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The Commander's Out Of The Bag, And I Couldn't Be More Excited

Posted by Derrick Sanskrit

I'm going to skip past the whole aspect of the cryptic viral campaign hyping Gaijin Games' first-ever release and its subsequent press leak last week and cut straight to why I'm super-excited for it.

If, for some reason, you're still enjoying the CommanderVideo viral stuff and would rather stay in the dark (assuming they bother keeping that going at this point, the viral site even posted the revealed game's logo), stop reading here, because the rest of this post will discuss the few details about said project.

Right, so Nintendo Power revealed a bit of info on Gaijin's BIT.TRIP: BEAT, a sort of trance-retro styled rhythm Pong coming to WiiWare in the coming months. Why is this interesting at all? Because we've got an independant developer (from what I can tell on Gaijin's blog, a three-man team) making their own ART STYLE/bitGenerations line, and that, my friends, is awesome. I've written before on my undying love for skip's ART STYLE/bitGenerations line of games, but it always struck me as odd that only a select few studios were putting their energy into these simple-yet-amazingly-fantastic games (the other noteworthy studio being Dylan Cuthbert's Q Games). And it is a line of games, as Nintendo Power points out that Gaijin has plans to follow BEAT with five more releases under the BIT.TRIP moniker.

While we've seen no full video of BEAT yet, the few screens and description (and about half a second of footage in the viral video) given make it seem not unlike Space Invaders Extreme in its presentation, which is a very, very good thing. Most promising, though, is that Gaijin Games' founder Alex Neuse has a list of favorite games in his bio, including "bitGenerations game: dotstream". Any game developer who feels the need to specify which of the bitGenerations games is their favorite is clearly in the right place to be designing new ones (for the record, mine is Coloris, with Orbital and dotstream right behind). For added "cred", here are his other favorites:

2600 game: Stampede
Metroid game: Super Metroid
Survival Horror game: Silent Hill 2
Homo-erotic shooter: Cho-Aniki
Music game: Rez
Game ending: Conker’s Bad Fur Day

Yeah, I feel like we can trust Mr. Neuse's taste level to deliver something satisfying. From this information alone, BEAT shows a great deal more potential than the seemingly dozens of uninteresting puzzle and arcade games on WiiWare. The fact that this is the first release from a studio formed well over a year ago leads me to assume that they've been planning their own line of bitGenerations-inspired WiiWare games for a while, and were probably pretty annoyed when Nintendo beat them to it with their ART STYLE trilogy this past autumn (though I also assume they were just as happy to get a brand-new bitGenerations game in Cubello).

So, rhythm pong with intense boss battles and four-player co-op from an indie developer who loves bitGenerations, Rez, and Cho-Aniki? I'm there. First in a new series of bitGenerations-inspired games? Even better.

Plus, check out this sweet track hidden on the CommanderVideo website. Safe money's on this being part of BEAT's delicious chip-soundtrack:

+ DIGG

+ DEL.ICIO.US

+ REDDIT

Posted Jan 12 2009, 04:00 PM

Filed under: derrick sanskrit, wiiware, rez, bitgenerations, art style, bit.trip, gaijin games, cho-aniki, viral, BIT.TRIP BEAT

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John Constantine, our superhero, was raised by birds and then attended Penn State University. He is currently working on a novel about a fictional city that exists only in his mind. John has an astonishingly extensive knowledge of Scientology. Ultimately he would like to learn how to effectively use his brain. He continues to keep Wu-Tang's secret to himself.

Derrick Sanskrit is a self-professed geek in a variety of fields including typography, graphic design, comic books, music and cartoons. As a professional hipster graphic designer, his recent clients have included Nerve, Pitchfork and MoCCA, among others.

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