Weekly Game Music: Lights (Lumines)


As far as I know, we only have one J-Pop music in this series (and the first one is more J-Jazz than -Pop), so lets bump that one more. Here’s Lights, sung by Eri Nobichika. The song appears in the excellent Tetris-based puzzle game, Lumines.

Like Tetris, Lumines involves placing 2 x 2 blocks of 2 colored bricks falling from the top of the screen in a specific formation. This case, it’s placing the same colored bricks in a 2 x 2 square. To complicate the things further, there’s a vertical beat bar that periodically moves across the screen. The 2 x 2 combo doesn’t disappear until that beat bar passes over it. In fact, you can add onto that 2 x 2 with more 2 x 2 formations for bigger points, before the beat bar passes through all of them. Therein lies the secret of Lumines: to get a better score, you have to form your combos to the beat of the background music.

Playing Lumines is like having a sensory overload, especially the visuals and audio. Like Bit.Trip Runner, each action creates its own sound to blend in with the techno background music. With strobe-light and colored-laser visuals, the entire game makes you feels like a DJ mixing music in a hip-hop party. Seeing your quick-thinking translate to a multi-colored spectacle is an exhilarating — and sometimes frustrating — experience.

Lumines was originally released for the PSP. Copies are available for PS2 as disc; the PS3 and Xbox 360, via download; and PC and iOS devices, via Steam and App Store respectively.


Extra!

Title: I Hear The Music in My Soul
Game: Lumines
Composer: Eri Nobichika
Vocals: Eri Nobichika


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Strange Free Games: The Stanley Parable


Last time, I introduced a game that provided an innovative narrative by allowing you to freely decide which way the story should go. Here’s a game that does just the opposite: The Stanley Parable tells you what you should do, then sees if you’ll comply or not.

The Stanley Parable is a Half Life 2 mod, which means it requires the Source engine pre-installed. For Windows, downloading Steam and the free game, Team Fortress 2 will take care of it. Unfortunately for the Mac, both Steam and a copy of Half Life 2 (or any of its episodes) are required.

Instructions for installation are in the download’s zip file, as README.txt.

The Stanley Parable is best played without any previous knowledge, but I’ll reveal the introduction anyways. As the title implies, you play as Stanley, an employee whose job involves reading what’s on the screen, and pushing the respective buttons. One day, Stanley stops receiving any commands from the said screen. Confused, he ventures out of his office, to see what’s going on.

Funny and scary at the same time, The Stanley Parable is a satire that criticizes the linear story structure of many games. Clearly inspired by Bioshock, the game’s multiple endings all makes fun of the role Stanley — and by extension, you — take in the story. Without spoiling much further, the narrator (Kevan Brighting) is as sexy as he is dangerous.
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Weekly Game Music: Kingdom of Ixataka (Skies of Arcadia)


Since Thanksgiving is fast approaching, here’s a game music themed after the Native American’s (or arguably, African’s) instruments. Here’s the theme from the game, Skies of Arcadia: Kingdom of Ixataka, composed by Yutaka Minobe and Takayuki Maeda. This tune is only one of many drastically diverse cultural tracks the game has.

As you can probably tell from the video below, Skies of Arcadia is an old turn-based JRPG about…sky pirates. The game starts with the Blue Rogue (basically, Robin Hood’s crew) assaulting a wealthy Valuan ship. The captain’s son, Vyse and his tomboy friend, Aika, rummages through this expensive ship to find a shy girl named Fina held hostage. Once rescuing her and stealing a few treasures, Vyse, Aika, and the rest of the crew travels back to their own floating pirate island to learn more about why Fina was kidnapped. Although Fina initially refuses to answer their questions, circumstances forces Vyse, Aika, and Fina to leave their home island. It’s here the Fina reveals her role: she has to collect the Moon Crystals, powerful magical crystals that comes from the six moons before they go into the wrong hands. Vyse and Aika, of course, agrees to help her, and travel across the vast skies in search of of these crystals, bumping into new and undiscovered civilizations.

Skies of Arcadia is a rather complicated for a turn-based JRPG. There’s 3 meters to consider: the health meter, magic meter, and Skill Meter. The latter is a requirement for each character to use magic or special attacks. The skill meter slowly recovers after each turn, or after focusing, so it’s a very disposable unit of energy. In addition, every weapon the character wields has an elemental property, allowing one to switch between 6 different elements. Like Pokémon, each element has it’s strength and weaknesses against each other. In addition, using one elemental property over others causes the player to learn magic affiliated to that element faster. Even more complicated, there’s also a totally different battle system called Ship Battle, where you fight against other pirates and naval forces. On top of it all, there’s plenty of different unlockables, including Discoveries, Wanted List, Moonfish, and more.

Skies of Arcadia is, unfortunately, very confusing. With random enemy encounters, the game also shows its age. Despite the Dreamcast graphics, though, the art style in this game is truly diverse and exciting. Unlike many modern games, where the enemies and allies are oddly segregated and uncooperative, Skies of Arcadia has a lot of different civilizations themed under different culture. Ixataka, as an example, is themed under Native Americans. The Valuan Empire is themed under ye olde gentlemen during the Industrial Age. Perhaps the most exciting civilization is themed under the Japanese/Oriental culture. With so many varied characters, the skies in Skies of Arcadia truly feels vast and wide open to new ventures and exploration.

Skies of Arcadia was originally released for the Dreamcast. It was later ported to the Gamecube as Skies of Arcadia: Legends.

P.S. Also worth noting, Skies of Arcadia also has a really creepy and disturbing final boss.

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Collapse! Blast Review


I have fond memories of Collapse!, by Gamehouse, back in high school. It was a simple and fun game during the rise of flash games. Playing Collapse! Blast on Google+ brings back many of those memories, but I find it difficult to find the original charm the old game had.

The directions to play Collapse! Blast is as simple as a single picture: click on any combination of 3 adjacently-placed, like-colored blocks to make them disappear. While this gameplay is similar to Diamond Dash, Collapse! Blast differs in a few ways. First, the blocks do not take up the entire screen. Instead, they rise from the bottom, imposing a new peril: letting the blocks rise to the top of the screen is instant game-over (don’t worry, this doesn’t happen often). Second, destroying an entire column of blocks causes the blocks on the outer edges to converge inwards. Third, Collapse! Blast adds a risky but rewarding strategy, where one can deliberately raise more blocks to gain more points. This last part makes the game significantly more entertaining than Diamond Dash, where no similar risks exist.

Interestingly, Collapse! Blast also tweaks its “physics” every week, changing how quickly you get score multipliers, Frenzy Mode, etc. Also, as you play more, you gain more Experience Points to earn power-ups, such as Bombs and Thunderbolts. This helps even the odd, but they come in very slowly. You’re probably bored by the point you get the last Colored-Bomb, even though the next item helps give you massive points. It’s quite unfortunate this terrible progression provides little curiosity or gratification.

Perhaps the worst offender, however, is its Life system. Much like Diamond Dash, Collapse! Blast offers only a palpable 3 lives to play through each game in succession. While the game will initially award you with extra levels to keep you playing, you’ll quickly hit a point where the game simply prevents you from playing further. One regains a life after 5 long minutes, or after asking a friend for help. While it’s true that by gaining more experience points, you’ll eventually increase your life meter up to 5 containers, that only means you can play 5 or 6 games successively before getting annoyed by the “wait 5 minutes” pop-up dialog. By then, you might as well stop playing.

Collapse! Blast is a legitimately fun game that I want to enjoy, but doesn’t let me. The core game mechanics is, by all means, very fun and frantic. There’s a big satisfaction for setting up large groups of blocks for elimination. Yet, this is hindered by one of the worst energy system ever created on a Google+ game. In a rare bit, I find this single flaw so glaringly bad, I cannot get myself to play the game longer.
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Strange Free Games: Façade


Here’s an old but extremely unique free game. Façade is a game created back in 2005, with ugly graphics, terrible animation, and shoddy cell-shading all intact. Despite these problems, though, Façade‘s terrifyingly original game concepts is often used as a pinnacle of Video Game narrative, where you, the player, ultimately guide the story. Façade is available for Mac and Windows XP. Windows Vista and 7 users may have problems running it.

Façade is an interactive story where you have to mediate the couple Trip and Grace from letting their marriage collapse in front of your eyes. Narrated in first-person, you type your sentence to the character you’re facing towards, and he or she will interpret that sentence. Like a choose-your-own-adventure book, the story will dynamically change based on what your responses and inquiries where, and decided on whether you save Trip and Grace’s marriage, or let the two fall apart.

Despite the terrible artwork, the tiny details the game contains is quite amazing. The characters’ facial expressions changes quickly and within context. You can interact with the characters and your surroundings to indicate your interest, or the lack thereof. And it goes without saying that the game’s voice-acting is top-notch and excellent.
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Strange Free Games: The Cat and the Coup


On Google+, I started a new series of posts called #StrangeFreeGames. Each post will introduce a game that is free, and a bit strange. I hope by introducing these surreal games, the theme will be better explored by game developers in the future.

With that said, the first game is The Cat and the Coup, a short, physics-based puzzle game that doubles as a documentary on Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh’s tragic end of power in Iran. It’s available for the PC via Steam.

The story introduces the events leading to the fall of the first democratically elected Iran Prime Minister in reverse chronological order. As his cat, you need to lead the ghost of Mohammed Mossadegh to where the whole problem started. The feline character is capable of rather limited activities, including knocking things over and rocking the rickety rooms. Nonetheless, with a little thinking and a bit of creativity, it’s not hard to go through this relatively short game.

Of course, the main pull of this game is its art style, a strange and messy scrapbook of events unfolding in a creepy way. While it does mix a few Persian artworks, most of it is political (and deliberately shoddy) Photoshop work…and it delivers. It’s a compelling part of the game on its own, and the whole thing comes together very nicely at the very end.
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