Month: May 2012

Weekly Game Music: Gameboy Tune (Machinarium)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

New week, new music. This week’s music is Gameboy Tune by Tomas Dvorak. Despite it’s overly-optimistic beeps and bloops, it’s a surprisingly mellow tune. It best accents the neon game arcade room in an otherwise old-and-rusty game, Machinarium.

Machinarium is a no-text, all visual point-and-click adventure of a weak but determined robot to get his kidnapped girlfriend back. During his travels, he learns the kidnappers has caused a ton of mayhem to the townsfolk, and even hung a time-bomb on a tall tower for a good measure. Frantically working to find a way to diffuse the bomb, our hero must…slowly help remedy each denizen’s misfortunes. Point-and-click at its finest.

Sarcasm aside, Machinarium is a rare game that successfully tells a story without a single use of text or voice acting. It’s puzzles — which ranges from distracting the guard to slip by him, to unlocking a door using a Rubik’s cube — can sometimes veer towards nonsensical and frustrating. Fortunately, there’s a consistent and easy way to find the solution of every puzzle in-game. The minor usability improvements helps guarantee that anyone can play this game.

Machinarium was originally released on the PC, Mac, and Linux in 2009. It has also been ported to iPad and Android as well.

Extra!

Title: The End [Prague Radio]
Game: Machinarium
Composer: Vojtech Zelinsky


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Strange Free Games: Souvenir

Posted on by Taro Omiya

New week, new game. Here’s an incomplete student game that still feels polished and playable. Souvenir is a meta-physical recount of a girl’s experience at college. It’s M.C. Escher-isque visuals best conveys the confusion one experiences when living away from familiar, and traveling into the new.

The game begins on a stage, portraying an unnamed girl starting to pack. Not after long, you end up in a greatly distorted world, bleak and twisting. As you choose the 8 “things to pack,” you start recalling various different memories, some mundane, some happy, and some depressing.

Souvenir plays like first-person puzzle game. Clicking on a surface causes you to fall to that location. Due to the twisting nature of the game, you frequently end up upside-down or sideways on various different surfaces. Collecting different items provides a fade-in text telling a recount of the character we’re playing. This slowly fleshes out our character’s personality, problems, and resolves.

Souvenir is playable at it’s own website.
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Weekly Game Music: Me and My Little War (Elebits)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

New week, new music. We’re at war. A war composed by Naoyuki Sato and Michiru Yamane. Me and My Little War is a fitting title for Elebits hero, Kai. The music’s exciting outbursts, followed by a childish melody, best depicts Kai’s selfish attempts at getting his parent’s attention, even in a middle of a crisis.

Elebits is told through the eyes of Kai, a seemingly neglected child. Kai’s parents, both Elebits researchers, rushes out one night on an emergency blackout. Disgruntled, Kai attempts to create his own power by collecting wild Elebits — power-generating spirits — using his father’s trusty gravity gun.

Elebits is a physics toybox that utilizes Wii’s motion controls to grab and throw nearly everything in the game. The game begins with a rather under-powered gun: you can only lift small things, like boxes and toys. As you collect the Elebits hiding behind objects, though, your gun grows gradually stronger, eventually letting you throw trucks and buildings with ease.

Elebits was originally released on the Wii in 2006. It’s sequel, which plays nothing like the original, was released on the Nintendo DS.
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Strange Free Games: Tower of Heaven

Posted on by Taro Omiya

New week, new game. Remember Tower of Heaven? Probably not. It was one of the earlier Weekly Game Music I’ve introduced. In any case, it’s a fun and extremely challenging platformer with Gameboy-like graphics. It’s Book of Laws adds a unique, challenging twist to the classical platformer genre.

The game starts with Eid, a big-headed silhouette, entering the Tower of Heaven. Upon entering, an omnipotent voice grudgingly welcomes our hero, warning him almost immediately that the path is dangerous, and that time is limited. When Eid ascends a few floors, the disgruntled voice forces him to carry the Book of Laws. As Eid climbs higher up the tower, the number of laws imposed by the book increases.

As mentioned earlier, Tower of Heaven is hard. Breaking any of the laws written in the Book of Laws causes instant death. These laws include, “don’t touch the side of blocks or walls,” “don’t walk left,” and my personal favorite, “don’t open the Book of Laws.” The laws points out the frequently unwritten rules in difficult platformers such as touching the side of platforms on mid-flight will lead to death.

Developed by 3 people (including the composer), Tower of Heaven is playable at NewGrounds.
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Weekly Game Music: Dissociative Identity (Killer7)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

New week, new music. I haven’t posted that many sad music, so here’s one from the surreal noir game, Killer7. It’s Dissociative Identity by Masafumi Takada. The music plays during a sudden revelation when Garcian Smith (in the video below) discovers his real identity.

Killer7 story follows a group of assassins with the same name, hired to take on several targets directed by the US government. A group of terrorists calledHeavenly Smiles are literally destroying the peaceful foundation created by the US, and Killer7 are the only group of people who can see and kill Heavenly Smiles. Killer7, of course, aren’t normal people either. In fact, they’re actually one person with 8 different bodies, personalities, and abilities. Since each mission takes place at different time and places, the story is frequently disjointed and difficult to follow.

Killer7 is a bloody, controversial game that does everything in its power to make you feel uncomfortable, without being frustrating. It’s controls are a great example: instead of allowing you to run and kill whenever you want to, your character is forced to walk on a specific track forwards and back. Killing enemies, of course, involves first listening for a disturbing laugh (Heavenly Smiles are invisible, remember), then aiming towards the sound in first person (you stationary at this position), and scanning the area to make the enemies visible. The game’s distinct gameplay allows it to use dramatic — and again, uncomfortable — camera angles to highlight either the character or area in interest. Almost all puzzles are in point-and-click affair, adding the disjointedness to the game.

Killer7 was originally released on the Gamecube in 2005. It has been ported to PS2.

Extra!

Title: Rave On
Game: Killer7
Composer: Masafumi Takada


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