61 Frames Per Second : atsushi inaba

Chiptune Friday: Spring Is In the Air With Okami

John Constantine — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Two truths. Today is March 13th. It will not be spring for another eight days. Also, the original soundtrack to Okami is not chiptune. At all. In fact, it is fully orchestrated and entrenched in traditional Japanese composition, a far cry from the heavy metal and pop roots of the blissed-out blip songs composed on the NES or similar consoles.

Have you gone outside though? It is freaking gorgeous out there. It may rain, it may be cloudy, but the bitter miasma of late winter has lifted, washed away as if by… a celestial brush! Given, it’s likely that the fine weather is a result of the Earth’s natural solar orbit and axial spin, but I like to think that there’s a sun goddess wolf out there making it nice outside. I’m going to find her. We’ll go to the park and play fetch. Beautiful women will be all, “Oh your dog is beautiful!” And I’ll be all, “Check dis.” Then Amaterasu will make a bushel of fragrant botanicals grow at our feet.

Here are three selections from the Okami soundtrack. Listen, be in bloom, and grab your DS or PSP. Go play outside today!

The Great Goddess Amaterasu’s Revival

We’ll Always Be Together!

Two People Gazing At Each Other

Related links:

Chiptune Friday: Ethernet’s “Theme For the Water Shrine” Makes Me Want to Adventure and Possibly Defeat an Ancient Evil
Chiptune Friday: Trip to the Beat
Best NES End Credits Music in the History of NES End Credits Music
Chiptune Friday: Shut Up and Jam!
Chiptune Friday: Blaze a Blaze in the Mushroom Kingdom

MadWorld: Actually a Pretty Even-Keeled World

John Constantine — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Unlike Bayonetta, Sega were all too happy to let me try out MadWorld yesterday. After a quick tutorial in the controls, I was thrown, for lack of a better phrase, into the deep end of Varrigan City. I walked away from the game thinking three distinct things:

One: Ultra-detailed black and white games are as cool in practice as they are in theory, but I can see why there aren’t too many of them.

Two: Platinum Games took Suda 51’s No More Heroes combat model and improved its accuracy and versatility in significant ways.

Three: MadWorld’s kind of… boring.

For clarity’s sake, I’m saying that my fifteen minutes with MadWorld were boring. I walked away without an inkling of what it will be like as a complete game. I got a good feel for its combat in one portion of one stage only. That combat is solid and the controls responsive, like a slowed-down, more deliberate variation on No More Heroes’ manic swordplay. A button makes protagonist Jack punch in combos and swing weapons picked up from the environment, shaking the Wii remote does an uppercut, holding the B-trigger brings out Jack’s chainsaw and you swing about the controller to make a mess of thugs wandering about town. There’s also grappling, throws with flicks of the remote, and all sorts of context-sensitive environmental violence. Looking at it all written out, MadWorld’s controls might seem a little overwhelming, even more complicated than those on a more traditional, dual-analog stick controller. They are when you actually play the game, but it’s not difficult to settle into the game’s rhythm. I say that as someone who’s played a ton of No More Heroes, so MadWorld may have something of a learning curve for players new to 3D combat on Wii that’s more than just wagglin’ the remote.

Unfortunately, the game’s mechanical competence is besides the point since the combat doesn’t feel very substantial. If you’ve seen the trailers, you’ve seen what MadWorld has to offer. You bludgeon all sorts of Sin-City-meets-Manhunt badguys with your fists and whatever else is around, throwing them into bizarre death traps wherever you can find them. MadWorld’s carnival freak aggressors don’t put up much of a fight though, and therein lies the problem. I’m a glutton for exaggerated cartoon violence in videogames. MadWorld’s is very satisfying, a perfect mix of funny and grotesque, as a visual spectacle, but it never demands anything of you as a game. If there’s no threat to your own well-being in a game like MadWorld, the violence loses the thrill of tension and release. It’s that exact balance that made the Platinum Games team’s other action games God Hand and Viewtiful Joe the so memorable.

MadWorld’s presentation — intricate black and white environments and characters accented by washes of red blood and yellow sound-effect words — looks great, bellying the Wii’s meager horsepower. The characters are huge too, much bigger than you usually see in the genre, and the camera stays close to the action. The characters are so big though that I found myself losing track of what was even happening. If the enemies were even remotely aggressive, I think I would have died more than a few times. The black and white compounds the confusion because it’s hard to discern what’s what on screen – if the game didn’t have a GTA-style radar as part of its HUD, I wouldn’t have even realized there was a path leading to the level’s objective. Platinum Games’ Atsushi Inaba admitted to the inherent problems of MadWorld’s visual style, and it was troubling to find that all the kinks hadn’t been worked out yet.

Platinum Games’ track record is enough to convince me that there’s a lot more to MadWorld than you can experience in fifteen minutes. Still, I was a little disappointed that its play was nowhere near as instantly gripping as its looks.

Related links:

The Contrarion: Madworld - Color Me Unimpressed
Bayonetta: Not As Gratuitous As You Think
Face-Off: Bayonetta and the Merits of Exploitation
Clover Returns, Heavy as Platinum
Independent at a Price: Sega and Platinum Games

Independent at a Price: Sega and Platinum Games

John Constantine — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Image courtesy of IGN.com

Last week’s reveal that Platinum Games, formerly of Clover fame, was making four entirely new videogames was one of the most exciting moments of the year in gaming. The return of powerful creative voices is always reason to sit up and pay attention. Brendan Sinclair of Gamespot sat down with Sega America VP of marketing Sean Ratcliffe and president Simon Jeffery to discuss Sega and Platinum’s new publishing relationship. Interviews like this tend to not be very revealing about the content or creation of the games being discussed; these aren’t designers talking, they’re marketers, so they market. Buried beneath the glad-handing here, though, is some scary insight into what independent developers without the resources to publish and promote their own work face when getting their games onto the world stage. Take a look at this excerpt:

Gamespot: Is this (publishing) deal exclusive, or can Platinum work here and there for other publishers?

Simon Jeffrey: It's completely exclusive.

Gamespot: Do the intellectual property rights for these brands stay with Sega or Platinum Games?

Simon Jeffrey: Sega.

No matter what Platinum Games creates under this agreement, they don’t get to own it. As both Jeffrey and Ratcliffe emphasize throughout the interview, they’re looking to turn Hideki Kamiya’s Bayonetta, Inaba’s Madworld, and Shinji Mikami’s untitled project into franchises. But these worlds, these characters, and most likely any assets built specifically for these games will become the property of Sega. While it’s laudable that Sega brass is offering as much opportunity, promotion, and “independence” to Platinum Games as they can, it’s upsetting to hear that they’re continuing the trend of retaining intellectual property. If ever there was an argument for an industry wide move to digital distribution, it’s that said move would keep a creator’s creation in their hands.

And, oh yeah, here’s some more ultra-violence for you. Just look at this trailer for Madworld. That is AWESOME. Apparently, it’s so gory, they may not even release it in Japan. Beautiful.

Clover Returns, Heavy as Platinum

John Constantine — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

While the final months of 2006 were exciting times – the Wii and Playstation 3 were released mere days apart while the Xbox 360, DS, and PSP really started to heat up content wise – it was also a time of mourning. Just after the release God Hand and Okami, Clover Studios disbanded. Parent company Capcom absorbed much of the staff while the designer trinity of Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil), Hideki Kamiya (Devil May Cry), and Atsushi Inaba (Viewtiful Joe) went off to form a new independent studio. Clover’s games were true rarities in the industry, each one an artistic ziggurat built on a foundation of violently colorful worlds and idiosyncratic mechanics. Viewtiful Joe’s comicbook world of an empowered movie buff that found the player manipulating the action with VCR commands, Okami’s sumi-e fantasia that allowed the player to literally exert their will on the world through painting; truly special stuff. That’s why it’s so exciting that yesterday’s rumors about their new games turned out to be absolutely true.

Their new studio, Platinum Games, has signed a three game publishing deal with Sega and their new titles sound like classic gold. Bayonetta for PS3/360 looks to evolve the stylish violence Kamiya created in the original Devil May Cry seven years ago, MadWorld is set to join No More Heroes in the world of surrealist Wii action, and Infinite Line’s take on science fiction sounds markedly deeper than the usual DS fare. Check out the leaked trailer for Bayonetta below.

Our thanks go out to NeoGAF and all its members’ tireless effort to dig up any and all info that leaks before press embargoes break.