4C today launched a new toolkit designed as a crash course to help non-profit organizations learn how to create “social issue digital games.”

The Games for Change Toolkit is primarily a Flash-based presentation containing video, reference material, and links to demonstration games that cover various aspects of game design, from the initial concept to production and distribution. While an actual SDK may not be involved, the toolkit introduces nonprofit organizations to both the broad potential and finer details of bringing an issue-conscious game into reality.

According to Chartier, the design primer’s video resources are culled from footage from the 2008 symposium “Let the Games Begin: A 101 Workshop on Making Social Issue Games,” here reorganized into a logical hierarchy for the G4C site.

I guess I thought the G4C Toolkit would be kind of a bore*, but I ended up hunting around the flash site for a long time: this kind of game design philosophy absolutely overlaps with the broader genre of edutainment. One of the best moments, I think, is during Karen Sideman’s presentation, when—paraphrasing James Paul Gee—she asserts that games don’t necessarily ‘make’ learning fun. In fact, it’s just the opposite: games are fun because we are learning.

*More social issues games ought to be as addictive as PETA’s Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals.

• Games for Change – G4C Toolkit (via)

Look, I know that people in their right minds don’t read celebrity gossip every morning. And I really, really do feel dirty about it.

Except that, late last week, Shia LaBeouf left a convenience store wearing a bag on his head (no, really, it is he—I compared the shoes), and I’m thinking he looks a little like Faust from Guilty Gear.

For your consideration:

I’m just saying.

P.S. Is this site running really, really slowly for anyone else?

I have a major soft spot for the Squadron of Shame, a videogames book club built around zealously attacking those artful games that no one seems to get around to playing (hence the titular, “shameful” feelings). The club’s frequent game playthroughs eventually and inevitably spun off in a podcast, for which the Squadron’s founders periodically assemble across the globe and Skype together.

In the most recent episode of their podcast, A.J. suddenly announces that he has uploaded his video performance of the 1UP Show theme song (here, also) to YouTube, as performed on the iPhone’s “Ocarina” app. I’m familiar with the Ocarina application—it’s a nice little nod to Zelda—because “Ocarina” was named among TIME Magazine’s Top 10 iPhone Apps of 2008.

There is nothing more resplendently geeky than announcing, on a podcast, that there is a YouTube video of you whistling into your iPhone, and more specifically, that you recorded it in honor of a popular videogame webcast. Here’s A.J.:

Isn’t it eerie and melancholy? It’s perfect.

I promise to type about something other than 1UP’s staff cuts soon.

I’ve seen Pong as a text adventure. I’ve even seen Pac-Man as a text adventure. But—this one was totally new to me—what about Pac-Man as a MUD?

The Pac-Man Dungeons calls itself “interactive fiction,” but it’s a classic MUD, through and through, right down to the fake telnet window (“You may chat with a ghost that is not more than 2 steps away,” the help file dutifully instructs).

Adorable.

• Masswerk – The Pac-Man Dungeons (via)

I remember the first time I saw Mass Effect in action, months ago. Here was a game where you could travel from solar system to solar system, exploring worlds in your ATV and interacting with alien races. And I couldn’t help but feel that I had done this before, years ago, with the Genesis.

Starflight is a now-obscure EA game that originally saw release on Microsoft’s old DOS platform, before being ported to the Genesis and a slew of other computers systems, where you essentially traveled through the galaxy, exploring planets, meeting aliens, and either talking with them and getting information or blasting each other to bits. Part of the appeal of the game is simply how fleshed out the world is; each of the alien races have histories together, and each will tell you slightly different stories about one other and themselves. Some will come after you for having a particular species of crew member on your vessel, while others will just try to blow you away immediately.

• Matt Langer – Twenty-five years ago today Apple introduced the world to the Macintosh personal computer with the 1984 ad.