4 those who see(k) the art in games
Archive for June, 2008
Unreal Soundtrack
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I simply have no words enough or powerful enough to describe the impact this soundtrack (the original Unreal game soundtrack) has made on my life. I find it imensely powerful, and mixed with the moments when it appears in the game it simply makes my heart shiver. First time you get out of the opressive wreck fearing for your life and you see the alien sun, the openness, the discovery, seeing the Spire climbing to the sky, walking through the cloud city large streets, traversing caverns with shimmering crystals… all are fixed strongly in my mind due to the powerful emotions expressed through this music. For years afterwards i listened to it day and night, for many lights i’d leave it on while i sleep hoping that somehow it would burn into my brain and I would be able to myself create a fraction of the beauty that the guys at Straylight Productions put in there.
Later on I realized that several other soundtracks that I liked were made by the same people (Crusader, Jazz the Jackrabbit, Unreal Tournament…). Alexander Brandon, Michiel van den Bos, Andrew Sega (Necros) and Dan Gardopée will forever remain my musical heroes, to me more precious than most of the big band/singer names which everybody has heard of. I wish I could tell everybody at the top of my lungs of them and see the recognition in their eyes like they do for some well known bands.
I was all the more impressed by their magic after Marius showed me how they were actually modules, how they had managed to create such amazing music, trully high quality, and yet put it in a restrictive format that managed to have a low CPU footprint and with songs taking a fraction of even compressed audio like mp3. Mindblowing. Seeing all the channels that they used to create panning shifts or echoes & reverbs, loops and audio gradients… aaaamazing!
I have just discovered you can actually listen to (part of?) the soundtracks online… trully amazing! Meeting any of these guys even through a email or message board is a lifelong dream of mine… maybe someday…
As I’m writing this the music is running and even after so many years and so many hundreds of listenings I’m amazed how my eyes tremble on the virge of tears of joy and how my mind is alive with visual imagery & emotional snapshots of the moments they described in the games… WOW! And the way they can so seamlessly transition from meditational and contemplative to the adrenaline that makes one feel so alive with the need to respond urgently… WOOOOW.
Some of my favorite songs (though it’s so hard to name) would have to be “All hallows sunset”, “Chizra”, “Dusk Horizon”, “Surfacing”, “Isotoxin”, “Vortex rikers”… sorry… i may find myself naming them all. The Unreal Tournament soundtrack I also found very fit for the adrenaline gameplay, though I can’t say it moved me quite so much. Still, it had some songs like “Razorback” which really rock my world and made me feel amazingly alive, and they were all pretty much what kept you going when you had reached the repetition and familiarity…
Big biiiig shout out for Straylight Productions and all their friends!!!
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All Roads – interactive fiction
03 years ago
by Void
in Literature
Games come in all shapes and colors, and while you might think that we’re now in 2008 and text mode games have died in the ’80s that is not quite true: there are still those of us who love a good story and are even willing to read text for it… especially when, unlike books, movies, and unfortunatelly most games, it’s a story that at least seems to respond/branch according to your input. In comes the interactive fiction competition, the 2008 edition being it’s 14th annual incarnation.
And all this was just the intro for my favorite interactive ficiton: All Roads: this game totally took me by surprise… i don’t want to spoil too much of the story for you, but a game which starts with you being the person being hanged, involves morally strange situations and time travel paradoxes… all through a personal emotional veil… well… let’s just say I never thought a political conspiration in medieval Venice could be so immersive (the image of entering the room of conspirators is still so powerful in my mind).
Winner for best story, best game, best writing & best setting awards for 2001.
PS: forgot to mention: to read the story you need an interpreter, but ther are tons of them, for all OSs, devices and environments imaginable. To go through the story you just communicate simple action words like "look" "stand up" "open" "wake up" "go north" …
PS2: amazing the variety of the stories and settings, from horror to emotional, from action to abstract (btw, I once played a mindblowing abstract one… i couldn’t believe the imagery)
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The Most Stunning Metal Gear Solid Artwork
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Great discovery: www.racketboy.com . They focus on retro gaming but it seems they have regular game art collections, now featuring MGS.
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Giants
0A couple of days ago a friend reminded me of this game… quite a special game. I liked it because of it’s original artwork, great sense of humor (the Timmy scene cracked me up) and some quite innovative gameplay. I still remember the feel and intuition of the jetpack and some great gameplay situations. Where it did go wrong in my opinion though were the lack of saves combined with lack of a really easy difficulty, which lead me to never finishing it, despite considering it quite the masterpiece.
Haze – GT review
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‘fraid to say my fears are confirmed by the review. And it’s not as much what they’re saying as much as what they’re showing: generic artwork, unimpressive technology, and a story that I don’t expect to be particularly moving or spectacular (I think it’s hard to make both a strong story and leave space for 4 player co-op). I really had hoped more from Free Radical. I may play it someday with a friend for the fun of a shooter, but I was hoping for more original level design and possibly a heart moving story with moral grey and paths…
PS: obviously until i play it myself this is just confirmed intuition… but in my experience i’m seldom wrong about this stuff (in terms of my own enjoyment)
A globalized game market?
0I’ve just read with great interest this article Analysts warn of "struggle" for Xbox. I’m proud to say things are slowly turning as i had anticipated last year, when everybody was praising 360 domination and crying ps3′s doom… even the Wii seems to be getting it’s warning signs, but i expect there may be another year before it gets serious. Anyway, how does this affect us artsy gamers? Well, first off I’m probably what they call a "core" gamer… and in theory I’m 360′s target. Yet I don’t have one (yet): I have yet to have my confidence gained in a durable reliable system (at a mainstream price). I don’t have their data but if somebody had asked me I would have assumed this might be the reason Europe wasn’t won over by the 360: MS seems to me to have strongly supported US while getting a bad rep & low support in Europe… but what do I know? I live in my own little world (but they know me here :D all my imaginary friends).
Anyways, a more relevant point would be this: i’m happy to announce that I feel this is proof that we’re becoming a more and more globalized society. Not winning everybody over seems to be a "dooomed" level of "bad". This is really great for the games industry (us!) because it combines with the second point i wanted to mention: one genre is no longer the definition of games, meaning games have grown up a lot, meaning we may see the end to game cliches and the kind of variety that spawns passionate niches, people who love their particular types of games… and many types… which is sooooo great I just can’t say it in words! Long live the games-are-art niche!!!
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Bioforge
0Now obviously this may look very bad by the standards of 2008… but this is not a website about technology, it’s one about artwork: and for me this game was aaaamazing! I was impressed by it’s strong mood (feelings like solitude, injustice, search, desire for freedom…) and superb storytelling. I spent many hours just reading and re-reading some of it’s incredible in game backstories told via journals & logs. Even the puzzles felt shockingly original and almost “realistic” in their variety (which didn’t make them easier). Big thumbs up for this game! In my opinion it could easily rival some of the best sci fi novels in it’s story… or at least short stories: hough the backstory is really deep you might argue that the character interaction is weaker – but it’s also something that may be one of the ingredients of the game’s eerie-spoooky “alone in a corner of the universe” horror-ish feel. Looking forward to a modern game to fill this niche better… though none will be able to replace it completelly: that’s what (good) artwork is like.
PS: the item interactions in the game were not only pioneering in my opinion but also really awesome: remotes controls, devices… but most importantly what I loved was using the flute at which point the character played these heart tearing sad tunes after which he mused about them in the journal wondering what they could be telling him about the life he lost/forgot…
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